eli5: Why does the US Military have airplanes in multiple branches (Navy, Marines etc) as opposed to having all flight operations handled by the Air Force exclusively?
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Because that gets very messy in terms of parallel chains of command.
If a marine commander decides on a mission he can order his own people to go do it.
Alternatively he would be **requesting** his colleague in the Airforce command to approve his mission and assign resources to it. That defacto makes him subordinate to the airforce command since they can veto anything requiring flight.
If you decide to set it up so that the local airforce organization is permanently subordinate to Marine command, they should just be organized as part of the marines.
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