Unofficial badges of the United States military

Unofficial badges of the United States military are those badges or emblems which do not appear in United States military regulations but are worn or displayed by many individuals serving in the United States military. Unofficial badges may also be bestowed for a one time action or be authorized under the authority of a local commander.

Unofficial military badges are rare in the modern age due large in part to the stringent and specific regulations regarding the issuance of military badges and the manner of wear on military uniforms. The term may still be used, however, to denote badges which were proposed for creation but never actually distributed as well as the badges that individuals continue to place in personal award displays, wear on civilian clothing, or occasionally wear on their uniform at the risk of reprimand.

Army service

Combat Armor Badge	Combat Cavalry Badge

Combat Engineer Badge	Combat Artillery Badge

Close Combat Badge

Since the Combat Infantryman Badge

Combat Infantryman Badge

The Combat Infantryman Badge is the U.S. Army combat service recognition decoration awarded to soldiers—enlisted men and officers holding colonel rank or below, who personally fought in active ground combat while an assigned member of either an infantry or a Special Forces unit, of brigade size...

was introduced in 1943, other branches argued in favor of their own badges,

but a War Department review board just after the war ruled these out. Despite this, unofficial versions of a Combat Artilleryman's Badge, a Combat Tanker's Badge and a Combat Cavalryman's Badge showed up. In some cases, these were made by simply pinning a piece of branch insignia on top of a CIB and repainting the blue field in the appropriate branch color, but others involved making a badge and replacing the rifle of the CIB with crossed cannons (on a red background), a tank (on a green background, which is not the Armor color of yellow) or crossed sabers (on a yellow background). http://www.professionalsoldiers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5629&page=2

These badges more often than not were not worn on a soldiers actual uniform, but instead might have been displayed in personal award displays like shadow box

Shadow box

A shadow box is an enclosed case used in dioramas with a scene or object that has been specially designed to let light pass through from only one angle, so that objects within are less susceptible to damage from light....

es. Occasionally, if a unit commander saw fit to allow the badges for wear, soldiers may have worn them on their dress uniforms for special events, reviews, inspections, or dinners. It is not likely that many if any soldiers sewed on a subdued version of the badge onto their utility uniforms (as with official army badges), and therefore this badge was likely to only have been worn on dress uniforms. The only truly widespread use of these combat badges was probably on personally owned items, like ballcaps and car decals.

In 2004, Congressman Mark Green, (Republican) Wisconsin, introduced H.R. 3950 to provide for the establishment of a combat artillery badge to recognize combat service by members of the Army in the artillery branch.http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.3950.IH: While none of the other unofficial badges were covered in H.R. 3950, the bill ultimately did not make it out of committee anyway. The final demise of these unofficial badges began when the National Defense Authorization Act

National Defense Authorization Act

The National Defense Authorization Act is the name of a United States federal law that has been enacted for each of the past 48 fiscal years to specify the budget and expenditures of the United States Department of Defense.-See also:...

(NDAA) of 2005 required the Secretary of the Army to establish a Combat Recognition Ribbon

Combat Recognition Ribbon

The Combat Recognition Ribbon was a tentative military award of the United States Army which was first proposed in the mid 1980s as an Army equivalent to the United States Navy’s Combat Action Ribbon....

(CRR) to recognize the combat service of all branches. The CRR would therefore provide an official award that fulfilled the role of the unofficial branch-specific badges. A combat recognition ribbon was never developed by the army because it was scrapped in favor of a Close Combat Badge

Close Combat Badge

The Close Combat Badge was an approved badge that was never issued. It was quickly scrapped and replaced by the Combat Action Badge....

(CCB). The CCB would recognize specific Armor, Cavalry

Cavalry

Cavalry or horsemen were soldiers or warriors who fought mounted on horseback. Cavalry were historically the third oldest and the most mobile of the combat arms...

, Field Artillery

Field artillery

Field artillery is a category of mobile artillery used to support armies in the field. These weapons are specialized for mobility, tactical proficiency, long range, short range and extremely long range target engagement....

and Combat Engineer soldiers who served in units purposefully reorganized to routinely conduct infantry-unique close combat

Close combat

*Close combat is a generic term for both Close Quarters Battle and Hand to hand combat.*Mêlée generally refers to disorganized close combat.*CQB is an acronym for Close Quarters Battle, such as that which occurs in urban warfare....

missions and were personally present and under fire while conducting those types of missions. This badge would not honor the combat service of soldiers of these branches, but instead signal that their unit had been purposely deployed to fulfill the role of an infantry unit in a combatzone. Finally, these restrictive criteria were scrapped and the Army created the Combat Action Badge

Combat Action Badge

The Combat Action Badge is a military badge worn in the U.S. Army. The emblem features both an M9 bayonet and M67 grenade. The Combat Action Badge may be awarded to any soldier after the date of September 18, 2001 performing duties in an area where hostile fire pay or imminent danger pay is...

for soldiers of any branch in any unit who enter into combat with the enemy. This new badge effectively makes obsolete the unofficial branch-specific combat badges.

Recorded instances of the unofficial combat badges actually being worn are rare, but the following comes from the memoir

Memoir

A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...

of a Korean war

Korean War

The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...

veteran:

At one meal in the mess hall, a young fellow was eating at the same table as I. He was wearing a medal on his left chest. The medal looked similar to a Combat Infantryman Badge, the difference being that the background was red and the weapon an artillery gun barrel. I told him that the US Army did not confer such a medal. He got very mad at me. He was just a little fellow. I repeated my statement that there was no such medal. He said that it was a Combat Artilleryman Badge. I said that there was no such thing. His buddies huddled around him and glared at me. Every time we ran into each other on the ship, he was with his buddies and he gave me an angry look.http://www.koreanwar-educator.org/memoirs/mcgill_frank/index.htm

External links

http://home.earthlink.net/~scottie16/3-C.I.B.-M.O.H..html
http://www.militaryhorse.org/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=2533
http://www.3ad.org/desertstorm/awards_badges/combat_badges/combat_badges.htm
http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-badges/combat.htm
http://www.knox.army.mil/center/ocoa/armormag/so03/5monien03c.pdf

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.