26 Mar 2013

Joint Staff of the Armed Forces (Brazil)

I think I never talked about military heraldry/vexillology on my blog. Actually, it's more like an eventual interest, not something I'm infinitely concerned about. These days, I was reading about the terrible new flags adopted by the Joint Staff of Armed Forces (Estado-Maior Conjunto das Forças Armadas or EMCFA, in Portuguese), and I decided to find alternatives by myself.

Before talk about flags themselves, I'll explain what's the EMCFA. In 1999, the three military ministries (of Army, of Navy and of Air Force) were unified on a single Defense Ministry; before this, existed the EMFA, an office, formed by the staff of the three armed forces, with the objective of planning collaborative actions between the army, the navy and the air force. In 2010, the EMCFA was created with the objective of keep collaborative works on Armed Forces, what apparently haven't yet happened after the unification.

Being created on 2010, the EMCFA only symbols on 2011. See the flag:
























The flag, as well as the coat of arms are tricolor of Army's green (in theory, it should be olive green), Navy's white and Air Force's blue; the colors come from the respective forces' uniforms. The coat of arms contain the emblem of each force on its respective color; in the middle, a sword (representing Armed Forces as a whole, probably). The coat of arms is completed by chains, representing the unity and cooperation between the arms. The yellow border on the flag, according to official description, represents the Ministry of Defense (can't find a reason).

I won't propose a newer coat of arms, as I think it's only needed to render the escutcheon as a proper shield and remove the words (and, if necessary, the chains).

My first thought was only rotate the colors and remove the yellow border (that yet appears on coat of arms):


















The logo of defunct EMFA could be used, but I think it doesn't combine with a tricolor flag. In the end, I decided for a yellow sword, representing the EMCFA and the Ministry of Defence, and a horizontal stripe to each force:


















Now I think it's a worthy flag! Next to it, I'd like to create a new flag for the chief of the Joint Staff. His current rank flag:


















I made only small changes on that flag, compatible with my EMCFA proposal:


















The sword now is white (as on Joint Staff arms and logo) because of the yellow background.

Comments are welcome. You don't need a Blogger account to do it.
Images #1 and #4, as well as elements of #2, comes directly from Army official website, so are in public domain. 

2 comments:

  1. Some very good flags. I like the way Brazil uses green for the army, white for the Navy and blue for the Air Force. I think they work better than Red, Navy Blue and Sky Blue that you find in the flags of commonwealth armed forces.

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    Replies
    1. Agree about the color combinations. British joint forces flag is too dark for my tastes and the white on middle stripe makes Brazilian correspondent more harmonic.

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