Now, infantry battalions aren’t the only places that 0602’s can go, so you can expect even more available opportunities. Combine this with an interesting, technical, and increasingly important skill set, and the MOS becomes even more exciting. The opportunity to be a staff officer (where your peers on the staff will be senior 1stLts, Captains, and Majors), and a platoon commander with 4 subordinate SNCOs to rely on and learn from is truly unique. That’s a wealth of knowledge, experience, and leadership to rely on and learn from. Each section will have a chief (probably a SSgt), and your platoon will have a comm chief (probably a MSgt). They’ll be split up into sections, such as radio, data, and wire. At communications school, you’ll be one of the few 2ndLt’s that gets schooled up on the Marine Corps Planning Process, or MCPP, which is essentially how a staff writes an Operations Order at the battalion level and higher.Īs a platoon commander, you’ll have anywhere from 60-80 Marines under your charge. An infantry battalion’s 0602 is simultaneously a staff officer (the S-6) and a platoon commander (in charge of about 60 Marines).Īs a staff officer, you’re responsible for working with the rest of the battalion staff to plan operations obviously your job is to plan the comm side of the operation. They are a unique kind of officer in that they wear two hats. So that’s what comm provides, but what does a Communications Officer do? Suffice to say that with rapidly developing technology it’s a vast, growing, and really engaging field. It would be impossible to go into full detail of the capabilities that comm can provide to the commander. They can send that picture back to the Chain of Command via radio. An enemy convoy drives by, and they take a picture of it. Let’s say you have a recon unit out at a listening post. For instance, several of our radios can be hooked up to a computer to transmit data instead of voice. For example, planning and setting up a vast array of technical systems: various radios that work on different frequencies, computers, and satellite communications. What this means is that it’s our job to plan and set up the means by which the commander is going to develop his situational awareness and give orders to his subordinates. WHAT DOES A COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER DO?Ĭommunications Officers “ enable command and control.” Comm actually has a bad reputation because the one or two classes you get about it are so damn boring, and comm rarely works right when clueless lieutenants are trying to use it.Īll in all, if you went through TBS with no outside knowledge of what the job is all about, you would really have no good reason at all to pick it. At TBS you learn NOTHING about what Communications Officers actually do. Before getting too much into communications school, let’s start with what the 0602 MOS is all about.
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