If United Earth MACOs were generally as competent as the Mobile Infantry of Verhoeven Troopers, that probably explains why they didn’t last until Kirk’s day.
Tell me about it…when you’re fighting an interstellar war, and your field defenses could be noticably improved by adding a freakin Maxim gun, something just ain’t right.
To be fair, they DID have a minefield. AND Lennier. 
Just to correct my earlier post the quote is “We’re a combined service” and it is from TOS Season 1’s Tomorrow is Yesterday.
No, the mug would only do minor damage. Scalding coffee is the serious weapon
! 
No, it’s the mug because the coffee is actually cold. See, the Boatswain’s Mate will take a good swig of that coffee when it’s new and piping hot, but they soon lose interest as it cools. Then they walk around the ship with a half full mug, in the pitching seas, just to demonstrate their gyro-stabilized-like left hand. As the ship bucks and rolls, the Boatswain’s Mate spills nary a drop owing to the years of sea-time and salt build-up on their shoes. Much of their ability, however, is due to the mug itself - it actually weighs between twenty and thirty pounds. It was forged from the lead ballast and steel frames of the ships from their youth. The mug, therefore, does extensive damage. The coffee is cold.
There was the bit in “A Piece Of The Action” (the one where the local culture was based on a book about Chicago gangsters that an earlier ship had left) where the ship’s phasers were “set to stun” to knock out a bunch of people on the ground. I recall a few other cases (e.g. the episode with “Apollo”, and there was the the evil-empire Enterprise in “Mirror, Mirror” threatening to scorch a planet if they didn’t comply with the Empire’s demands).
Hmmm. I don’t remember that incident. Cite?
Short answer: Roddenberry had a hangup about Starfleet not being “military.” So no Marines, just redshirt Security dudes (and the occasional dudette) for handling intruders and landing party duties.
I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Roddenberry flew B-17s in WWII (I just verified that on wiki. I was saying to myself, “gee, will they have an article about Gene Roddenberry?”). He wasn’t anti-military. He seemed to think that the military could be a progressive institution. He also thought that the class system, which separated officers and enlisted, was going to die out. Also that the United States and the Soviet Union would eventually (and necessarily) go to war, and that a race of Napoleonic supermen would briefly rule the Earth.
I will need someone else to dig up the exact episode, but in an early TNG episode, Picard stated that Starfleet was not a military organization. Thankfully, they stopped that nonsense when Gene gave up day to day oversight of the franchise. Never really corrected it, but gave up harping on it.
By TNG, Roddenberry had come up with TUU (Technology Unchained Utopia) as a guiding principle for the Federation. (Search for other discussions about TUU on these very boards.) TUU made for boring TV. By about Season Vi (and the movies around that time and after), TUU was pretty much just a background thought, not an over riding principle.
But, to say that Roddenberry had no problems with the question of “Is Starfleet Military?” is to forget the first few seasons of TNG and the dreck that often invaded our TVs because of TUU. (See also Phil Farrand’s Nitpickers Guide newsletters for discussions of this.)
Well, the thing was, he seemed to have a position that Starfleet was NOT a military force (at least, not in the contemporary sense), so much as a sort of combination of research and peacekeeping/policing. Of course, the transition from police to military is presumably easily enough if you can make the design needs for things like ships match between the two (presumably a peace keeping force will still have occasional need for some heavy firepower which would be equally useful in an open warzone), and we’ve seen Starfleet develop more dedicated warships (fast mean heavily armed little things) over time as the universe became progressively less friendly (ie: the Borg and the Dominion)
TNG did it once, too—they needed to get a team down into a planetside bunker, but it was built under so much solid rock/metal that they couldn’t get a transporter signal to it.
…So, they used the ship’s phasers to burn a hole down to the bunker until there wasn’t too much rock in the way, anymore. Problem solved. (For various reasons, they didn’t just hit it with a few 60+ megaton photon torpedos and head on to Risa for the weekend.)
I didn’t watch much of TNG, but it’s still an exaggeration to portray the man as anti-military. I remember the lengthy discussion of the “ridiculous costume” line, though. When I was a kid, just about every male adult I knew had been in the millitary. “Ridiculous costume” was a characterization that any one of them would have agreed with. Also, in the original series, with Roddenberry’s original conception, Starfleet was pretty clearly a military force. So I wouldn’t call it a “hangup.” He apparently decided that its function had changed.
I didn’t say Gene was anti military. Some other poster did. My points still stand as they relate to the Star Trek franchise.
ETA: BTW, I’m not arguing with you. I think we’re discussing things from different perspectives. Your points are also valid.
Also, the difference between TOS and early TNG, in relation to the militarization or not of Starfleet, hang on Gene’s evolving ideas about TUU in the years between the two series.
IMHO:
Kirk and Co were clearly fighters. Medals and citations and treaties and spies and all sorts of “fighty” stuff.
Early Picard and Co were all pussies.
Pike had a hat.
Where did all the hats go?
Pike had Nurse Chapel as a first officer. Where did all the competent chicks go?
To be fair, Pike didn’t have Nurse Chapel as a first officer, he had Number One as a first officer, who just happened to be played by the same actress (and one of the more prolific actresses in Star Trek at that)
Details, details… 
TOS was the only Star Trek that ever counted. Everything else was just a place holder, so when Shatner and Nimoy got tired of playing “movie star”*, there would be a slot on the schedule for the Enterprise to get back to its five-year mission.
*And the suits at Paramount came to their senses.