On July 9th, 1918, an inbound local train in Nashvillle, Tennessee collided with an outbound express, killing 101 people and injuring another 171. It remains the deadliest train accident in American history. This tragic event is widely regarded as the second-worst thing to happen that day.

The United States Warrant Officer Corps was established to plant explosive mines, a task traditionally assigned to abducted children. Since actual officers were too valuable to explode in nautical experiments and enlisted personnel could not read, this hybridized caste of literate expendables was produced. Experts have since generally viewed this as a bad decision.

While teaching an enlisted man to read and unloading menial maritime tasks on them is a practiced military tradition, no officer could foresee the modern manifestation of a pseudo-officer who, as a completely hypothetical example, made fun of a Company Commander’s QTB slides last Thursday in front of the Brigade Commander (who, on two separate occasions, interrupted the briefer with “I’m sorry, I’m still thinking about that hilarious shit Chief said.”)

By World War II, the scope of a Warrant Officer grew from “experimental bomb emplacer” to “glorified bank lady.” In 1942, Warrant Officers were elevated above their enlisted counterparts in an official capacity by George C. Marshall—who, among other minor endeavors, is known primarily as a lazy and disloyal man who facilitated the rise of the Chinese Communist Party.

The U.S. Air Force, broadly considered to be more intelligent than the Army, wisely discontinued their warrant officer program in 1958. The Army, in a brief moment of clarity, paused their production of bank ladies throughout the 1950s. Interestingly, the 20-year renaissance in which new Warrant Officers were not permitted in the U.S. Army corresponded with the greatest economic boom in modern American history. It should be noted that in this period, there were much fewer occurrences a warrant officer pantomiming self-harm during your portion of the QTB.

Between 1968 and 1970, the Warrant Officer Corps earned three Congressional Medals of Honor for heroic actions in the Republic of Vietnam. This is embarrassingly less than the traditional officer corps.

In 1985, DA PAM 600-11 defined Warrant Officers as a “highly specialized expert and trainer who[…]operates, maintains, administers, and manages the Army’s equipment, support activities, or technical systems for an entire career." A central expert, separate from leadership, to stay fixed as others come and go. In the educational realm, this is referred to as a “janitor.” In fact, some Warrant Officers choose to dress like janitors to emulate this ideal.

It is of the greatest irony that the same 99th Congress that greatly restricted immigration in the United States simultaneously opened the foul floodgates of plebian disease by elevating the status of the Warrant Officer to “Commissioned.” It was all downhill from there. With such an incestuous mixing of enlisted and commissioning, what’s to stop a Warrant Officer from, putatively, inaccurately reenacting your QTB in front of the entire battalion staff as they look on in uncontrollable laughter?

Today, Soldiers can hardly tell purebred Officers and Warrant Officers apart—and in limited and confused instances, even look up more to their Warrant Officers; for example, a headquarters E-4 to whom you have relayed the synopses of many informative military history podcasts may choose to have your Chief re-enlist them instead, immediately following the QTB.

Furthermore, Warrant Officers are generally assumed to enjoy better qualities of life, fewer work hours, more respect in the workplace, commensurate pay, and a total lack of UCMJ, Property, or direct Maintenance responsibilities. They do not attend Physical Readiness Training, even when reminded by official government email before the QTB. Not a single Warrant Officer has ever heard of, let alone attended, a Rehearsal of Concept Drill. I find that this troublesome data in direct violation of the U.S. Army Officer’s Creed—so recited and well-known that I need not cite it here. We pay Warrant Officers incredible sums for piloting aircraft that could be better manned by a virgin on Twitch. With so much of the DoD budget already allocated to the shareholders of war profiteers, do we really have the income stream for another faction of middle-aged freeloaders?

I return in my conclusion to the introduction of this sad tale. Like the burning corpses of those poor souls trapped in a heap of twisted metal in 1918, so too is the Army trapped in the hellfire visegrips of the Warrant Officer corps. Let us reverse tracks of fate, to a time before we had objectively lost four land wars in the East and the term “Officer” was reserved for those who earned their commissions without merit or expertise.