MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY

It appears that the red+white+blue+circle scheme has exceeded its capacity for unique logo generation. Although it does seem that the Missile Defense Agency's graphic designer is a republican with a beach-boys and/or McCain fetish. The new logo (center) has an unmistakable resemblance to the Iranian Space Agency's logo, however the latter's iconography is not as aggressive. One could argue that the ISA's logo depicts each of our solar system's rings as white lines with the red circle being the moon and the white circle (the negative space that eats into the blue circle that contains the orbit rings) being the earth -- the proportions seem accurate. That single dark line in the shape of an oval represents the earth's orbit.

Now let's look back at the MDA's new logo. It is easy to interpret the iconography as a missile bomb-bomb-bombing Iran. How? The circle of negative space (seen as light blue here) represents earth, as the U.S. tends to create visual identities and logos that are overwhelmingly directly connected to us since we perceive ourselves to be the center of the universe. The narrowing of the red band implies perspective (big to small or wide to narrow) and just happens to be going from about the location of where the U.S. would be to the location of where Iran would be on a globe. As the name implies, the MDA deals with missiles so it would make sense to depict a missile in the logo. And the star? An explosion? The sun? Who knows. The imagery is cryptic, but what else could that red band be?