Colonial Military Authority

The Colonial Military Authority (CMA) was the military arm of the Colonial Administration Authority created by the UEG in 2310; together, these organizations comprised the Colonial Authority. The CMA's 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.

In common parlance, the CMA is sometimes referred to by the unofficial name of the Colonial Military Administration. It is also frequently known as the Colonial Military.

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.

In the two decades that followed the invention of the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine, there was considerable debate over whether the United Nations Space Command should be in charge of security in the extrasolar colonies or if an altogether new agency should be formed, a discussion that ran parallel to that over the governance of future colonies outside Sol. A large camp within the UEG supported expanding the purview of both the UEG and the UNSC to the stellar frontier, while others within the Parliament felt this to be an unsustainable solution in the long term. With plans for dozens if not hundreds of colonies to come in environments wholly new to mankind, separated by months of travel time and communication lag, the UEG proper would soon find itself stretched thin. Instead, any agencies responsible for governing that process should likewise be built from scratch to accommodate the new challenges. Prominent voices within the UEG were also wary of UNSC expansion, fearing that the agency (which had always rivaled the UEG itself in prominence) would entirely eclipse the civilian government.

Ultimately, the UNSC itself was not opposed to the formation of the CMA. Although willing to provide warships and ground forces to provide security for the civilian population, the UNSC was 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 extrasolar 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, with a flexible, relatively decentralized command structure to account for the months-long communication lag between systems.

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.

In its formative decades, the CMA was a small-scale policing force for developing colonies, whose security needs were generally very modest. The numbers of civilian spacecraft (especially slipspace-capable spacecraft) were still limited in the newly-settled systems, so true ship-to-ship actions were rare, with most CMA activity being surface-based. This changed with the rapid proliferation of vessels in the colonies during the Domus Diaspora.

Twilight years
Toward the end, the CMA was notorious for its widespread corruption problem. Procurement funds disappeared throughout the chain of command, leading to outdated or broken gear at best, units and ships that existed only on paper at worst. Training was likewise poor in quality, with a greater overall focus on posturing to the UNSC than actually being efficient at running operations. While a good portion of this was due to simple greed, the widespread rebel sympathies among CMA personnel played a major role in the CMA's systemic difficulties; equipment and parts that should have been used to arm CMA troops mysteriously ended up in the hands of rebel organizations, and only sometimes were thorough investigations carried out. While such problems exacerbated in the CMA's final decades, their seeds were sown much earlier. It has later been noted that even for much of the UNSC-CMA Cold War, the UNSC had greatly overestimated the CMA's practical warfighting ability; although the latter had experience in carrying out interstellar campaigns, the institutional rot within the CMA would likely been its undoing had the tensions escalated to an all-out shooting war.

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 HMG-38 rifle followed shortly after, and became the standard automatic infantry rifle of CMA troops throughout the 25th century.

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, shown with Vakara GesmbH's VK78 Commando.

CMAN Marine Corps
Technically not a distinct branch, as they're organized and controlled by the CMA Navy, the CMAN Marine Corps were a niche, specialized infantry force, with no capacity for large-scale expeditionary operations like those conducted by their peers in the UNSC. Instead, they were employed solely for maintaining ship security and acting as a zero-gravity combat force, where they could board ships, conduct remote customs checks, and root out deviant enclaves so frequently found in the Outer Colonies. Given the fact that they would almost certainly be outnumbered by raiders or rebels, the Marines demanded a much higher standard of training over the average CMA Army grunt. At their height during the Inner Colony Wars and the Domus Diaspora, many could even be considered the equivalent of light commandos fielded by other military organizations and branches of the time.