I supposed due to branding and recruitment and legacy issues, this is a non-starter. But I see no need whatsoever to have separately named branches of the US military.
It just gives people a reason to split into groups and compete and fight. They already have overlapping capabilities anyway. Seems like we should just get rid of the names and everyone is a part of the "U.S. Military".
The reason to have separate branches of the military (if you can afford it) is to maintain organizational and doctrinal uniqueness.
Think about it in evolutionary terms. Any hierarchical organization trends towards uniformity, especially one where promotion is conservative. E.g. most pyramidal organizations.
The Marines fundamentally, organizationally, and tactically approach warfare different than the Army. The Army would have been incapable of fighting WWII in the Pacific. It's just not what it's designed to do.
By maintaining five combat branches (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard), you maintain five unique approaches to warfare.
Consequently, when the situation calls for it, you can apply any of those four unique approaches.
Whether or not that's worth the cost of distinct services is debatable, but it's certainly a benefit from the approach.
"The Army would have been incapable of fighting WWII in the Pacific."
You do realize the US Army was extensively involved in the amphibious operations in the Pacific? In the Southwest Pacific, it was almost all US Army in New Guinea/Papua, New Britain, the Admiralty Islands etc. Guadalcanal was the main USMC effort. All of the landings in the Philippines were Army, Okinawa was joint Army/USMC under Army command. Army divisions also fought on Iwo Jima, Tinian, Saipan, etc.
I'm not disparaging any branch of the service, nor diminishing their contributions across the many fronts of WWII.
I am saying that the Army wasn't organizationally crafted around or trained for amphibious assaults against defended beaches.
Those units that did were re-trained, co-mingled with Marine units, and typically under Marine command (e.g. what eventually became V Amphib).
Marine units were built for that mission (i.e. by integrating air assets at a lower level). Army units were not.
And I don't think anyone in service would argue you could transfer a unit to a different branch and expect everything to work normally. Military culture makes corporate culture look easy.
But my original point was that diversity breeds strength. Army perspective may succeed where Marine perspective fails, or vice versa.
You may say you're not disparaging other branches, but you are.
"the Army wasn't organizationally crafted around or trained for amphibious assaults against defended beaches."
So Normandy wasn't defended? Normandy made Peleliu and Tarawa look like a piece of cake.
The Army also developed amphibious doctrine and training on its own with the ATC. It could be argued that Marine doctrine was flawed; Marine units lacked the logistical support for longterm conflicts. Army units did a better job of sustained operations. Amphibious assaults involved more than seizing a beachhead, especially with well entrenched Japanese troops.
And to be clear, Army units weren't "co-mingled" with Marine units, except at corp level. Army units operated in divisions.
Fundamentally, the Army had more troops in the Pacific, did more amphibious landings, arguably against tougher defenses, yet the Corp PR machine would have you think the Marines did it all by themselves. How many people even know the Army fought on Guadalcanal?
My grandfather was a soldier in the Pacific theater in WWII and he was always quick to point out that the Army had many more troops in theater, killed many more enemies, and suffered many more dead than the Marines did. The Army could have still won that theater without the Marines, albeit more slowly. The opposite is not true.
> The Marines fundamentally, organizationally, and tactically approach warfare different than the Army. The Army would have been incapable of fighting WWII in the Pacific. It's just not what it's designed to do.
Arguably. I look at it as equipment vs training vs organization.
The stuff can change, but it's even harder to change the way people think. And almost impossible to reorg and entire organization. And all militaries are very effective at making sure people think and behave in desirable ways -- kind of important when things start exploding around you.
So a response that might be advantageous for pushing across continental Europe isn't optimal for a chaotic beach assault.
You throw a Marine in the former, and they're still going to respond like a Marine.
> Seems like we should just get rid of the names and everyone is a part of the "U.S. Military"
There are some real differences between and within the different single Services (Land, Air and Martitime), many of these differences exist for functional reasons (consider s/w devs, testers and ops). Forcing everyone into the same uniform doesn't make the differences go away. The Canadians tried this and reverted back after several years [0].
It turns out that what's important is to to ensure that operations are commanded Jointly, even if the forces are generated separately. It's also important to ensure jointness in training, e.g. for littoral ops and air/land integration, so that people know what to expect when they come together. Many countries rediscover the need for jointness the hard way, when the different components are forced to integrate during a war.
I don't think the parent was even talking about actually integrating organizations, but just building a shared identity. That starts with a name. A lot of googling showed there is actually a word for that: "United States Armed Forces". I don't remember it being used much in US media. At best in technically correct news articles, but I doubtful to have heard it in movies. Even the word being plural might make it hard for people to identify as such. The Wikipedia page doesn't even list an acronym, with USAF already being taken...
We in germany have a "Bundeswehr". There obviously are separate branches and what not. I'm actually not familiar with the internals, since we from the public usually think of the military as a single entity. Doesn't matter if a trainee dies on a ship, a barrack has problems with nazi tokens or fighter jets colliding and dropping out of the sky during training, each of those events makes me think bad about our military in general (and sadly are not made up).
The Air Force doesn't need to share the Army's motivated esprit d'corps because most of them will sit at a desk or work as mechanics.
> We in germany have a "Bundeswehr". There obviously are separate branches and what not. I'm actually not familiar with the internals, since we from the public usually think of the military as a single entity.
So you're making a point about copying the Bundeswehr but don't actually know how the BW is set up?
Everything you described already exists in the US: the Department of Defense (and, to some degree, NATO). They're the overarching coordinating civilian department that runs the military. But the US military is HUGE and each individual US military service is larger than most other countries combined militaries.
Having some sort of combined bootcamp is nice, but as someone else mentioned, the Canadians already tried that and gave up on the idea. The hyper-fit Marines have a completely different lifestyle than an Airforce mechanic who will fix radars 13 hours a day -- the mechanic can get away with a 6 week "basic" training and then sent off to mechanic school, while the USMC grunt needs to have that discipline worked into them, and there is no way to do that except the hard way.
> The Canadians tried this and reverted back after several years.
From the linked source, this appears to overstate the situation.
> On 16 August 2011 the three environmental commands of the Canadian Armed Forces were renamed to reflect the names of the original historical armed services... The unified command structure of the Canadian Armed Forces was not altered by this change.
It just gives people a reason to split into groups and compete and fight. They already have overlapping capabilities anyway. Seems like we should just get rid of the names and everyone is a part of the "U.S. Military".