Awards and decorations of the United States Armed Forces
Military awards and decorations given to personnel and units of the United States armed forces
Various medals, service ribbons, ribbon devices, and specific badges recognize military service and personal accomplishments of members of the U.S. Armed Forces. Such awards are a means to outwardly display the highlights of a service member's career.
U.S. military awards currently issued to service members
General order of precedence
The precedence of particular awards will vary slightly among the different branches of service. All awards and decorations may be awarded to any service member unless otherwise designated by name or notation.
Note: ^The precedence of the Purple Heart was immediately before the Good Conduct Medals until changed to its current precedence in 1985.
Military departments
Inter-service
Army
Navy and Marine Corps
Air Force and Space Force
Coast Guard
To denote additional achievements or multiple awards of the same decoration, the United States military maintains a number of award devices which are pinned to service ribbons and medals.
Inactive and obsolete awards
U.S. military personnel having received these awards have participated within these areas of combat/conflict during the time these awards were given to U.S. service members. Such awards have since been discontinued or are no longer applicable in terms of receiving these commendations. Certain decorations remain inactive at this time (e.g. National Defense Service Medal) but may be reactivated at a later date in the future.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Awards and decorations of the United States Armed Forces” as military awards and decorations given to personnel and units of the United States armed forces. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as military awards and decorations given to personnel and units of the United States armed forces. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q784242. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Awards and decorations of the United States Armed Forces” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.