Transportation Security Officer - "1-striper" denoted because the shoulderboard has one strip on the base of it beneath "TSA"

Lead Transportation Security Officer - LTSO - "2-striper"

Supervisory Transportation Security Officer - STSO - "3-striper"

That's the rank structure for the uniformed personnel, and also the chain of command. TSO-LTSO-STSO.

However, uniformed personnel also includes BDOs in two ranks, Master Transportation Security Officer-Behavior Detection Officer, and Expert Transportation Security Officer-Behavior Detection Officer. It's like a second chain of command that exists concurrently. This is designed around what pay band the person is at. TSOs are at D and E, LTSOs and MTSO-BDOs are at F, STSOs and ETSO-BDOs are at G.

So, at that point, it looks something more like this:

TSO (D) - "1-striper"
TSO (E) - "1-striper"
LTSO (F) - MTSO-BDO (F) - "2-striper"
STSO (G) - ETSO-BDO (G) - "3-striper"

One is a management track, the other is a technical track. It should also be pointed out, at least in HSV, that E-band TSOs do not have any extra authority over D-band TSOs. We just get paid a little more. At large airports, it's possible they might give E-band TSOs a little bit of authority over D-band TSOs, in some kind of "Elder TSO" status or something, but if they do, I'm unaware of it.

So far as training officers are concerned, no, there's no particular way to distinguish them that I'm aware of. I just, y'know, know who they are in Huntsville. One is on morning shift, and is a TSO. One is on evening shift, and is an LTSO. And then there's the Training Dude himself, who used to be a STSO but is now a ETSO-TI... or something very much like that.

Anything after G-band personnel aren't uniformed, not as far as the smurfsuit is concerned.

Transportation Security Managers, or TSMs, are at least H-band. I... uh... will confess I don't really know a lot of the specifics of these ranks and higher. Management and regulatory guys, like the Transportation Security Inspectors (cue someone mentioning one of the inspectors crawling all over American Airlines aircraft in 3... 2...), Bomb-Appraisal Officers (though now they're called Transportation Security Specialist-Explosives, or TSS-E, or something to that effect) and other such things. Typically I see these people either wearing suits, or khaki pants and a DHS button-up shirt.

The FSD is not a uniformed position, unless you call a suit a uniform. The multiplicity of the position is based upon the size of the airport. In HSV, we have one - Sam. His official job title is AFSD - Assistant Federal Security Director. The actual Federal Security Director herself for our hub-spoke system is based in Birmingham, where there are also four or five AFSDs that constitute her staff and oversee different operations -- screening operations, law enforcement stuff, each one of them falling into a different niche with their job title (AFSD-S, AFSD-LE, etc).

My experience with them is typically something along the lines of me seeing them occasionally at Huntsville and asking "Hey, who're the suits?"

The person next in authority over the FSD is... uh... either a regional FSD or a district FSD, I don't know what it's called specifically. They're basically over a number of airports spanning multiple states. I don't know how many there are, and I don't know how many states our guy (I've only ever seen him once, about three years ago, and he had a very nice suit) has under his watch.

So, if we're still talking about the chain of command from bottom to top, it begins now to look something like...

TSO - "1-striper"
LTSO - "2-striper"
STSO - "3-striper"
TSM
AFSD-S
FSD
R-FSD

For any typical trip through the checkpoint, however, you're likely only to encounter the bottom three rungs of this ladder. The TSO, the LTSO, and the STSO... and, with as much scut work as most STSOs are given to do, only probably going to be the TSO and LTSO.

Whew. Get all that?