Essentially, at the end of your sea tours you would branch off into either Engineering or a Topsider specialty with engineers becoming experts in how to operate and maintain the engineering plant while the topsiders focus on driving and fighting the ship. The Merchant Marine and Coasties already do something similar and so do every other Navy. The issue that took us away from this was the engineering types complained about not being able to hold command and being discriminated against for promotion since they couldn't hold command at sea. I think the idea of mixing and matching COs and XOs would fix this problem.
@Aluroon broke it down into a three branch system with the differentiation between Ops, Weps, and Eng, but it's the same idea. The three branch system would likely gain more traction since these are already tracked via AQDs and there are unspoken specializations based upon those AQDs. The other issue with the Topsider/Engineering approach is that there's no career option for major command equivalency for Engineering types since big deck CHENGs are EDOs and the SWO community would need to radically alter it's accessions path and retention policies to recruit engineering types and would run afoul of career programming for EDOs (Essentially removing career opportunities for our equivalent of O6 major command at sea for carrier construction and industrial maintenance specialists).
I spent a few years working very closely with a Commonwealth Navy (ie one that stills calls ships “Her Majesty’s.”
Their answer is that their EDOs go to sea then go back ashore to run material support and acquisition functions. Obviously this would make PERS and both the SWO and EDO communities have a collective heart attack.
Their Warfare Officers are branched into Ops, Nav, and basically Tactical Specializations (eg ASW, IAMD, etc).
Engineers focus on keeping the equipment (either “WEPS” or “Engines”) running.
My 2c - both sides have their pros and cons. I think the right answer is pulling from the best of both, but the bureaucratic inertia of changing a system as large as ours would be impossible without us actually losing a whole lot of people in combat.
Threadtax:
All sub-light RF. Funny that you described it that way as that's exactly the phrase I used lol. Do current weapons systems allow anything like laser target designation? Given the ranges (over the horizon) that any theoretically missile shots at enemy ships would take place, that doesn't seem likely, but it's one way around an RF hash. Bonus points for the IFF being knocked out. I had hoped that's the case, but it's good to have it confirmed.
Laser is theoretically possible but impractical due to the ranges involved as you’ve pointed out. With ships, due to the power they generate, if you have LOS with a laser, you’d rather just blast it with a destructive laser though obviously that is still a bit away from being practical.