Yes - the Army Air Forces were reorganized as a separate service with its own military department with the National Security Act of 1947. The Marine Corps was severed from the Navy to form its own service at the same time. (Both within the Department of the Navy.) A couple years later the Act was amended to make the military departments subordinate to the new Department of Defense.
However, it wasn’t until many years later that the USMC was made a true equal of the other services, with a seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. IIRC that required another statutory change, but I’m on my phone and can’t look it up right now. Pretty sure it was prior to Goldwater-Nichols, though.
Relative to the original division of US armed forces’ civilian leadership and control, a War Department (Army) and a Navy Department (Navy), both the Air Force and Marines are derivative or combinations. That is also assuming a concept of independent strategic air operations is invalid (as most rank and file veterans of the Army and Marines believe IME and that’s sort of become the pop history/culture standard it seems).
However that’s kind of arbitrary. In some other countries (Soviet Union/Russia, China) strategic missile forces alone are or have been a ‘service’ co-equal with the status of the Marines or even of the AF in the US organization, air defense forces also. There seems a tendency to look to countries similar to the US, where it’s true some have gone to the relative extreme of one ‘service’ but then dropped it (like Canada) or the services aren’t necessarily more unified practically than the US ones (Israeli Defense Forces as it relates to their AF, Army and Navy). There’s a much stronger culture, and political pressure to maintain and increase ‘jointness’ in the US military now than decades ago.
Also there’s the particularly common complaint about AF wrt ‘close support’ of the Army, with implication the Army should do it, but in a lot of Allied forces resources like attack helicopters belong to separate AF’s not the Army as they do in US case. Also the USAAF in WWII was a separate service in every practical respect up to the very highest level of command and even there semi-nominally, so there’s no actually extensive US experience with a really Army controlled AF, aside from the force quickly built up for a few months real involvement in WWI.
So long story short it’s somewhat arbitrary in terms of starting from square one on first principals to have a Marine Corps as mainly full fledged service in the Navy Dept. So what? Same with a Strategic Rocket Force in USSR/Russia, or why Apache attack helo’s belong to AF’s in some Allied countries. However it’s not completely arbitrary. The USMC is aimed at rapid reaction expeditionary warfare, with ability to more or less substitute/augment the Army in other types. As for combat record, the USMC did a lot to perpetuate itself, in the post WWII limited war world, with its clearly superior performance to the Army in the opening months of the Korean War. Since then the differences are harder to notice.
The problem with the Marines IMO isn’t that they exist separately from the Army, but where mission requirements drive expensive procurement of questionable value in order to maintain ‘differentness’ (too much spending IMO on amphib ships, stuff like high speed surf capable armored vehicles, arguably the F-35B version of that a/c etc). If that were reined in, then so what if there’s a separate Marine Corps. There’s also some benefit to internal competition.
I was always under the impression the US Marines were able to be more rapidly deployed than Army units, hence why the first boots on the ground are almost always Marines. While the US Army has quick-deploy units they still aren’t as fast or as numerous as simply deploying US Marines.
That isn’t necessarily true. Plenty of Marines are on amphibious ships (rather poorly named sort of boat – the vessel doesn’t go on land, but it carries stuff that goes onto the land, like armored vehicles, but they also carry things that go into the air, and that isn’t really amphibious, is it? its like aeroterraphibious or something) so it may very well be that Marines are closest to a crisis because they are floating around the hotspots of the world.
But various units of the Army, especially the 82nd Airborne, are known to be able to deploy a sizable force to pretty much anywhere on the globe within a few days’ time. For example, the 82nd was on the ground in Saudi Arabia within three-four days after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, essentially serving as the tripwire (or line in the sand) to deter Iraq from pressing the fight further.
When Pierre Trudeau amalgamated the forces back around 1970, the common uniform was compared to a garage mechanic’s. Only thing worse than military bureaucrats, I guess, is non-military bureaucrats.
The USMC is not a more rapidly deployable force, nor have they been for quite some time. Can you name a combat operation in the last 100 years where the first unit on the ground was a Marine unit? The US Army always maintains an airborne brigade ready to deploy to any location, anywhere in the world within 18 hours. The Marines cannot do this. The first soldiers on the ground in Europe (101st, 82nd, Rangers), in Vietnam (173rd), in Grenada (82nd), in Panama (Rangers, 82nd, okay and SEALS), in Iraq (okay a whole bunch of units but primarily Army), in Afghanistan (Green Berets, then Rangers, then 82nd) and in Iraq again (bunch of units, but Marines were not first) have mostly all been members of the US Army.
There is no longer a reason to have a Marine Corps. Its role and mission could easily be filled by the Army with a little organizational restructuring.
The Marine Corps only survives because people like having a Marine Corps.
Their primary function at a diplomatic mission is to provide a delaying action to give the ambassador time to escape and the folks up in “the vault” time to destroy critical crypto components. To that end, they often have things like CS gas canisters, the usual sidearms and shoulder weapons, and even containers of oil. The last item is used to dump on the floors of the entry to make it difficult for hostiles to maintain footing. They are rarely engaged as a fighting force, as mentioned above, as it is not their mission. This is one reason that the big flap over Benghazi was such a farce.
Many nations to this day have their Marines on a model similar to how it was for the US up to WW2, as definitely a branch of the Navy, reporting to the Admiralty, but with a distinct career path you join directly, different uniform and rank structure, etc.
As mentioned before, the US Marines grew ever more autonomous after WW2, first becoming a separate component reporting directly to the Navy Secretary, and then joining the JCS permanently in the late 70s. Up to WW2 and then thru most of the Cold War, major Theatre Commands were headed by Army or Navy and later on Air Force types since those services not only counted with the warfighting forces but also with the global-scale technical, logistical and political/bureaucratic edifice to do such things, while the Marines was seen as a more-teeth-than-tail outfit where the Navy would provide most of the back-up, and there being fewer Marine officers at each rank it was harder to billet them to those posts – pre-Vietnam the Commandant & his #2 were their only 4- and 3-star generals. Only late in the Cold War and more so in the post-Cold War time did Marine officers fully enter as heads of Joint Commands – the first Marine to be Chair of the JCS did not come about until 2005.
Right, the Marines nowadays provide units that are already forward deployed in-theater, as it were, with the various fleets. They show up often to evac US/allied citizens from some faraway port when things go pear-shaped locally. But if you need something division-size or larger the advantage is not that great since you still need to haul most of who and what you need from homebase. And once the war is on, from how we’ve seen them used since Vietnam they mostly seem to be treated by theater commanders as medium infantry interchangeable with equivalent Army units.
They do still have a distinction in philosophy, generally set up as a “leaner” force with resources focused on the fight itself; if/when you then move on to the rebuilding/stabilization phase you bring in the Army with their Civil Affairs units. Or so it goes.
Him: Marines are just f*cking psychos.
Me: In a firefight, would you rather be with Marines or soldiers?
Him: Marines. Any day.
Me: Why?
Him: Because those psychos will step over their best friend’s body to kill the bastard who pulled the trigger. They attack. We defend.
Sailing ships needed soldiers, as mentioned above, for discipline and as fighting troops. The Marines were not part of the Royal Navy but part of the Army. The officer in charge of the Marines on a ship was (nominally) subject to the Captain, but the ship’s captain (for example) would not discipline a Marine. On a sailing ship the trained and lived apart from the sailors and, emergencies apart, took no p[art in the day-to-day operation of the ship. This ensured that they would not side with the crew if it came to a mutiny.
This traditional role pretty much morphed into a commando type force; highly mobile and selected , not just for toughness and skill with weapons, but also intelligence and independence. The Royal Marines are part of the army.
Isn’t the theory (one of them anyway) supposed to be that the Marines do combined arms better than the other forces, because both the guy on the ground and the guys in the air are under the same chain of command? I have no idea if this is true in practise, but I’ve seen it claimed.
While the Royal Marines did not come into official being until 1802 and while the RM traces its descent to Army regiments raised for sea service (and sometimes Army Rehiments were used as Marines as well), which is why the Marines use Army ranks, the Royal Marines are part of the Navy, having always been under the Administrative and Operational control of the Admiralty as opposed to the Army.