Talk:Daniel Webster Cluff

Officer-in-charge
In the lead of this article, Daniel Cluff is referred to as the officer-in-charge of Chatham Lifeboat Station. He may have been in charge of the station, however as an officer, he would have been called the commanding officer rather than the officer-in-charge. The term officer-in-charge as used by the U.S. Coast Guard is reserved for an enlisted Coast Guardsman that is in charge of a small station or cutter. It is not used in any other context by the Coast Guard. The instances where an enlisted person would be in charge of a unit are limited to very small units of men usually numbering less than 10 to 15 persons. An officer-in-charge has less authority to operate their unit or cutter than an officer would have under the same circumstances but, never the less, still the person that is responsible for the completion of the unit's mission. An example of limited authority would be the application of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. An officer-in-charge must refer all charges against personnel in his unit to the next higher authority in the chain of command, which would be an officer.

The term used in the lead should be changed to commanding officer. I was unable to check the cite used in the offending sentence because the reference is unavailable to me. If the writer of the newspaper article used as a reference used the term officer-in-charge in the newspaper article then it was an error in understanding Cluff's actual responsibilities. The name of the billet that Cluff filled was that of commanding officer; there was no officer-in-charge. Cuprum17 (talk) 15:26, 26 January 2016 (UTC)