#and one of the ones I kept drinking from said something something maneuver enhancement brigade

[bomberqueen17]

sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “whoa goddamn, my google doc entitled “this is dumb” of the Found...”

Can they be in different units? I know the UCMJ about as well as...uh, a typical civilian, but I thought fraternization only applied if they were in the same chain of command.

I was trying to clarify this and couldn’t figure it out. None of the explainers of it go into that kind of detail. I should ask my sister, who would know for sure. I’m not sure you can date *anyone* in your chain of command *at all*, quite separately from someone outside your rank category. She ran afoul of this very slightly early on in her career-- I don’t know much about this but I know she got hassled by her peers a bit as a cadet. (IIRC, she hadn’t done anything actually incorrect, but the person she’d been going with was someone Not Appropriate in the eyes of her peers, and she got shit for it, including mild vandalism of her car. And as it happens, when you look up the UCMJ, there’s a lot of stuff in it that was only formalized into written law *very* recently, that was “custom” before that. It’s not... all technically... rules. A lot of it is just Things That Are Not Done. I don’t think civilians as a whole really completely grasp how important customs and traditions, continuity and culture, are to the armed forces in general.) 

She met her husband in a group of young officers, part of an informal sort of expedition club in the European theater back when we had troops stationed there, but part of why she was so interested in going to these mixers and things was because that was how you met people outside your chain of command; he was of similar rank, but in an unaffiliated unit, so there was no conflict of interest. They were eventually deployed together, but still as part of different units, and they were just lucky to be near one another. Their second deployment was after they were married, and the Army tried to keep them together but did a worse job of it. There’s only so much they could do, and again, they weren’t in one another’s chain of command.

There’s a cultural divide between officers and enlisted, there just is-- my father had all kinds of shenanigans in his career, enlisted into officer training and graduated a 2LT and made it as high as major before shenanigans forced him out for rank stagnation and, somewhere in his fifties, he re-enlisted out of sheer stubbornness, and went through a series of NCO ranks and wound up retiring as a warrant officer, after something like 37 total years of service. But at one point he was in a seminar, and at that point i think he was a warrant or might have been an NCO, and the person leading the seminar, an NCO of some stripe, had gotten ahead of him in acronyms, as often happens. Dad’s pretty good at figuring out acronyms on the fly, after decades in the Army and National Guard, but he just didn’t have enough context. So, finally, he had to raise his hand and ask what an “RLO” was.

The session leader knew who he was and knew his history and paused, shamefaced, before muttering, “Real Live Officers.”

(i.e. officers with commissions. NCOs don’t have commissions, and Warrants have a warrant instead of a commission.)

I don’t know for sure, it might be just fine to date someone outside your rank category if they were in a different chain of command or even branch of service-- but it might not be. Especially as in this story Shara is an exceptional early woman to hold a position-- she’d be under a lot of scrutiny. 

Either way, it allows me to do some worldbuilding in the story to have it be a concern-- give them both external contexts, and tie in to the thing I’m like, #1 most excited about in this ‘verse, which is that in a world where there’s no Alderaan, I can explore the Organas’ role more. So. We’ll see what my further research turns up, if anything.