So now that the great name debate is over, Space Force wants its enlisted guardians to help determine how their rank insignia will look.
To that end, the military’s newest service on Tuesday launched a survey complete with four choices of insignia for ranks from E-2 to E-9.
“We are conducting a scientifically designed survey to capture Guardian feedback on proposed enlisted insignia designs,” Lynn Kirby, Space Force spokesperson, told Air Force Times in an email. “We released the survey March 2. Members have the next few weeks to respond to their unique invitation to participate, and the results of the survey will inform the next steps toward finalizing insignia designs.”
Only guardians who already transferred and those pending transfers received unique invitations to participate, Kirby said.
The new designs were first made public by the Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page on Thursday.
One version of the proposed enlisted rank insignia mirrors the current Air Force design, but with a twist. The star is replaced by the Space Force emblem.
Another version resembles Army and Marine Corps enlisted insignia, with upward-pointing chevrons, but with the Space Force emblem at the bottom of the design.
A third mirrors that, only with downward pointing chevrons while a fourth option resembles Navy enlisted rank insignia, with slashes for E-2 and E-3 and downward pointing chevrons and the Space Force emblem replacing the eagle for the rest.
After much public debate over what to call its troops, Space Force spelled out what its rank structure will be as of Feb. 1 in a memo signed Jan. 29.
But those who advocated for the Space Force to adopt a rank structure patterned after the Navy — most notably Captain Kirk himself, Star Trek actor William Shatner, on this very website — or something even more fanciful and space-faring will be sorely disappointed. With a few exceptions, the Space Force’s rank structure closely resembles the Air Force from which it derived.
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The officer rank structure for Space Force guardians, as they are now known, will be the same as that used by the Air Force, Army and Marine Corps, ranging from second lieutenants to four-star generals.
Howard Altman is an award-winning editor and reporter who was previously the military reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and before that the Tampa Tribune, where he covered USCENTCOM, USSOCOM and SOF writ large among many other topics.
