Do you say "junior enlisted" or "lower enlisted"?

SFC (Join to see) good read/share, I always called them by their rank as stipulated in AR-600-20. You can never go wrong with the regulation.

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel Samantha S. Maj Marty Hogan SGT (Join to see) SGT Philip Roncari SPC Margaret Higgins SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth SP5 Michael Rathbun CW5 Jack CardwellCOL Mikel J. Burroughs CPL Dave Hoover SFC Shirley Whitfield LTC Stephen F. SSG William Jones Capt Dwayne Conyers 1SG Carl McAndrews Lt Col Charlie Brown PO1 Tony Holland SGT Jim Arnold

I always said Junior which is a better descriptor as the dictionary goes. BTW we call them the Senior Enlisted Leader, not the Upper Enlisted Leader.

I don't know if it is a Marine thing, or just a me thing.
Pvt-LCpl, collectively Junior Marines
Cpl-Sgt, collectively NCO's
SSgt-SgtMaj, collectively Staff NCO's

2ndLt-Capt, collectively Company Grade
Maj-Col, Field Grade
BGen-Gen, Flag

Don't like the term lower enlisted.

Always heard it called lower ranks.

I always referred to my people by their rank. If I was referring to a group, I would say "all my Privates through Lance Corporals" or whatever was the appropriate group. People work hard to achieve whatever rank they are assigned, I should at least take the tie to identify them by that rank. Even the newest Private had to earn the right to be a Private instead of a recruit.

Apologies if I'm out of line for putting in my thoughts on a question directed at leadership as a junior enlisted, but I usually see "junior enlisted" go over better than anything else. One notable exception was with a couple of senior NCOs who skipped the "junior" and "senior" designation, referring to only "enlisted" and "NCOs", which didn't seem to ruffle any feathers.

Rank works best; but as for junior vs lower it's semantics. Doesn't matter. If someone is offended by "lower enlisted," well ... it's the world we live in now.

I think the rest of the English-speaking world has a much simpler solution: the entire military consists of Commissioned Officers, Non-Commissioned Officers, and Other Ranks.

Only the US military (and those smaller countries that follow in our image) tries to shoehorn Warrant Officers in as a completely separate category or as some strange kind of not-quite-commissioned Officers (the rest of the world correctly considers them Non-Commissioned Officers).

Occasionally there might be some reason to subdivide one of those categories, such as Junior and Senior Officers (which is often vague) or Junior and Senior NCOs (also ambiguous!); but I don't recall ever seeing a situation where there was a good reason to subdivide enlisted who aren't NCOs.

If a term really is essential, I suppose Junior Enlisted would be most logical as it follows the pattern we use when subdividing Officers or NCOs, but if some soldiers are "Junior Enlisted" then doesn't that mean that some other soldiers must be "Senior Enlisted" - if so, who are they?

How about "Soldier"?

Once you make SFC, your title is now "Senior NCO". So it makes sense to use the term "junior" for grouping the preceeding ranks.