Crossed Cannons: The Field Artillery Branch Insignia, Explained
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Every Redleg wears them, most can tell you roughly what they mean, and almost nobody can tell you where they came from. Crossed cannons — two 19th-century field guns laid over each other in gold — are the branch insignia of the United States Army Field Artillery, and they have been in continuous use since 1834. That makes them one of the oldest unbroken symbols in the Army.
Here's the actual history, and why the version you've seen isn't always the same version.
1834: where it starts
Crossed field guns were adopted for Artillery in 1834, appearing on regimental colors, on knapsacks, and as part of the cap insignia worn by artillery officers. The guns in the design are muzzle-loading field pieces of that era — which is why the insignia still shows a smoothbore cannon on a two-wheeled carriage rather than anything resembling an M777. The symbol was frozen at the moment it was adopted, and the branch never updated the hardware. Nearly two centuries later, artillerymen wear a gun nobody has fired in anger since the Civil War.
1901–1902: the split
In 1901 the Artillery was divided into Coast Artillery and Field Artillery, and the insignia had to distinguish between them. A plain scarlet oval was added at the intersection of the cannons. The Field Artillery version, approved on 17 July 1902, placed a gold wheel on that red oval — a nod to the fact that field artillery moved and coast artillery didn't.
1950–1957: consolidation and the missile
The Army Organization Act of 1950 merged Coast and Field Artillery back into a single Artillery arm, and on 19 December 1950 the crossed field guns were redesignated as the insignia for the whole branch. That lasted seven years. On 2 January 1957 it was superseded by a new design: crossed field guns with a missile laid over the top of them, all in gold. The missile was the Army acknowledging that artillery had stopped being exclusively a tube business.
1968: the branches split again — and this is the part people get wrong
Air Defense Artillery became a separate branch on 20 June 1968, and on 1 December 1968 was authorized to wear the modified insignia — the crossed field guns with the missile. Field Artillery went the other direction and reinstated the original 1834 design: crossed cannons, no missile, no wheel, no oval.
So the quick field-identification rule: crossed cannons alone are Field Artillery. Crossed cannons with a missile over them are Air Defense Artillery. Two branches, one ancestor, one small detail separating them. If you've ever squinted at somebody's collar trying to work out which one they are, the missile is the tell. You can wear the distinction outright on our Cross Cannons Rank Set, which swaps the branch device into standard enlisted chevrons.
What about the Marine Corps?
The Marine Corps doesn't run Army-style branch collar devices — every Marine wears the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor regardless of what they do. But crossed cannons show up constantly across Marine artillery anyway: on battery guidons, unit logos, battalion merchandise, and informally as the mark of the 08XX field. If you want to know what those 08XX codes actually mean, we broke them down in our Marine Corps artillery MOS guide. The symbol crossed services because artillery is artillery, and the guns look the same from either side of the fence.
Why it stuck
Branch insignia get redesigned all the time. This one didn't — or rather, it did, twice, and both times the branch went back to the 1834 original. That's unusual, and it says something about how artillery thinks about itself. The job hasn't fundamentally changed: put accurate indirect fire on a target somebody else found. The tube got longer, the math got automated, the crew got smaller. The two guns crossed on a collar are a bet that the underlying thing is permanent.
They pair well with the other piece of artillery visual shorthand, too — the red trim that made "Redleg" stick in the first place, which we covered in our field artillery slang glossary. Wear them on Cross Cannons silkies, stick them on something with the Cross Cannon rank stickers, or browse the rest of the tube artillery lineup in Cannons & Paladins.
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