Space Force's Uniform Logos, Ranked

The idea of a new branch of the U.S. military known as the Space Force was first floated by President Donald Trump. When Trump unveiled the service's logo in 2020, it immediately inspired comparisons to the Star Trek logo. The early reveal of Space Force's dress uniforms reminded many watchers of the costumes worn on the show.

Space Force is the latest service branch to contribute to a long tradition of military branding. We are referring to the use of deranged emblems to identify individual units.

I was fascinated by the designs of the military patches after reading a book called I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Killed by Me. These artifacts of units that aren't officially acknowledged but feel like they are, were acquired by Paglen using government records, FOIA requests, and crowdsourcing. You would expect the military to have boring guns-and-eagles iconography. In many instances, their designs go in strange directions that could be described as Bizarre or metal as fuck.

When I saw some people sharing emblems from Space Force's units, I wanted to see them all. The USSF doesn't seem to be interested in creating a single repository for all of its new emblems. The branch does not have a complete list of logos, and pointed us to the individual websites of the units. Many of them are still missing, and can only be found amidst an enormous collection of other material, which is why the saints of Wikipedia have done a good job of collecting them. I tried to pull together as many of the patches as I could.

Are Space Force's emblems as crazy as those from the black world? Since the Space Force badges are official, they use a more uniform approach, but still use a lot of head-scratching iconography and inscrutable symbols.

Many people, myself included, saw Space Force as a joke when it first launched. As a sitting president, he launched a drive to crowdsource which hypothetical Space Force logo should go on merchandise that his political campaign was selling. They were just telling the campaign which design they would pay for on a tote bag, and they thought they were voting on Space Force's official branding.