Pros/Cons of having separate brances of the Military

Great Debates
21

It’s interesting that the OP seems to favor a unified service. (I seem to get that impression for the post, even if not implicitly stated.) Historically, as weapon systems became more numerous and specialised, the services (with their command and planning staffs) seperated to concentrate on their specialties. This didn’t happen because of “tradition”, it happened despite tradition.

In the years leading up to the Napoleonic age, the major powers did indeed have what amounts to a unified service (a Field Marshall in overall command of the forces present, with the Admirals under his command taking care of the technical details), with GB being a notable exception.

However, as the industrial age came around, and the technical knowledge required to best use the weapon systems available required specialisation, and eventually seperation, of the armed services. An Army General has already too much to learn about war fighting with ground troops (besides the nebulous “inspirational leadership” skills all leaders need to coax their troops to put themselves in grave danger, you also have the skills of logistics and supply, force concentration, communication and control, battlefield manuever from the squad level all the way up to Corps level, etc.) to expect that they also have to learn about the navy side of things (the “fleet in being” concept, navigation, ship maintenance and repair, convoy routing and intercept, distant blockades, mine warfare, and so on).

Real world example: In the 20’s, the Royal Navy aviation units were placed under the care and feeding of the Royal Air Force.

Since budgets were (and still are not) infinite, priority for those defense funds went to bomber development. The designs (and aquisition) of carrier based aircraft suffered. (Carrier aircraft have a while slew of required features that shore based aircraft do not.) Great Britain went to war in '39 with carrier aircraft that were obsolete at the very start (even though the RN had regained control of it’s ship based aircraft in the mid 30’s).

It’s difficult to say exactly what effect this had on the war. It shouldn’t be a stretch to assume that if GB’s carrier based force had better aircraft (and the design bureaus set up and humming, producing newer designs), the carrier force would have had a more positive effect on the war (from GB’s point of view). Can you imagine the “Hunt for the Bismark” if the Victorious, Ark Royal, et al, had the combat capabilities of the USN Dauntless dive bomber types?

Note: The USN was marginally better in May '40. Dauntless SBD’s, Devastator TBD’s, Buffalo Fighters, compared to the RN’s Gloster Gladiator’s, Blackburn Skua, and Fairey Swordfish.

The IJN had, arguably, the most capable/advanced aircraft, the A6M “Zero”, B5N “Kate” torpedo bomber, and the D3A “Val” divebomber.

End Note.

The US Army was in control of the Air Force through WW2, and did a fairly decent job of it. Arguably, the bomber design (B-17) received more attention than the fighter designs in the late thirties, but the US industrial base was flexible enough to get out better fighters (P-40 vice P-36, F4F vice F2F) just in the nick of time…

22

They have, I understand, been attempting to unify certain things to save money - for example, they’re training chaplains for all branches together now.

23

There’s a lot more we could be doing in terms of interoperability, shared communications, using the same or very similar equipment, consolidating administrative/pencil-pushing stuff, and there might be some big savings there, depending on how far we went with it. But the considerable benefits of preserving the traditions and esprit de corps of separate services - to say nothing of the huge and ugly political battles it would take to consolidate, as each service has its vehement defenders on Capitol Hill - mean the status quo is likely to persist well into the foreseeable future.

President Truman gave some serious thought to military consolidation not long after WW2, before the establishment of a unitary Department of Defense, but finally - and, I think, correctly - decided it just wasn’t worth it.

24

The biggest advantage is that they don’t take over the civilian leadership.
Rivalry is all that protects us from the fate of smaller dictatorships.

25

It might affect recruiting,someone who wants to go to sea and travel might be put off if theres a reasonably good chance that he might end up as a grunt on the ground.
Likewise those who like long lie ins followed by a little light dusting and doing lunch with their friends might be put off if they think that they might NOT get into the Airforce.

And now I’m off before I get hurt.

26

It seems to me that in point of fact the military is more or less unified in command, which is the important part. Once in the field, commanders seem to coordinate elements effectively.

I do think that the role of the Air Force/Army should be revised. The Army should receive permission to have all the military troop support birds, fixed-wing and helo, they need/want. The AF seems to prefer flying solo, so let them. They apparently don’t like things like the A-10 Warthog, but it’s an absolutely critical plane and arguably the best thing we’ve got in the air. So let the army deal with it, and the AF can handle all the non-troop support stuff. Which does, of course, include virtually everything.

27

Exactly right. I expect a military coup in Canada any day now. Belgium is probably next.

28

I’d be more open to a unified logistics service if it weren’t for my experience getting mail while in the Navy.

Around 1990 or so, the US military consolidated all of the separate mail hierarchies (originally one per service) into one, single, mail hierarchy, that would deliver the mail to individual commands. Because the Army’s hierarchy was the largest, the new, combined hierarchy was heavily army-influenced.

And the bastards could not get the effing mail to my ship in a timely manner. I can’t really explain, now, just how much mail means for morale during a deployment, but I don’t think it can be overstated how much it matters. And the bastards kept collecting our Mail in Norfolk, sending it off to the clearing site for “European” operations in Germany, bouncing it back to Norfolk, since we were actually at sea in the Caribbean, and then sending it back to effing Germany, because our designation was “Afloat European.”

We had mail shipments go through that cycle three, four, or five times before someone thought to actually check deployment schedules, and see where our unit was, before just going on automatic pilot.

And I remained convinced that a lot of the problem was simply that the Army types never thought to consider the differences between the operations of a naval command vs. an army command.

Now, it’s possible that in the decade and half since then that military mail has straightened out. But it never did while I was in. Hell’s bells, we’d even had one shipment of mail sent off to Germany while we were in drydock in Portsmouth!

29

If you were on a ship in the middle of the ocean and the R.A.F. were airdropping your mail they always had this hilarious joke whereby the first container would burst open in mid air scattering thousands of pieces of paper into the sea so we were supposed to believe it was our mail that was lost.

Yes we’d been away from home for gods knows how long,hadn’t had any word from home for god knows how long but the Crabfats always did their best to put a smile on our faces just before they fucked off home to the U.K. for lunch later that day.

How we laughed!

30

Thanks for the replies everyone (didn’t want this to be a drive-by OP). I asked the question mostly from a position of ignorance, but admittedly leaning toward the concept of a unified service. As I expected, there is a lot I don’t know about how the military operates.