General officer
collective name for several military ranks (all the generals of a country)
A general officer is an officer of high rank in the armies, and in some nations' air and space forces, marines or naval infantry.
In some usages, the term "general officer" refers to a rank above colonel.
General officer ranks
The adjective general had been affixed to officer designations since the late medieval period to indicate relative superiority or an extended jurisdiction.
The various grades of general officer are at the top of the military rank structure. Lower-ranking officers are typically known as field officers or field-grade officers, and below them are company-grade officers.
Common systems
There are two common systems of general ranks used worldwide. In addition, there is a third system, the Arab system of ranks, which is used throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
In the old European system, general officer ranks are named by prefixing "general", as an adjective, with field officer ranks, although in some countries the highest general officers are titled field marshal or marshal.
The other is derived from the French Revolution, where generals' ranks are named according to the unit they (theoretically) command.
Old European system
The system uses either a brigadier general or a colonel general rank (i.e.
“General officer” enters the record as collective name for several military ranks (all the generals of a country). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what General, officer and collective can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1501868. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “General officer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.