How Many Militaries Does One Man Need?

Try this one on for size, Internet Populace: we need to get rid of the gaping divisions between the branches of the armed forces.

First of all, there are all kinds of redundant systems we can probably live without. I don't know that we really need air force helicopters and navy helicopters and army helicopters and marine helicopters; air force special forces and navy special forces and army special forces and aquatic mammal special forces (http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/navy/a/navydolphin.htm).

Now, I get that specialization is a good thing, let's us do all sorts of fancy killing where meat and potatoes killing won't cut it, but there is no way that Navy Seals aren't learning a lot of the same things that Airborne Rangers are picking up. Don't they all have their own training bases? Is there any way we can't throw all these guys into a lecture hall, consolidate all the different Advanced Knife Kills: Negotiating the Brachial Plexus subsections? How negatively will increasing class size affect our U.S. News & World Report rankings of national special ops forces? And can't we make up that difference with a higher percent participation in alumni donations?

How swollen is military spending with redundant projects? Is there seriously any doubt in anyone's mind that the air force and the navy both have extremely expensive projects in development for a next generation fighter plane? And is there any doubt that those planes are not the same? And probably couldn't be serviced with the same parts? And probably one takes unleaded and the other takes premium? If you're out there, then you've got a more generous soul than yours truly, because I just assume that we've got billions of dollars being flushed down nearly identical but incompatible toilets.

And these redundancies aren't doing us any favors on the business end of the business either, I can't imagine. How many lieutenants do you need to navigate to get an inter-branch mission rolling? How many different requisition forms? I seem to vaguely recall stories have of there being problems at one point because different branches operated on different radio frequencies or something equally trivial. This game of military telephone can't be making life any easier.

Which brings me (sort of) to the problem of inter-branch competition. I like to imagine a world where all the people in the U.S. armed forces see themselves as being on the same side. As it is, you can't raise the air force's budget without raising the navy's budget, which means that the army will hold it's breath until it passes out unless it gets a bump also, and now here we are again, the marines locked in the bathroom and refusing to come out because they always knew we loved the others best.

This is no way to raise a family.