Operations Department

The operations division is the corps of officers and crewmen within Starfleet who specialize in services and military functions on starbases, aboard starships, and at Starfleet Command. Members of the operations division may specialize in a ship or base service, administration, or military operations, or serve as staff officers. Operations officers include engineers, security and tactical, and some service specializations such as communications. Operations division personnel also fill administrative posts as yeomen, personnel officers and portmasters. By the 24th century, this division had new postings established on ships, such as operations officers (aka chiefs of operations).

The operations division, command division and sciences division usually are denoted by Starfleet uniform insignia, most often color coded.

Officers who belong to the operations division sometimes wear the division color of another department than that which they specialize in, if said ops officer were to become a department head, they might wear the colors of command division, or if they have a dual specialty in a sciences division department, an alternate color might be worn.

In the Earth's Starfleet of the 2140s and 2150s, line officers of ops division wore red division stripes on their uniforms.

The red color had been replaced by the uniforms of the 2250s and early 2260s, as beige (gold) uniforms and work gear were worn by ops division personnel, except security who wore blue.

Red was again the color of the ops division throughout the later 2260s, worn by line officers and flag officers of this division, though some Operations officers continued to wear beige (gold) perhaps indicating a specialized subset.

By the 2270s, new uniforms showed different division colors, the operations division was signified by two differing colors, with red backing the Starfleet badge, and also on uniform bands and epaulets, for engineering and maintenance staff. Security and services crew now wore gray badge backings and bands.

The operations division was changed again with the 2280s uniforms, with gray representing both security and services, but also sciences. Engineering and maintenance wore gold colors, which also represent some conn divisions like pilots and navigators. The insignia used gave the officer the option of wearing command division white uniform insignia, with another department color like operations' banded across, or the opposite, with department color insignia with command white banded across.

By the uniforms used from 2350s onward, gold had become the operations division color, and this has continued through several Starfleet uniform styles, including the current style, and even several styles observed in alternate futures.