One of the most common objections I receive when I state that the light ash guidon staff is the proper flagstaff for a US military color guard is some variation of this: “Where does the regulation say the staff has to be that color?” I appreciate it, but that question approaches the subject backward.
The US military did not begin with an undefined pole and then require each generation to select a color for it. It developed and standardized a particular piece of equipment: a wooden flagstaff or guidon staff of prescribed length and construction, fitted with an upper ferrule, lower ferrule, appropriate finial, and, for two-part staffs, a center screw joint. The light natural-wood appearance belongs to that established article.
Current drill manuals do not need to provide a paint chip, stain number, or Pantone color every time they use the word staff. They assume the use of the military flagstaff that the services have carried, displayed, procured, illustrated, and described for generations.
This distinction is important:
The color of the wood is not the controlling specification. The identity of the staff is.
The Manual Is Describing a Particular Object
Army Regulation 840-10 defines the flagstaff itself:
“The flagstaff is the staff on which a color, distinguishing flag, or guidon is carried or displayed.”
The regulation then establishes authorized lengths. Positional, distinguishing, and organizational colors use 9-foot-6-inch or 8-foot staffs; general officer flags use 8-foot staffs; guidons use 8-foot staffs. It also requires flagstaffs in the same display to be the same length. Those provisions were retained in the Army’s announced 2025 policy changes. Notice what this means. The regulation is not talking about anything that happens to be capable of supporting cloth. Flagstaff has a specific military meaning.
TC 3-21.5 makes the physical identity of that staff even clearer. At Order Colors, paragraph 15-33 directs the bearer to rest the ferrule of the staff on the marching surface. Then paragraph 15-34 states:
“At the Carry, rest the ferrule of the staff in the socket of the sling.”
The bearer then secures the ferrule in that socket. That language matters.
There is a lower metal ferrule (it prevents the wood from splitting) because the staff was designed to be grounded at Order and seated in a socket at Carry. The sling (colors harness) and the staff are complementary pieces of military equipment. One was designed around the other.
A generic decorative flagpole with a rounded wooden bottom, rubber cap, or flat plastic plug cannot suddenly become the prescribed military flagstaff merely because a flag fits over it and it happens to fit into the large-cup harness socket. The Army manual tells us what the equipment does. The equipment specifications and historical regulations tell us what the equipment is.
The Other Services Use the Same Basic Staff Architecture
This is not an Army-only concept by far. Marine Corps Order 5060.20 repeatedly identifies the ferrule and sling socket. When moving from Present Colors to Order Colors, the color bearer removes the staff from the sling socket while gripping the staff above the ferrule.
The Marine Corps Order states that at Order Guidon, “the ferrule rests on the deck” beside the right shoe. It also has a diagram that labels the Lower Ferrule, Staff Connector, Upper Ferrule, and Spear head. The manual explicitly states that the guidon is carried on an 8-foot staff.
Air Force drill doctrine uses the same equipment terminology. AFPAM 34-1203 directs the guidon bearer at Order Guidon to let the staff slide through the hand until the ferrule reaches the ground.
The services differ in techniques, authorized staff lengths for particular colors, some finials, and certain ceremonial applications. However, they do not use completely unrelated objects called “flagstaffs.”
As I documented previously in The Flagstaff and Guidon Staff Manuals DrillMaster Study, the guidon staff and color staff are fundamentally the same type of equipment. Their application changes according to staff length, the flag attached, service, and ceremonial requirement. That distinction is critical. We are not comparing a “guidon pole” with an unrelated “color pole.” We are examining variations of the same long-established military staff.
This Staff Did Not Appear in the Twentieth Century
The lineage goes back much farther than our current manuals. I so appreciate having print and electronic editions of relevant historical manuals. The Revised Regulations for the Army of the United States, 1861 prescribed standards and guidons carried on a lance and stated:
“The lance of the standards and guidons to be nine feet long, including spear and ferrule.”
That is Civil War-era U.S. Army regulation. (NY Military Museum)
The significance is not that the 1861 staff was dimensionally identical in every detail to the staff sold today. It was not. The significance is the continuity of the equipment concept: a wooden military staff or lance terminated by a spear at the top and a ferrule at the bottom.
Surviving Civil War objects reinforce that documentary evidence. The New York State Military Museum preserves Civil War guidons still associated with their staffs, including examples from New York artillery and cavalry organizations. One 125th New York Infantry guidon was reportedly struck at Gettysburg with sufficient force to shatter its staff. (NY Military Museum)
The National Park Service preserves the 35-star mounted-troops guidon carried by Company B, 5th U.S. Cavalry, during Grant’s movement to Appomattox on April 9, 1865. (National Park Service)
Another surviving Union cavalry guidon, from the 1st Arkansas Cavalry, is described as having been carried on a wooden staff called a lance with a brass lance head. (Civil War Virtual Museum)
Excavated hardware also survives. Civil War battlefield finds include metal spear or spade-shaped flagstaff heads. Such finds are entirely consistent with the documentary record of wooden staffs fitted with metal hardware. They are historical evidence of the ancestry of today’s staff, although an excavated finial by itself should not be used to claim that every detail of the modern staff had already been standardized in the 1860s. The continuity is nevertheless unmistakable.
The Socket Is More Than a Modern Sling Feature
Mounted service gives us another important part of the history. By the early twentieth century, the Army had purpose-built horse equipment specifically intended to receive the lower end of the guidon staff. The 1908 Horse Equipments and Equipments for Officers and Enlisted Men, issued by the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, specifically lists a “STIRRUP WITH GUIDON SOCKET.”
The equipment description explains that the guidon socket was attached to the regulation stirrup to create a guidon stirrup. Federal records continued to list “Stirrup, with socket for guidon” as Army equipment. I interpret this as a direct conceptual link between the old mounted lance and today’s color sling. The mounted bearer seated the lower end of the staff into a purpose-built socket. The modern dismounted color bearer seats the lower ferrule into a purpose-built sling socket. That is not accidental terminology.
The staff has a ferrule because it is an equipment system designed to interface with not only the ground, but a socket.
By 1913, the Spear-and-Ferrule Staff Was Explicit
The 1913 Army Regulations provide another clear marker in the development of the modern staff. For cavalry guidons, the regulation prescribed a lance 9 feet long “including spear and ferrule.”
Field Artillery used the same lance prescribed for Cavalry guidons. So by 1913, more than a century ago, official Army regulations were already defining the military guidon staff by the same recognizable end components we still discuss today: a spearhead above and ferrule below.
Again, there have been dimensional and construction changes. That does not break the lineage. It demonstrates normal equipment development. What persisted was the basic architecture.
Then the Army Explicitly Said “Natural Color”
This brings us to the most important historical language for the current argument. Army Regulation 260-10, dated October 25, 1944, was the predecessor of today’s AR 840-10. The Government Printing Office catalog confirms that edition and its subject: flags, colors, standards, guidons, streamers, silver bands, tabards, and automobile plates. For colors and standards, AR 260-10 stated that the pike (a misuse of the term) and lance were “of wood, natural color” and prescribed a length of 9 feet 6 inches, including the spearhead and ferrule.
The regulation then applied the same language to guidons: the pike and lance were wood, natural color, and 8 feet long, including spearhead and ferrule. I wrote about this in my article, A DrillMaster Study of the Flagstaff and Finial. That historical text answers much of the present argument.
The natural-wood appearance was not invented by a modern flag manufacturer. It was expressly part of Army regulation. Equally important is what the same regulation did when a different finish was intended.
For the President’s color, AR 260-10 prescribed a wooden staff with an “ebony finish” along with distinctive gold-plated hardware. That contrast is helpful in this study. The normal military staff was wood, natural color and the special Presidential staff was wood, ebony finish (both still are the same colors). When a materially different finish was required, the regulation said so.
That makes the modern argument that any stain or color is acceptable because a current drill manual does not repeat “natural color” much weaker. Historical Army regulation shows that finish was part of the identity of the equipment.
Modern Procurement Continues the Same Article
The supply system provides the next piece of evidence.
The Defense Logistics Agency presently lists NSN 8345-00-214-9125 as: “Guidon wood pole, 8ft” for federal supply purposes. A 2002 DLA solicitation on SAM.gov identified that same NSN as “Flagstaff, Wood, Jointed, Army, Type IV” manufactured in accordance with MIL-F-40048C. The contract’s basic quantity was 6,000 staffs. This was not some obscure ceremonial boutique item. DLA was buying thousands of standardized wooden flagstaffs.
A more recent 2024 procurement description for the same NSN identifies the item as a wooden, jointed, varnished Army Type IV staff with coupling, ferrule, and spearhead, 8 feet long, manufactured to the B-7-10 drawings and MIL-F-40048 specification. (GovTribe)
MIL-F-40048 itself has a long history. Published specification records show versions dating to at least 1958, with revisions in 1959, 1962, 1970, 1974, 1977, 1978, and 1984. (GlobalSpec)
The modern federal stock number was established in 1973, but the equipment obviously predates the NSN. A stock number records the supply-system identity of an item; it does not establish the date on which the item itself was invented.
The procurement chain therefore connects the modern staff to decades of federal standardization, while the regulations take the equipment lineage back much farther.
What the Commercial Market Tells Us
Now examine the actual military staff sold today. Total Force identifies NSN 8345-00-214-9125 and describes the staff as “Constructed Of Light Ash Wood” with polished fittings, center screw connector, bottom fitting, and Army spear. (Total Force)
Mr. Guidon describes its military-specification guidon staff as a two-piece light ash pole with Army spear and bottom tapered ferrule. (Mr. Guidon)
Annin’s commercial catalog separates ordinary decorative indoor poles from guidon staffs. Its ordinary display poles include polished oak-finish staffs and even wood-grained steel poles. The separate guidon-staff section specifies a hardwood jointed staff with a light ash finish, Army spear, and pointed lower ferrule. (IRP CDN) That catalog distinction is especially useful.
The manufacturer itself does not treat the brown office pole and military guidon staff as interchangeable products. They belong to different product categories and are built differently.
Other suppliers show the same pattern: jointed hardwood, light ash finish, military spear, and pointed lower ferrule. (Gates Flag & Banner)
This does not mean that the phrase “light ash” magically transforms commercial advertising into military doctrine. It means that when manufacturers build the traditional military staff described by the specifications and manuals, they repeatedly arrive at the same recognizable article. That is evidence of equipment continuity.
Why Ash Makes Sense
There is also a practical reason ash became such an appropriate wood for this application. The US Forest Service describes white ash as tough, strong, and highly resistant to shock. Historically, those properties made it particularly desirable for handles, oars, and baseball bats. The Forest Products Laboratory similarly describes ash as straight-grained, hard, strong, stiff, smooth-wearing, and possessing high shock resistance.
Those are desirable characteristics in a staff that is several feet long, repeatedly handled, grounded on a ferrule, moved through a sling socket, assembled and disassembled, transported, carried outdoors, and subjected to bending through exposure to wind.
Wood science did not create the ceremonial rule. Doctrine establishes what equipment is used. Wood science simply helps explain why ash is exceptionally well suited to the job.
“But the Current Regulation Doesn’t Say Light Ash”
Correct. A current drill manual may not say those two words. That does not make every pole acceptable. TC 3-21.5 also does not give the metallurgy of the lower ferrule. It does not specify the thread pitch of the center connector every time it directs a color bearer to Carry Colors. It does not restate the federal procurement drawing when it says “staff.” It does not need to.
The manual is teaching the manipulation of an already identifiable piece of equipment. This is the same mistake people make in many areas of military ceremony. They search a drill manual for every manufacturing characteristic of every object involved. Drill doctrine and materiel specifications do different jobs.
The drill manual tells the bearer what to do with the flagstaff. The heraldry and protocol regulations establish where and how it is used. The procurement system defines the physical item being supplied. Historical regulations show how that article developed. You have to read those sources together.
A ceremonial exception or unit-specific practice does not redefine the general standard.
But The Old Guard Uses Brown Staffs
Photographs of the 3rd Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) frequently show color bearers carrying dark brown wooden staffs. This does not contradict the distinction between the military flagstaff and the commercial office-display pole.
The Old Guard staffs retain the defining construction of the military article, including the proper ferrules and fittings. The difference is the finish applied to the wood, not substitution of a different type of pole (I have not asked during my visits why the dark finish, but it could be to match the color of the rifles, my guess).
The Old Guard is the Army’s official ceremonial unit and maintains unit-specific ceremonial traditions. Its practices therefore should not automatically be interpreted as general authorization for Army units to modify ceremonial equipment.
The Old Guard example establishes that the regiment uses a darker finish on an otherwise recognizable military-pattern staff. Without the applicable unit SOP, procurement specification, or other authority, that practice should not be interpreted as general authorization for other Army organizations to refinish their staffs. It just does not establish that any commercially available wooden flagpole is interchangeable with the prescribed military staff.
The Brown Office Pole Is a Different Article
This is why the ubiquitous dark-brown office pole is such a problem. It usually has a rounded bottom rather than the pointed lower ferrule described throughout military drill. Many have decorative screw-eye hardware, fine-threaded center joints, and civilian “perfect-fit” ornaments. They are designed to be assembled, placed into a floor stand, and left there. They are display poles. They were not designed as color-bearing equipment.
I illustrated this difference in A DrillMaster Study of the Flagstaff and Finial. The military staff tapers into the ferrule and uses the hardware arrangement necessary for the manual of the staff. The common office-display staff does not. That is why saying, “But the regulation doesn’t prohibit brown,” misses the issue. The regulation does not need to maintain a list of every incorrect commercial product.
The question is not: Does the manual prohibit this brown pole?
The correct question is: Is this the military flagstaff the manual is describing?
If it lacks the lower ferrule that the manual tells the bearer to place on the marching surface and seat into the sling socket, the answer should already be apparent.
“But They Use Those Staffs at the Pentagon”
Another argument I have encountered is that the familiar dark-brown office-display staff must be acceptable for military use because those staffs are seen throughout the Pentagon. One instructor specifically told me that the Pentagon displays were the reason he used them. This is an understandable observation followed by the wrong conclusion.
The Pentagon contains an enormous number of static flag displays. The Department of Defense’s own history explains that Pentagon corridors, halls, and alcoves gradually became decorated with institutional and historical displays. Beginning especially in the 1970s, these included a Flag Corridor displaying state flags and historical US flags, a NATO flag corridor, and numerous other ceremonial and historical exhibits. Those are interior displays. They are not color guards, and they are not demonstrations of the manual of the colors.
That distinction becomes particularly obvious when examining the finials commonly seen on Pentagon office staffs. Many of those static displays use the spread-eagle ornament. Yet Army Regulation 840-10 is quite specific about Army finials. It identifies the eagle for: “Presidential flagstaffs” and identifies the spearhead as “the only device used with Army flags.”
Therefore, the presence of an eagle-topped brown office staff inside the Pentagon cannot, by itself, establish that the same staff and finial are authorized for an Army color guard. In fact, it illustrates exactly why appearance and location cannot substitute for source authority.
A person can walk through one of the most important military buildings in the world and see flags mounted on commercially styled indoor staffs. That tells us what has been selected for those particular static displays. It does not tell us what TC 3-21.5 requires a color bearer to carry. The distinction is functional as well as doctrinal.
TC 3-21.5 directs the color bearer to manipulate a staff with a lower ferrule and states:
“At the Carry, rest the ferrule of the staff in the socket of the sling.”
The common office-display pole was not constructed for that purpose. It is designed primarily to stand upright in a floor base. Its suitability for a hallway, office, conference room, or historical exhibit does not establish its suitability for the manual of the colors. This is the same principle that applies elsewhere in military ceremony:
Display practice is not automatically drill or protocol doctrine.
The Pentagon is especially capable of creating confusion because of its institutional authority. A service member reasonably assumes that something displayed at the headquarters of the Department of Defense must have been placed there correctly. It may very well be entirely appropriate for the purpose for which it was installed. The error occurs when that observation is converted into a rule for a different purpose.
“It’s used at the Pentagon” answers the question, Where have you seen it?
It does not answer the question, What authorizes it for a color guard?
Those are entirely different questions.
The proper sequence remains authority first. For an Army color guard, TC 3-21.5 establishes the manual, AR 840-10 establishes flagstaff and finial requirements, and the standardized military staff provides the equipment capable of performing that manual. A static office display elsewhere, even inside the Pentagon, does not supersede those sources.
This also helps explain why the widespread use of brown office staffs has become so persistent. Service members see them in command suites, headquarters buildings, conference rooms, auditoriums, and at the Pentagon itself. Familiarity gradually creates the impression that the staff is “military.”
But frequency of use does not establish equipment identity. A brown office-display staff topped with an eagle remains an office-display staff. A proper military staff does not cease to be a military staff merely because a specialized ceremonial unit, such as The Old Guard, applies a darker stain to its ash staff.
Those two brown staffs may look similar from across a room. They are not the same piece of equipment.
Although the Pentagon Reservation is administered by Washington Headquarters Services rather than the Army, much of the federal government’s military heraldic infrastructure remains centered in Army organizations. The Institute of Heraldry provides heraldic support across the Armed Forces and other government agencies, while Army Clothing and Heraldry supplies such items as the Presidential flag and flagpoles for senior officials. That makes the widespread use of commercial-style brown office staffs in Pentagon displays particularly worthy of scrutiny, but it does not by itself establish that the Army controls every Pentagon flag display.
What About Other Static Displays?
For the Army, Department of the Air Force, and Marine Corps, there is no sound doctrinal basis for assuming that placing a flag in a floor stand transforms the prescribed military flagstaff into optional office furniture. Army regulation expressly applies the flagstaff definition to colors that are either carried or displayed. Department of the Air Force policy specifically prescribes light-ash wooden flagstaffs for indoor displays. Marine Corps doctrine directs color bearers to place the same military staffs they carry into indoor flag stands.
That wording is useful because it reinforces the larger point. Even where the Air Force permitted more than one wood or finish description, the authorized appearance remained light natural wood, not dark walnut, mahogany, black, white, or gold-painted decorative staffs.
There are also limited service-specific exceptions involving staff length, finials, Presidential staffs, automobile flags, and certain static-display configurations. Those exceptions should be identified as exceptions. They do not erase the standard.
For a military color guard, the staff must be capable of performing the military staff manual. That means the correct staff architecture, especially the lower ferrule. Army regulation defines the flagstaff as the article upon which a color, distinguishing flag, or guidon is “carried or displayed”; DAFI 90-1201 expressly regulates indoor flagstaffs; Marine Corps ceremonial procedure puts the carried military staffs into the display stands. Navy remains the unresolved area because its static-display staff requirements are not stated with the same clarity in the public sources we have examined.
Color Is Ultimately the Wrong Argument
This brings us back to the original complaint: “The regulation doesn’t define the color.” It does not need to define a modern color value. Historically, the Army did define the ordinary staff as wood of natural color. More importantly, the military has continued to describe, illustrate, manipulate, procure, and supply a specific type of staff.
The standard military article has historically been supplied in natural or light-finished wood, and that remains the normal commercial and military-supply configuration. The finish, however, must not be confused with the identity of the equipment. A specially finished military staff remains a military staff; an office-display pole does not become one merely because it is made of wood.
So when I say to use the light ash military guidon staff, I am not inventing a ceremonial preference based on aesthetics. I am identifying the standardized piece of equipment that satisfies the historical and current requirements. Its characteristics form a coherent whole:
The wooden shaft, tapered construction, lower ferrule, upper ferrule, center joint where required, prescribed length, appropriate military finial, and natural/light wood appearance all identify the military staff. Remove enough of those characteristics and eventually you are no longer looking at another permissible version of the same equipment. You are looking at a different product.
That is what happened with the cheap brown office pole. It entered military buildings because it is inexpensive and convenient, then familiarity gradually became mistaken for authority. Ubiquity does not create doctrine.
More Than a Century of Continuity
The historical trail is remarkably consistent. In 1861, Army regulations described standards and guidons carried on lances fitted with spear and ferrule. By the early 1900s, the Army was producing specialized guidon sockets for mounted bearers. In 1913, Army regulations continued to specify guidon lances whose length included the spear and ferrule. In 1944, AR 260-10 explicitly prescribed wooden staffs of natural color, while separately prescribing an ebony finish when that special finish was intended.
Beginning in the 1950s, MIL-F-40048 formally standardized flagstaffs and flagstaff heads through the federal specification system. See GlobalSpec. In 2002, DLA (SAM.gov)was still procuring thousands of Army Type IV wooden jointed staffs to that specification. In 2024, at GovTribe, a federal procurement documentation was still describing the 8-foot article as a wooden, jointed, varnished staff with coupling, ferrule, and spearhead.
Today, the Defense Logistics Agency continues to identify NSN 8345-00-214-9125 as the 8-foot guidon wood pole. And today’s military drill manuals still tell the bearer what Soldiers and service members have been doing with this equipment for generations: put the ferrule on the ground, raise the staff, and seat that ferrule into the socket. That is equipment continuity.
The exact dimensions, hardware, finishes, terminology, and service applications have evolved. No responsible historical argument should claim that an 1861 staff and a 2026 staff are literally identical. They do not need to be.
The evidence establishes something much more useful: the same basic U.S. military flagstaff concept, a wooden staff with purpose-built upper and lower metal fittings designed to be carried and supported as military equipment, has persisted for well over a century.
The familiar light ash guidon staff is the modern continuation of that tradition and standardization. So no, today’s manual does not need to say, “Paint this pole light ash.” That is not how the standard works.
The staff is the standard.