The American Interest has an interesting series of articles in their latest issue about the future of each service of the US military (surprisingly, they had a decent section on the Coast Guard as well, which I thought was an important addition). As is doubtlessly obvious given the American Interest's editorial leadership, the pieces are fairly hawkish and call for significant investments into upgrading and maintaining America's armed forces. They make some controversial stands - restarting procurement of the F-22, NGB, and DDG-1000 projects (or at least fast-tracking next generation replacements), recapitalizing the Marine Corps' amphibious assault capability and redesigning the EFV (expensive idea, that), and expanding the size of the navy.

Much of the strategies argue for a two-level military - a smaller, cheap, but well-trained force that can deal with counterinsurgency (and be rapidly expanded as needs arise), coupled with a large conventional military capable of taking on any reasonable combination of big belligerent nations. Thus, their model calls for an expanded SpecOps force in the Army dedicated to counterinsurgency (and leading 'conventional' US troops in a switchover), while the main Army maintains conventional striking power in a flexible stance, and the Marines focus on maintaining amphibious assault capability (but can be seconded to other armed forces). The Air Force would bifurcate into a 'low intensity' and cheaper force of loitering bombers and drones with the other end of the spectrum populated with new and fancy fighters and bombers with a significant technological advantage over rivals. The Navy would include both 'stability operations' and shore-hugging Littoral Class Ships coupled with maintaining or increasing the number of large capital ships. You get the idea.

I think the pieces are more valuable for their insights into what might be wrong with each service then how to fix the problems, but they're all worth a read. What really struck me, though, was the total lack of an overarching strategy (in this series) for the armed forces as a whole - the Marine Corps, for example, was concerned merely with validating its existence as more than an arm of the Army, and the Air Force needed strategic direction in its role in today's battlefield. One segment from the Air Force article was particularly illuminating:

For the Air Force, a sustainable force posture would also mean changing the way joint forces use its resources in combat. Although current doctrine calls for each of the four services’ air forces to be controlled by a single joint Air Combat Commander, this seldom happens in practice since each service wishes to retain as much autonomy as possible. This lack of unity above the battlefield significantly weakens airpower’s contribution to the joint fight. A century of experience with air warfare has shown that airpower is most effective when control is centralized under a single commander. The air assets of the four services working together are vastly more capable than four U.S. air forces acting independently.
They go on to argue that USAF and USN cooperation has improved in recent years, but obviously this is a huge issue.

So, I'm curious - what do you all think about the value of having separate commands for each branch of the US military? On the one hand, it theoretically lets each service specialize in what they do best. On the other hand, it causes political infighting over the fight for resources (in the lack of an overarching military - and not civilian - commander to force a consensus) and can seriously hinder combined arms battle planning and training.

Case in point: currently, the way air power is split up in the US military is nothing short of astounding. Theoretically, the USAF controls the majority of aircraft in a given battlefield. Except: Naval battles are normally carried out by USN aviators flying off of carrier decks. Similarly, long-range strikes against a ground target might be carried out either by USN air wings or by USAF aircraft attacking from a ground base somewhere. Then again, if you're talking about the Marines they believe in having their own prepackaged expeditionary units, complete with some modest fixed-wing air power - though it might be flying off a USAF base or a USN carrier deck. Of course, the Army doesn't want to be left out - while they are prohibited from operating fixed wing aircraft (even for aircraft whose only role is to support ground operations, like the A-10 Warthog), but they have a huge rotary wing fleet that they often use in a ground-attack role for which it is unsuited (e.g. large formations of Apache helicopters attacking a modestly defended target when a single bomber or fighter squadron could have destroyed the target with little risk).

The point is, it's a mess. I read recently that the 1986 bombing of Libya was a huge logistical headache because USAF F-111s flying from bases in the UK were denied access to airspace in several European countries, necessitating detours and midair refuelings - and several aircraft which dropped out of formation due to malfunctions. The actual force which struck Libya was a hodgepodge of USAF and USN assets, and could probably have been carried out by the USN carrier strike group without any help from the USAF - and less headache for everyone.

This duplication of effort and competition between the services is rampant and can be traced to a bunch of other areas - overlapping logistics systems, administrative stuff (e.g. military police, internal legal wrangling a la JAG/NCIS/etc., procurement systems), IT systems, and combat units (e.g. the Air Force has their own special operations guys, even when there's no real reason for one separate from the Army). Throw in the inevitable inter-service fights for funding, and it's a huge mess.

So - all political realities aside - would it be worthwhile to reshape the military into a single command structure and eliminate some of the redundancy? I'm not advocating a move to the USMC's self-contained combined arms units, since that obviously hampers specialization and tailoring force structures to the specific task at hand. Yet a more unified military would probably yield some significant cost savings and better application of combined arms doctrine.

That being said, I'm skeptical that combining the various branches into one service would actually solve many of the problems listed above. Subordinates to the overarching chief of staff would still compete for resources, even after a reorganization, and it would still lead to chain of command headaches. Combined arms doctrine isn't just related to force structure, but also to training - if the Army guys know how to call in an accurate airstrike, do they really care if it's a USAF or USMC or USN asset that does it? Furthermore, it means that the overarching commander is going to have to be drawn from one type of combat (ground, naval, air) and will probably not have a good understanding of how to command other types - witness the mess when Israel put an air force guy as Chief of Staff, who then proceeded to neglect ground forces training and logistics for years while he focused on air wars. There's an advantage to having something like the Joint Chiefs of Staff - they can offer different perspectives on an equal footing to the Chair, the SecDef, and the President without deferring to a single Chief of Staff. Meanwhile, operational command lies with the individual combatant commands and are ordered by the President and SecDef. Nevertheless, I still think the cost savings from eliminating redundancies would probably make up for other inconveniences - and having a unified operational command would probably streamline a lot of interservice bickering.

What are your thoughts? Obviously this is a thought experiment given that this kind of reorganization is incredibly unlikely from a political perspective. I'm afraid my knowledge of military command structures is limited to the US and Israeli militaries - any other interesting models out there?