This is no longer the case. Well, in reality it was probably never the case, but in 2005 the Marine Corps created MARSOC and joined the United States Special Operations Command. This pretty much officially declared that some Marines are more elite than others…
The French Armed Forces do not have separate “Marines,” but I don’t know whether their/any amphibious forces are part of the Army or the Navy. Their Armed Forces include four branches: Army, Navy, Air Force and Gendarmerie.
The Spanish Armed Forces, again do not have separate “Marines.” Both the Air-transported Infantry and the Legion are part of the Army; the equivalent of the Marines are Navy (webpage in Spanish, in theory there’s an English version but that specific fragment is clearly a pic and hasn’t been translated). There are three branches: Army, Navy and Air Force. Neither of the national-level police forces (Policía Nacional and Guardia Civil) is considered part of the Armed Forces. The Coast Guard is also part of the Navy.
Wait. People in the Navy don’t carry guns?
People in the Navy generally use bigger guns which are attached to their ships, as opposed to handguns. You know: torpedos, artillery…
While I was training in Quantico we had a Foreign Officer Exchange system whereby officers of other nations’ Marine Corps equivalents would go through the six month “The Basic School” integrated with US Marine Lieutenants. We had two from Morocco and five from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis weren’t worth much, some were scary, but I would have followed one of the Moroccan officers anywhere. He was a Moroccan Naval Infantry Officer.
The real question is why not ingrate all the services? There aren’t many good reasons why not. Our services are more joint service than ever. When I was in, I always was in joint service units. Always. I was military intelligence and there was absolutely no reason why we were in four different uniforms to do our jobs.
You can say the same about the medical branches, the science branches, the nuke branches, the food service branches, the personnel & financial branches, the chaplans, band, honor guards, police, and on and on. It’s all redundant and wasteful.
All the services have elite “special forces” type units. Someone who joins the Army to be a Pathfinder, or joins the Air Force to be Special Ops, or joins the Navy to be a Seal, or joins the Marines to be Conan the Barbarian or whatever, has more in common with their other service counterparts than they do with a file clerk in their own service.
I thought the armed forces were integrated decades ago. 
Hold up a second. To those that are saying that the Army is slow to deploy and we have big units, I say your information is outdated. 2 (3?) years ago, the Army began a transition to what everyone on the inside is calling the Modular Army. We’re not based around 10,000-man divisions anymore. We’re now based around a mobile 3,500-man brigade.
I can’t believe wiki has a citefor this.
This attitude epitomizes the concept of “Penny-wise and pound-foolish.”
Because on a management level, the services have fundamentally different missions. Much distress is voiced about interservice competition, but this is actually a very health thing if not done to excess. If all services were run from a single integrated command authority, it would be possible (and indeed, likely) that the management could be dominated by a single personality or philosophy, weighing to toward one particular type of operation in favor of a more comprehensive and balanced approach.
Let me give a concrete example. In the post-WWII era, the US Army Ordnance Corps provided a modest but fairly continual level of funding for research in applied rocketry, largely based on the German V2 (Aggregat-4) derived Bumper/Hermes rocket program. At this time, the Navy was moderately interested in rocketry but found that liquid fueled rockets (the only type capable of delivering reliable long-range performance) were too hazardous to handle on-board sea vessels, and pursued the Viking sounding rocket program as an almost purely scientific endeavor of the Naval Research Labs (NRL). The newly-founded United States Air Force ironically had essentially no interest in rocketry. This all changed with the launch of the Sputnik 1 on the Soviet R-7 rocket.
Although there had been increasing interest in strategic rocketry and space warfare applications (i.e. satellites and orbital bombers) since the mid-Fifties, this was regarded by all but the most forward looking leaders as science fiction. The beeping Sputnik satellite (described by Clare Boothe Luce as “an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority,” spurred rapid interest in deploying our own satellite and developing strategic intercontinental missile systems. The Redstone rocket, developed by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), was considered the top candidate for an orbital launch vehicle, but for a variety of reasons (some technical, others political) the NRL Vanguard rocket, which was purpose built as a space launch vehicle but based on the technologies and experienced with the Viking, was selected. Although its performance and reliability were disappointing (3 successful launches out of 11 flights) much of the testing and flight failures provided information that served to improve later generations of rockets.
Meanwhile, the ABMA Redstone rocket was improved and man-rated, providing the first launch vehicle for unmanned and manned Project Mercury suborbital launch vehicles, while the newly formed Air Force Ballistic Missile Division’s (AFBMD) first ICBM, the SM-65 ‘Atlas’ became the basis for the Mercury-Atlas orbital space launch vehicle that put John Glenn in orbit. The AFBMD was unhappy with the degree of maintenance and support required for the Atlas as well as delays in development, and proceeded with the development of the more reliable SM-68 ‘Titan’, which lead to the hardened silo-launched storable liquids Titan II, which developed into the familty of one of the most heavily used American launch vehicles in the Sixties through the Nineties. (It’s usage was exceeded only by the Delta family, derived from the Delta-Thor rocket which itself was derived from the Thor MRBM, which was designed as an interim vehicle until Atlas and Titan could be fielded. The Delta, in the form of the Boeing Delta IV rocket, is still in used today.)
All of this experience was with liquids, of course, and provided a lot of cross-fertilization across programs that allowed reliability and performance improvements in liquid fuel rockets, ultimately leading to the purpose-build Saturn SLV rocket family. However, liquids have a lot of deficiencies in terms of being weapons, particularly the maintenance, handling, fueling time (in the case of cryogenic propellants), and the caustic nature of storable propellants like hydrazine and inhibited fuming red nitric acid (IFRNA). This is especially true in a marine environment. When the US Navy was tasked with developing a ship- or submarine-launched strategic ballistic missile for deterrence (part of the deterrence triad of ICBMs, strategic bombers, and what became the SLBM), the Navy rejected the liquid-fueled Jupiter missile (albeit after influencing the design to be short and squat) and started putting research effort into solid fuel rocket motors, culminating in the Polaris system and its successors (Poseidon, Trident), which were more compact, more reliable, and required far less servicing than any liquid fuel rocket. Once they developed and deployed Polaris, the benefits became obvious and the Air Force was tasked with developing a solid-fuel ICBM that would be more robust and faster to deploy than the problematic Atlas and Titan. The result, of course, was the Minuteman system, the last evolution of which (the LGM-30G) continues to be in service today. The Air Force also deployed the advanced Peacekeeper missile (now out of service but motors still used for the OSP-2 Minotaur IV and V family of sounding rockets and space launch vehicles), the Sprint and Spartan ABM systems, and the aborted but innovative Midgetman mobile SICBM. This research into solids led to the development and use of “Stage 0” parallel-staged strap-on solid rocket boosters to provide high initial thrust and improve performance of existing liquid-based launch vehicles (Castor IV, GEM-40/46/60, Titan SRMUs, STS Solid Rocket Boosters) as well as robust upper-stage kick motors like the Payload Assist Module (PAM) and Inertial Upper Stage (IUS).
Solid rocket motors play a considerable role in modern American space launch and strategic missile systems across all service branches and in NASA and commercial applications, but without their initial development by the Navy for SLBM applications, it is unlikely that they would have been developed to an extent beyond simple JATO and retro motors. For a verification of this we need look no further than the Soviet rocket programs, which were managed by a single authority (albeit with competing design bureaus) and which focused on powerful but problematic liquid fueled systems for both land- and sea-based systems.
This is but one example of how having different services with focus and tasking resulted in independent development of capabilities that ultimately benefitted all services and other non-military applications. Joint service programs are beneficial, of course, because they allow the valuable cross-fertilization of philosophies, capabilities, and processes that benefit all, but having independent upper-level management permits a more balanced development of capabilities. In the Special Operations world, joint operations and (to an increasing extent) training are more the norm than exception owing to the fact that the missions are often intersecting, but even here the notion that SEALs are the same as Det Delta are the same as PJs just isn’t true; even though all have basic training in similar areas (parachute insertion, littoral insertion, independent logistics, et cetera) the services have different intended missions. As highlighted in Pete Blaber’s The Mission, the Men, and Me, when the decision was made to integrate SEAL DEVGRU operators into TF-11 operations in a planned assault on Takur Ghar above Shar-i-Kot valley in Operation Anaconda (a mission planned by and reconnaissance performed by a combination of CIA Special Activities and US Army Det Delta operators) the choice of insertion mode (helicopter) and planned tactics resulted in delays and ultimately failed badly as the SEALs did not have either specific training in highland mountain operation nor operational intelligence and experience in that specific error. This resulted in the unnecessary deaths of several operators and unproductive rescue/support operations. While much of the blame lays at the feet of upper echelon commanders inexperienced about the situation on the ground and who failed to heed the advice coming from officers lower in the chain, it is also true that the Delta and SAD operators had specific and recent training in rugged mountain operations and had been in the area, becoming familiar with the territory and conditioned to the high altitude, while the SEALs, however well-trained they may have been in the ordinary sense, were not attuned to or experienced in the conditions in which they were thrown.
Stranger
I do.
Generally, only officers do (and they normally don’t). Or sailors specially assigned by an officer as an armed guard.
Navy people aren’t expected to be fighting the enemy individually, like Army soldiers. They fight as a ship, and their guns (big ones, like 16" on the battleships) are part of the ship itself.
Certain MOS on board a sub are expected to sub in for combatants - engineering ratings and torpedomen. Technically quartermasters are included, but they are about as useful as sonargirls …
Not every Marine is a combat trooper as some have said. They have their POGs too no different than the Army. And the Army is not some slow moving bohemoth, we do have rapid deployment brigades, there is one standing by at all times to be anywhere in the world within 48 hours.
And to everyone who says there’s no warrior culture in the Army, I’m an Army Infantry squadleader and I just wanna thank you for finding that loophole around not insulting anybody outside the burnpit. You wanna slap me in the face then come do it in person so I can shove my ‘warrior culture’ down your throat along with your teeth.
[Moderator note]
This kind of remark is out of place anywhere on this Board, even in the Pit. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Anyway, I can’t speak for others but I myself never said that the Army didn’t have a warrior culture, just that the one the Marines have is unique.
It is also partially a part of America’s own popular culture.
Movies like Full Metal Jacket have cemented into America’s collective mind the idea that the Marines is full of really hard-ass guys. This means that people go volunteer for the Marines to prove what hard-asses they are to everyone else, whether it’s their family, their friends, or themselves.
The Army, the Navy and the Marines all used to come to my high school to recruit. The Army and the Navy had demonstrations about all the different kinds of jobs you could do, they had demonstration videos that put a huge emphasis on vocational training and learning stuff that you could use in civilian life later; they also placed a big emphasis on technology, computers, etc.
The Marine recruiting booth was all macho. There was nothing about technology, and nothing about job skills. But there was a big video presentation of infantry in action, with loud heavy-metal music in the background, stuff exploding, guys climbing up cliffs and fighting dragons with swords and things like that, and a recruiter in the Marine dress uniform talking about honor and courage and proving yourself.
Saying the Army and the Marines have different missions is true but not a good answer. Paratroopers and tankers have different missions but both are part of the same Army. There’s no reason why the missions carried out by the Amry and the Marines couldn’t be carried out by different units in a single force. The advantage would be that duplicated operations like administration, logistics, intelligence, and support that each force has could be combined into a single organization.
One historical justification for split forces was fear of military plotting. Generals control a lot of power and many countries have seen them use it to take over the government. Civilian governments find it reassuring to know that not all of the armed forces are following orders from any one individual.
But normally paratroopers aren’t so many that it makes sense to separate them. Artillery is not usually a separate service branch, but they’re almost-there. To take an example from civilian life, in a small company or factory Quality Control will be part of the Production Department, EHS Compliance may be handled by Production or by HR; in a large enough place, each of those is a separate Department. Once the volume of work is enough that you will need people who are dedicated to Quality Management or to EHS Management, it makes sense to have those managers report directly to the Factory Manager and not to the Production Manager.
In basic, nonspecific terms, the Army is like the police and the Marines are like SWAT. Cops and SWAT both are police officers, they both have cars and guns and helicopters, but the situations for calling in one or the other are quite different. Sure, you could call in the SWAT team to issue a parking ticket, or call in the uniformed officers to raid a warehouse full of hostages and C4 explosives, but you’re better off letting people do what they’re good at.
That’s not difinitive at all. Delta Force, a part of the Army, are some of the best trained spec-ops commandos on the planet, people you could send into a jungle naked and reasonably expect them to quell a military coup. And your average marine grunt is probably on par with the average Army grunt. It’s all just a matter of application.
Right. A unit or a service’s mission is not as important as a service’s internal ethics and culture. Disparate cultures fuel detrimental interservice rivalries. It’s fine that everybody makes sheep jokes about the other services, but at a war level, it can be disastrous. The trouble we had in Vietnam can be viewed part politics back home, and part interservice rivalry. The Army wanted to conduct the war its way, and the Air Force wanted to conduct the war their way. The Army viewed the Air Force’s mission to be close air support of Army ground missions. The Air Force OTOH, felt as a “real” branch of the military, they should conduct the war their way. Ground troops go unsupported while the Air Force whines about not being able to just aerial bomb their way to victory.