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 even though they all have aircraft, they have aircraft for different missions.
The Navy flies aircraft for sea control. This is mostly either aircraft designed to take off and land from ships or aircraft designed to fly around and scan a wide area of water to make sure that you are aware of everything inside (and sometimes capable of shooting at submarines).
The Army has aircraft designed to directly support ground troops either by providing tactical mobility or air support with greater precision than what the Air Force can do. They have a specific agreement with the Air Force and the Navy about which aircraft they’ll be flying called the [Key West Agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West_Agreement?wprov=sfla1), so they almost exclusively fly helicopters. They do fly a mix of other aircraft, but that’s a few smaller transport and reconnaissance planes than what the Air Force flies, or a jet for if you need to move a general or other big man but not much else.
The Air Force has strategic air power as its main mission. Basically, if the most important part of what they’re doing is going on in the air, the Air Force does it (while the Navy’s aircraft are mainly for stuff that happens in the water and the Army’s aircraft are mainly for stuff on land). This involves strategic transport (the Army’s transport capability is mainly for moving stuff around after the Air Force has already flown it up to the front) and refueling of other aircraft. They have big planes that fly around with powerful radar and communications stuff to make sure that the other aircraft know about what’s going on around them and are coordinating with each other. They have long-range heavy bombers. They have planes designed to shoot other planes. Note that “planes designed to directly support ground troops” isn’t one of these categories: they have a few of these, but the Air Force would generally prefer to prioritize other missions, so purpose-built stuff for this like the A-10 (which isn’t nearly as great as some people make it out to be, they’re just mainly based out of John McCain’s state and he had a lot of pull in political decisions about the military until he died, so he kept them funded long after obsolescence because keeping those in service meant more people paying taxes in Arizona than if they were retired) tends to be the red-headed stepchild of the Air Force. But not as much of a red-headed stepchild as helicopters (even if you’re flying the A-10, you’re still a fast jet pilot and that’s the club that runs the show in the Air Force): they generally only have helicopters for either patrolling nuclear missile sites (they also use this model for flying generals and other big men around near the Pentagon) or for search and rescue and recovery of downed pilots.
The primary mission of the Marine Corps is to quickly deploy expeditionary forces to be somewhere while the Army and Air Force are still getting packed up to go. They don’t have everything, but they have a little bit of the main things and work closely with the Navy to do a lot of the stuff that they don’t do themselves. They fly helicopters which aren’t quite as capable as the Army’s utility and attack helicopters, but they’re a bit smaller and share more spare parts between the two types than the Army’s Black Hawk and Apache do (since the Cobra originated as a derivative of the Huey), so you can deploy a bunch of them on a ship more easily. They have fast jets specifically with supporting ground troops in mind, some of which are specifically designed to still be capable if you haven’t built a full-size runway yet. They have a version of the smallest of the Air Force’s big cargo aircraft, and their version is set up for refueling other aircraft.
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