Yesterday, the Boston Globe published an opinion piece by columnist James Carroll. In it, he argued that the U.S. military had failed to evolve over the course of decades and thus requires a dramatic transformation. His primary recommendation is to heed the argument made in a December Foreign Affairs article, which called for the abolition of the U.S. Air Force as an independent service within the Defense Department.
In the 1980s I spent some time with the Canadian military forces. They all, regardless of branch, hated service unification, and convinced me that it wasn’t really working in practice—infantrymen were not interchangeable with sailors, signalers on land were different from those on ships, etc. etc. If anything, it only deepened the sense of alienation and bitterness that the professional military people felt for their civilian masters; when the scotch was flowing the conversation was quite animated. (The 2011 renaming of the land, sea, and air components as the Canadian Army, Royal Canadian Navy, and Royal Canadian Air Force recaptured a sense of unique identity, but legally, they remain a single, collective entity—the Canadian Forces.)
One of the things that civilians never quite get is the bonus that comes from service pride. It is not a thing to be overlooked, and probably returns more to the system in indefinable efficiency than putting everybody in the same uniform and then finding, as our Canadian friends will tell you, that it’s not as simple as making everybody the same.
It’s worth remembering that “service unification” was a big lesson from WWII, and the creation of DoD itself, along with the overseas unified commanders, was regarded as a major “unification” of the Services. For the truly wonky, you can go back through WWII and see the theater commanders—Eisenhower, Nimitz, MacArthur—struggling for a way to get the services to work together, in ways that seem absurd, sometimes, to us now (the German escape from Sicily being an example of the breakdown). So service unification was a big lesson from the war, and the DoD and unified command system we’ve had since then (with all the sub-unified commands, JTFs and so forth) are the particularly American response.
There might be some merit in reducing the Department structure, since the offices of the civilian secretaries tend, like all bureaucracies, to grow. Yet the civilian secretaries, of independent service branches, play a role in the civilian-military connection. In our post-WWII history there has been a constant sort of Brownian motion between the civilians and the uniforms in DoD, and that’s not liable to stop, no matter how the deck chairs get rearranged. For the political cost of making major changes, and the disruption of a distinctively American unified service culture, it seems to me that it would be a lot of smoke for not much steam.
Colonel (USA ret) Bob Killebrew writes and consults on national defense issues as a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Prior to his retirement from active duty he served for thirty years in a variety of Special Forces, infantry and staff duties.
Photo credit: DVIDSHUB
Adam Long 
FNL 
SJP 
As a civilian with little experience in military matters, it has always seemed to me that the US forces being split into 4 services demonstrates two related values: (1) redundancy and (2) checks and balances. We have two services with significant land warfare capability [army and marines], two services with significant aircraft [navy and airforce], two with nuclear missiles [navy and aircraft]. As a general principle, it seems to me that this kind of redundancy is valuable — but I don’t know enough to know whether the costs outweigh the benefits. To contemplate a darker scenario, inspired in part by seeing what happens in countries around the world where the military runs the whole show — I may be naive but I find it comforting that the services have capabilities that could, potentially, counteract each other in the event of, say, an attempted military coup.
I am a 20 year Air Force Veteran and I do support the consolidation of Army and AF services; however, perhaps we should create a service for space operations. That would be the last frontier to fight for and it is comming sooner that what we think.
I have spent some time with Canadian forces more recently, several months each on two separate occasions over the last 2-1/2 years. I did not hear distaste for the unified services. In fact, if anything, there was a sort of (polite) smugness that their unified way made considerably more sense than the American way. A number of duplications particularly stand out as unreasonable rather than a redundancy that can serve any useful purpose. For one example, the medical/health services. The conflict in Afghanistan offers a good illustration. No real need for navy folks (beyond special ops types), but the Navy “can’t be left out”. The “joint” rather than unified system just makes the bureaucracy that much more cumbersome, all up and down the line. (Not to mention working with coalition forces.). There’s bound to be a difference in perception and perspective between those who experience a change from what they’ve been used to and those for whom the status quo reflects a past change after it has become old hat. Remember the Air Force was once the newbie, emerged from the Army Air Corps, Also, whenever one gets input from others, one has to be sure both 1) that they are not telling you what they think you want to hear, and 2) that you are not hearing only what you agree with. Quite a bit of psychology research has demonstrated our tendency to have our own opinions validated even when conflicting information is presented to us.
With all due respect I think we need to look at two other major factors when comparing our military to the Canadian military:
1) The Canadian military is 1/10 the size of the US military. What might make sense for a small military force does not apply to global super power. If we were to unify and reduce our forces we would no longer be a super power.
2) Canada relies on the US for protection against strategic threats. They could not and would not be able to stop an invading super power. We protect this continent. That is why our defense umbrella extends into Canada and surrounding waters. Canadian forces are effectively another branch of the US military. Whenever we engage in a global conflict Canada sends some of their resources to fight with us.
It’s not a matter of like or dislike. That’s how it works. Canada benefits from our military protection by being our strategic neighbor to the north. They don’t need a large standing military with separate branches because we provide them.