Firstly, I am British, so I have 0 clue on how the US armed forces work.
My limited knowledge of the system tells me that marines and the army perform the same task, which is the primary land based attack force.
So what exactly is the difference between the 2 and how does the US decide which force to mobilise and when?
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The US Marines is a much smaller military branch then the US Army with only a fraction of the number of members. However they have much tougher requirements and train much harder. The concept is that the marines are the first ones into combat and work with limited resources and time. This means that they have to rely much more heavily on each individual marine and each marine have to do an effective job with the resources he have available. The army is expected to take longer to deploy and rely more on help from the navy and air force but when they deploy they have a lot of people and is a much more powerful force through share numbers and resources alone.
If you want some comparison to the British military the US Marines can be compared to the Special Air Service. However the scales are completely different as the entire US Marine Corps is a bit bigger then the entire British military.
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