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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Historically the branches don’t get along well with parallel command structures and competing budgets. When Airplanes came out there was the Navy (with subset of marines) and the Army. Both developed their independent air branches with independent mission sets.
After WW2, the US Air Force was spun into its own separate branch, but fulfills all or most of those duties for the Army: cargo, paratrooper transport, and fixed wing air support. After the Army and Air Force Split up, a new aircraft was developed: the helicopter. We’ll the Army looked at it’s utility for the battlefield and wrangled to retain control for light cargo, transport, and even close air support and attack roles. So today the Army and Air Force have a guideline of on the battlefield if it’s fixed wing it’s air force, and if it’s rotorcraft it’s Army. This is changing slightly with the new tilt rotor for the Army.
The air force operates all long range bombers and missiles. That’s a unique role set.
Planes for the Navy almost universally have to be carrier capable, and that’s an engineering set that would limit all Air Force planes. There’s video comparing Navy and air force landing, the Navy hits the runway hard, because on carriers they gotta get that hook it (though it’s an automatic flight controller these days) while air force very lightly lands, and have runways that are miles long.
The Marines meanwhile sort of get the Navy handouts, but have both choppers and vtol fighters. They’re meant to operate more or less as a standalone fast response force, so everything is fast to deploy and mobile.
Now outside of combat all branches operate civilian type aircraft for administration type purposes.
Also if you count choppers, the US Army is the second largest air force in the world, not the Navy, iirc. They have a lot of choppers.
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