Commanding officer
officer in command of a military unit
The commanding officer (CO) or commander, or sometimes, if the incumbent is a general officer, commanding general (CG), is the officer in command of a military unit. The commanding officer has ultimate authority over the unit, and is usually given wide latitude to run the unit as they see fit, within the bounds of military law. In this respect, commanding officers have significant responsibilities (for example, the use of force, finances, equipment, the Geneva Conventions), duties (to higher authority, mission effectiveness, duty of care to personnel), and powers (for example, discipline and punishment of personnel within certain limits of military law).
In some countries, commanding officers may be of any commissioned rank, although in others the term only refers to officers in command of units of specific sizes. Usually, there are more officers than command positions available, and time spent in command is generally a key aspect of promotion, so the role of commanding officer is highly valued. The commanding officer heads the command team within the modern military hierarchy.
There are two recurring debates related to military command: the collective command thesis and civil-military relations.
While the commander is an individual, the academic debate centres on whether command is an individual act or a form of a collective. British sociologist Anthony King argued for the emergence of a command collective in Western military forces in his 2019 book Command. Others have argued against King's thesis, stating that it romanticises the collective, that contemporary commanders themselves do not understand their function in this way, or that it may be the case.
The public source identifies “Commanding officer” as officer in command of a military unit. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Commanding, officer and command.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11247470. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commanding 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.