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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Each branch can have different objectives in an overall mission and only a finite number of aircraft to go around… The air force will prioritize eliminating opposing aircraft and AA defenses, but the army still wants close air support of advancing forces at the same time. If the air force has all the assets you will have to wait until they decide they can spare some planes for what you consider important. In a battle with near peer air forces, you may have a hard time getting “spare” planes to support your branch.
The aircraft of each branch are focused on their mission sets
Put simply via example:
Navy jets land on carriers
Army helicopters support ground forces for direct action or casevac
Air Force jets project strategic power like B2s or B52s
Marine jets and helis support ground forces
Speaking from the Marine Corps perspective, the basic ideal is that Marines support Marines. Not because of what it might seem like, that we just think we’re better.
We do.
But the idea is basically that there’s a good chance we’ll be out on our own, one large unit with organic logistics and air support, etc., moving to the objective.
Having to go inter-branch to the Air Force would be a lot of politics and having to justify your needs, etc., etc. It’s not going to be ‘hey, send me a couple A-10s, there’s a chance we’re gonna get overrun’ and they arrive. It’s going to be a lot of jawing and nonsense and who’s got the fucking time in combat when you can just relay your shit to the command and they’ll just give you the support.
Interestingly enough, in smaller countries, the Air Force tends to own all the planes. For example, the only Danish Navy helicopter squadron was transferred to the Danish Air Force in 2010.
There are many reasons why the US services do this. A big one is the different mission sets requires different pilot training. Another is the different capabilities require different aircraft.
One thing to realize is there is a lot of cooperation and sharing already.
Given their common origin, the Air Force and Army tend to work closely with each other, with Air Force transports carrying Army units.
Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard pilots go through the same intro flight school course and have common training squadrons for basic aircraft type. Each Amphib big-deck tends to have a few Navy H-60s onboard for Search and Rescue and logistics support. Carrier air groups have included Marine Hornet squadrons in the past.
Even though the Air arms are fragmented across the services, there isn’t as much overlap as you’d think. The Navy doesn’t have any high altitude bombers just as the Air Force doesn’t have any carrier-capable aircraft just as the Army doesn’t have any large troop transports.
I’ll add that we don’t always get along. I’m retired here, so that’s my main perspective. AF leadership has different priorities than the Army, which has different priorities than Navy, which is different from the marines.
It’s bad enough that other branches can get told to pound sand, and their people get ignored as each branch only wants to do missions for its own priority. Imagine the army general asking for CAS while the AF says F’ off we’re going to bomb this other place.
It reminds me of when the AF was trying to dump the A-10, which was really just a bluff to get Congress to pay for that and their fancy new bombers. Anyway, the Army jumped up and said that they’d take them since it’s role is 90% army support anyway. The AF backed down real fast after that and kept funding the A-10.
Almost all these answers are attempts at justifying how it is – they don’t explain the reality. (u/OK-disaster2022 and u/headoutdaplane are on target)
All military services have aircraft because of history and the nature of government. *It has nothing to do with specialized roles or ease of use or anything else. *
Bottom line: Government organizations compete against each other for resources and power. Airplanes were just another tool in the toolbox of our two Services: The Department of War and the Department of Navy.
Neither Department wanted (or wants) to give up resources or power to the other. Congress forced the War Department to split into Army and Air Force in 1947. There was *no way* the Navy was going to give anything up to the War Department. So they kept their own tools (aircraft).
Now, every Service competes for resources and money when they submit a budget. Aircraft = money, force structure, etc. So every service has aircraft. And it won’t change until an outside force compels them to change (like Congress did in ‘47).
I could spend hours talking about Douhet and Mitchell, the Key West Agreement, Space Force, and a lot of other relevant stuff but this is ELI5.
Because we taxpayers allow them to have the budget to sub-optimize.
I watched the government pay me 4musd to develop a unit specifically for an aircraft carrier, then watched the us Navy pay to have another unit developed with the exact same performance for 4musd while a third identical function unit was developed for another 4musd by a foreign company funded by the US government.
Why? Because we let them.
Let’s put in this way. Imagine if all of the cars, trucks, tanks, and anything else that ran on the ground belonged to the army.
So if the navy needed to load a ship and needed some trucks to transport the material and then a crane to load it, they’d have to call up the army and requisition it. You’d quickly see how this would be a huge bureaucratic nightmare.
You might think it a stupid example but in WWII Germany, the railways were controlled by competing branches and as a result nothing got through efficiently.
Air Force guards the air domain with air, sea, and land assets.
Navy guards the sea domain with sea, air, subsea, and land assets.
Army guards the land domain with land, sea, and air assets.
Space force guards the space domain with space, sea, land, and air assets.
Coast Guard guards the coast with air, sea, and land assets.
Marines attack in any domain with any available asset.
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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