Colonial Military Authority

The Colonial Military Administration (CMA) was the military arm of the Colonial Administration Authority created by the UEG in 2310. Its purpose was to coordinate all warships, troops, and installations assigned to colonial duties, with the goal of combating dissent and piracy. Although it eventually possessed the largest interstellar fleet seen before the Insurrection, it was usurped and then ultimately shut down by the expanding UNSC.

Strengths

 * 1) Operational Freedom: unlike the UNSC, the CMA never had the luxury of fast communications networks that allowed for optimized coordination. Their entire structure optimized independent action, allowing their troops to strike hard and fast without waiting for orders from their superiors.
 * 2) High Endurance: the CMA frequented unexplored, underdeveloped regions of space, and often travelled far away from their bases on various missions. While hardly the most modern, their armed forces use technology which was rugged, energy-efficient, and easy to maintain. They also invested in a large support base to keep their ships and vehicles running for as long as possible without replacement.

Weaknesses

 * 1) Strained Budget: the CMA rarely received the money that was needed to police large expanses of the Human Sphere. While its operating costs were lower than that of the UNSC, equipment that was horribly obsolete was sometimes used for decades on the account that it was cheap.
 * 2) Disloyalty: in an attempt to encourage unity, the CMA recruited exclusively from the colonies and championed the common heritage that bound their personnel together. This had the side-effect of breeding sympathy to the colonists and becoming disillusioned with Earth-based authorities such as the UEG. The lower pay compared to their UNSC counterparts also made them much more susceptible to corruption.
 * 3) Incompetent Leadership: the CMA, for one reason or another, rarely awarded those who exhibited skill. Instead, wealthy officers who should never be given a command reached the highest positions in the organization, which led to fiascos that could have been prevented had proper protocol and common sense been followed.

Formation
The CMA, along with its parent organization the Colonial Administration Authority, was established by the UEG in 2310, when planning for humanity's first attempt to establish an interstellar colony, the New Hampshire Expedition, was still underway. Although willing to provide warships and ground forces to provide security for the civilian population, they were reluctant to take charge of these operations directly. This was because the UNSC felt that their resources should still remain concentrated in the Sol system for the time being, as they felt that colonial security, while necessity, did not require their direct attention. They also knew that their existing doctrine was reliant on developed infrastructure, with fast communications being vital to their success. A new command could be structured in ways that best mitigated these issues.

At the time, assignment to the CMA was regarded as a lifetime posting, so the entirety of the Expedition's security force were selected from authorized volunteers in the UNSC and national militaries. To make things easier, their families were given a spot on the three colony ships. Brigadier General Dominik Jagoda was placed in command of the growing CMA, with Captain Kulap Wattana serving as his second-in-command.

Firearms
Initially, the CMA was content to arm its personnel with past-generation firearms that were either in the process of being phased out, or had been surplus to the UNSC's requirements. This practice continued for much of their first century of existence, as their rapid expansion meant that there were problems with getting enough weapons into the colonies in the first place. Indeed, a number of CMA garrisons preferred to simply acquire locally-produced variants, rarely informing the central command on Earth when they did so.

The need for universal standardization was one of the lessons the CMA learned during the Inner Colony Wars. Over the course of the 25th and 26th centuries, the organization shifted from UNSC-derived armaments to their own bespoke designs. The CMA grew to prefer weapons that were lighter, easier to control, and capable of high rates of fire. Their standard service rifles, for example, were all chambered in the 5.25mm rounds, pistols in 8mm, and sniper rifles in either 6.5mm or 10mm. The reason for this trend was complex, but boiled down to their expectation for what environments their soldiers would fight in: that is, short-ranged battles with unarmored insurgents, usually inside cramped spaces such as arcologies and ships. The other reason was that the CMA had a separate line of weapons built specifically for the needs of heavyworlds, which could provide an Army Section with slower-firing but extended-ranged capabilities in a pinch. Their firearms also tended to be kept in service for longer: the SCC-2B carbine and SMG-26, for example, had both been introduced in the early 2300s.

The CMA named its armaments with two different systems. The older style used a prefix that signified what sort of weapon it was classified as, followed by the model number set by their manufacturer. Submodels were denoted by a letter at the end. For example, had it been adopted, the MA5A assault rifle would have been called the SR-5, and the MA5B would have been known as the SR-5A. By their later years, they had begun shifting to a two-letter prefix that denoted the company instead.