I was recently asked about splitting a color guard formation and this is such a good question, that I decided it needs to be an article to help inform others.
Question
My team is posting a color guard that will be on a narrow porch in front of the entrance to a building. I am contemplating splitting the team, a foreign national flag and musket on the left and the US flag and musket on the right. My idea is to have them facing each other for the official party to pass through the color guard to enter the building. Is this permissible?
Answer
What you describe here is a pseudo honor cordon, two lines of people facing each other. Having anyone pass between your colors and guards doesn’t maintain the integrity of the formation unless you can have two guards per flag. That way you have two separate formations but having anyone pass between both formations as they face each other is not the appropriate . If you can do that, that would work. If not, keeping your formation together at one side of the entrance is the most appropriate.
Below is a photo of a joint service honor guard arrival ceremony at the river entrance of the Pentagon. In the center, going up the steps, is the cordon. At the bottom of the steps are two separate color guards, each team holding national colors.
Appropriate Splitting
Splitting a monument or an area in which to lay a wreath is appropriate as you can see in the photos below.
For any color guard, military, civilian, or civil, it might be a good idea to add a guard on the inside of each half of the team. Why you would need to do that I am not sure, but it is authorized for the military.
I will add a note here. AFPAM 334-1203, AF/SF drill and ceremonies manual, states “The Air Force or Space Force flags are never carried without the US flag.” In the image below, even though there are two extra guards, essentially creating two different teams, one could say that the US flag is “present”. We have one team with the US, Army, and Marine Corps colors, and the other with the Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard colors. I’m not a fan of that setup, protocol-wise.
By the way, just because the USAF states that the departmental color is not carried on it’s own and the other manuals do not mention it does not mean other service color can be carried alone. All manuals state and show what a color guard is, each position, and who mans those positions. The only time one flag is carried is when it is just the US flag with two guard.
