Which branch is superior - The Air Force or The Navy?

Again, U.S. Marines are a separate branch of the U.S. military. No one fights over water or air. They fight over land. That is why you need the U.S. Army. The Navy and Air Force support the Army and the Marines on the ground, not the other way around.

* Folks in California and Nevada may start fighting over water soon...

I believe the marines were originally conceived as a division of the navy to be infantry that fights ship to ship back in the day. Now a days they have marine expidinionary units that go to sea on navy ships and sail around the world so marines can be on the ground as soon as possible if something kicks off.

People fight over water and air all the time. Air superiority is key to having the upper hand on the battlefield and total situational awareness. I don't know if you know what you are talking about.
 
The world's greatest Air Force and the world's greatest Navy. Both serve their purpose just fine. Neither is better than the other. They're both great at what they do and both work well together when need be.
 
Again, U.S. Marines are a separate branch of the U.S. military. No one fights over water or air. They fight over land. That is why you need the U.S. Army. The Navy and Air Force support the Army and the Marines on the ground, not the other way around.

* Folks in California and Nevada may start fighting over water soon...

Marines originates from the word mariner. It means sailor, you should look it up...
 
Separate branch, same department. Which is why the Navy and the Marines do so much together. They wear literally the same awards & ribbons on their uniforms.
 
I believe the marines were originally conceived as a division of the navy to be infantry that fights ship to ship back in the day. Now a days they have marine expidinionary units that go to sea on navy ships and sail around the world so marines can be on the ground as soon as possible if something kicks off.

People fight over water and air all the time. Air superiority is key to having the upper hand on the battlefield and total situational awareness. I don't know if you know what you are talking about.

20 years in the U.S. Army I think would give me a pretty good notion of how the U.S. military works. You proved my point on the underline sentence you wrote above. Key word being 'battlefield'.

While the U.S. Marine Corps is a separate and distinct service branch, it has many close ties to the U.S. Navy, and the Department of the Navy oversees both service branches, each having its own autonomous leadership. The U.S. Marine budget is part of the U.S. Navy budget. That's why those boys are always short of basic equipment in theater. Marines are the only branch with their own air assets to support ground Infantry.

U.S. Navy SEALs are basically soldiers in the Navy. Most of their operations these days is done on land, like the U.S. Army Special Forces. The U.S. Army diver school is much harder than the U.S. Navy diver school. Just ask any SEAL. You don't get weekends off in Ranger or Special Forces school like they do in SEAL training.

Special Operations Diver Badge - U.S. Army
 
20 years in the U.S. Army I think would give me a pretty good notion of how the U.S. military works. You proved my point on the underline sentence you wrote above. Key word being 'battlefield'.

While the U.S. Marine Corps is a separate and distinct service branch, it has many close ties to the U.S. Navy, and the Department of the Navy oversees both service branches, each having its own autonomous leadership. The U.S. Marine budget is part of the U.S. Navy budget. That's why those boys are always short of basic equipment in theater. Marines are the only branch with their own air assets to support ground Infantry.

U.S. Navy SEALs are basically soldiers in the Navy. Most of their operations these days is done on land, like the U.S. Army Special Forces. The U.S. Army diver school is much harder than the U.S. Navy diver school. Just ask any SEAL. You don't get weekends off in Ranger or Special Forces school like they do in SEAL training.

Special Operations Diver Badge - U.S. Army

The Army has divers? Why?

If they need to go do something underwater, why not just ask their friends in the Navy?
 
The Army has divers? Why?

The Navy has SEALs? Why? All SEAL missions, and Marine missions, can be done by the U.S. Army. When was the last time a U.S. Navy SEAL blew something out of the water? Those boys love to play soldier.

Well, on the serious side. It is always easier to use people within your own service to do the job. Army diver school is probably the second hardest school in the Army. Candidates used to be drowned on purpose. I don't know if they are still doing that.
 
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20 years in the U.S. Army I think would give me a pretty good notion of how the U.S. military works. You proved my point on the underline sentence you wrote above. Key word being 'battlefield'.

While the U.S. Marine Corps is a separate and distinct service branch, it has many close ties to the U.S. Navy, and the Department of the Navy oversees both service branches, each having its own autonomous leadership. The U.S. Marine budget is part of the U.S. Navy budget. That's why those boys are always short of basic equipment in theater. Marines are the only branch with their own air assets to support ground Infantry.

U.S. Navy SEALs are basically soldiers in the Navy. Most of their operations these days is done on land, like the U.S. Army Special Forces. The U.S. Army diver school is much harder than the U.S. Navy diver school. Just ask any SEAL. You don't get weekends off in Ranger or Special Forces school like they do in SEAL training.

Special Operations Diver Badge - U.S. Army

Thank you for your service
 
20 years in the U.S. Army I think would give me a pretty good notion of how the U.S. military works. You proved my point on the underline sentence you wrote above. Key word being 'battlefield'.

While the U.S. Marine Corps is a separate and distinct service branch, it has many close ties to the U.S. Navy, and the Department of the Navy oversees both service branches, each having its own autonomous leadership. The U.S. Marine budget is part of the U.S. Navy budget. That's why those boys are always short of basic equipment in theater. Marines are the only branch with their own air assets to support ground Infantry.

U.S. Navy SEALs are basically soldiers in the Navy. Most of their operations these days is done on land, like the U.S. Army Special Forces. The U.S. Army diver school is much harder than the U.S. Navy diver school. Just ask any SEAL. You don't get weekends off in Ranger or Special Forces school like they do in SEAL training.

Special Operations Diver Badge - U.S. Army

People do fight over land they don't want all the time though. Look at what we are doing in Syria now.

We seem to only fight now to stay in war IMO. Look at every conflict we have been in since WW2.
 
If evil doers retaliated against the warships that Tomahawk missiles launched from, do the warships have anti-missile defenses or are they screwed?
 
If evil doers retaliated against the warships that Tomahawk missiles launched from, do the warships have anti-missile defenses or are they screwed?

Yes. Lets just hope the U.S. Navy ships don't run into other ships like they have been doing. That seems to be the bigger danger. Putin has said that Russia will retaliate. I'm kind of concerned about that. Not exactly sure what Putin has in mind.

 
People do fight over land they don't want all the time though. Look at what we are doing in Syria now. We seem to only fight now to stay in war IMO. Look at every conflict we have been in since WW2.

Why would you fight for land you don't want? The U.S. is fighting against the Assad regime. U.S. forces on the ground (a few hundred Marines and U.S. Army Special Forces) are supporting the rebels. The problem is Russia is supporting the Assad regime. Russia has a huge military base in Syria and will never give that up. Look at how close Syria sits to Israel.

People are dying by the thousands by their own government in many parts of the world (i.e. Africa and Myanmar). You don't see a U.S. presence there. Well, there was a very small presence in Niger (U.S. Army) and they were killed. Europe does not care either. No oil and no strategic value. But big conflicts generate a lot of money for the U.S. WWII brought us out of the depression and turned us into a first world power. Having the Atom bomb helped a lot and it was a U.S. Army project (funding).

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were all fought because of Communism or terrorism. The U.S. does not want to move into those countries, but it does want them to be on our 'team'. Not sure Syria, Israel, and even South Korea need to be on our team. Are these countries worth the cost of American lives or the risk of nuclear war?
 
Why would you fight for land you don't want? The U.S. is fighting against the Assad regime. U.S. forces on the ground (a few hundred Marines and U.S. Army Special Forces) are supporting the rebels. The problem is Russia is supporting the Assad regime. Russia has a huge military base in Syria and will never give that up. Look at how close Syria sits to Israel.

People are dying by the thousands by their own government in many parts of the world (i.e. Africa and Myanmar). You don't see a U.S. presence there. Well, there was a very small presence in Niger (U.S. Army) and they were killed. Europe does not care either. No oil and no strategic value. But big conflicts generate a lot of money for the U.S. WWII brought us out of the depression and turned us into a first world power. Having the Atom bomb helped a lot and it was a U.S. Army project (funding).

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were all fought because of Communism or terrorism. The U.S. does not want to move into those countries, but it does want them to be on our 'team'. Not sure Syria, Israel, and even South Korea need to be on our team. Are these countries worth the cost of American lives or the risk of nuclear war?

I would say no. Not in my opinion. Nation building or "spreading democracy" does not work and history has proven it in these regions.

We need to be killing bad guys and getting the f out IMO. I know we need bases in certain areas but we tend to go all in with little thought about what happens afterwards.
 
Paging. :rolleyes: @SMillard

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The U.S. Army diver school is much harder than the U.S. Navy diver school. Just ask any SEAL. You don't get weekends off in Ranger or Special Forces school like they do in SEAL training.

Ranger School is SIGNIFICANTLY shorter than BUD/s (2 months vs 6 months) and when BUD/s students get to third phase (which in itself is 2 months long) they have to go ~21 hours a day, 7 days a week, non-stop.

As for SFQC, it varies in overall length depending on the individual and their specialty but they most definitely get weekends off.

Navy diver school and BUD/s are two different things.
 
The M60 machine gun was a great weapon. Firing the 7.62 round was really effective. We had them in basic training, my first Infantry unit and OCS. I had a soldier shot through the thigh when the blank adapter of one of the weapons came off by accident. He was lucky it was not his head or his torso. We had women in my OCS class and I remember watching one of them having to carry that thing during one of the patrols. That is one weapon the U.S. Army should have kept in the inventory.

I also remember watching one of the live M18 claymore mines go off in basic training. That was fucking loud and those pellets were very effective. You did not want to be in the back-blast area of one of those things when it went off. The North Vietnamese would find them and strap them to the top of trees to bring down U.S. helicopters during the Vietnam war.

Also scary was the M67 hand grenade. Loud. My concern was soldiers fucking with the safety pin or not throwing the grenade far enough. I don't think the girls can throw it as far as the guys. I remember being a 'green' 2nd Lieutenant and having to run a hand grenade range. I had done the M-16 range a few times, but never a hand grenade range. I remember the soldiers unloading the boxes of grenades off the Humvee, opening the boxes and seeing the green grenades with the 'yellow' markings of live grenades. Not the 'dummy' blue ones. My heart just sank. I was scared. Scared that someone might do something stupid with one of the grenades and get someone killed. Luckily everything ran smoothly. I had great NCOs as safety officers and I think the soldiers themselves were a little concerned about playing with live grenades. Never touched them again for 16 years. The guys I saw in theater with live grenades had the safety pin taped to the grenade.

Yeah, looking back, we were all very young, playing with some real deadly stuff. The power to kill placed in the hands of a young Infantry Platoon 2nd Lieutenant, or Platoon Sergeant, in the U.S. Army is amazing. Not to mention being able to call in airstrikes or indirect fire by artillery. It makes a 5.56 round seem like child's play.
The M60 was great to shoot, loved shooting it, hated carrying it. I don't know why they discontinued it, I was doing work at Homestead and they had the replacement machine gun there (don't know they designation) and my first questions was "how much does it weigh" the guy said "well we can tell you served when that's your first question, everyone else asks about the kickback or what it shoots" surprisingly it weight about the same as the MM60.
Never saw a claymore go off, I knew it was a devastating weapon. I've seen the "crowd control" version that has the rubber balls instead of the steel shot. The damage of the rubber balls to people was enough to make not want to be in front of one of those. I've heard a lot of stories about things the NVA and VC would do with claymores and other captured American equipment, sometimes I think we should have hired them as consultants on unorthodox uses for our weapons. I remember the days they would have us practicing shooting down the remote control planes with our M 16s, I went in thinking "how hard can it be" turned out really hard, then thinking "how the hell did the NVA and VC shoot down so many aircraft with small arms?" The Vietnam era guys were all senior NCOs at the time I was in, some were batshit crazy.
Ah yes, grenade training. That was the day no one was a cowboy. Everyone would run around with their hands over the grenades as they ran to the training NCO. I was pretty much resolved that that was the last day I'd ever throw a grenade, I have a terrible throwing arm and on more than one occasion throwing a baseball didn't release my fingers fast enough and the thing dropped right in front of me, always feared that happening with the grenade. It was funny how people treated the M203 grenades like they were nothing but the M67 they held like it was the most volatile thing in the world.
I think about how deadly and expensive the equipment we had . When you think about the cost of everything it is kind of mind boggling. Now I yell at guys to take care of a $15 respirator and $20 hardhat, yet at 19 I was walking around with easily a few thousand dollars worth of gear and weapons and didn't give it a second thought.
 
Ranger School is SIGNIFICANTLY shorter than BUD/s (2 months vs 6 months) and when BUD/s students get to third phase (which in itself is 2 months long) they have to go ~21 hours a day, 7 days a week, non-stop.

As for SFQC, it varies in overall length depending on the individual and their specialty but they most definitely get weekends off.

Navy diver school and BUD/s are two different things.
You are also talking apples and oranges, Ranger tab course which you are talking about is a combat leadership course that's a bitch to get accepted to, while anyone in the Navy can volunteer for BUDS/SEALS. While BUDs is longer than the Ranger school you have to remember that the Ranger school is basically like going back to school for a Masters degree in war fighting. I don't know if it's still the same but the land warfare portion of BUDS/SEAL is eight week. People going into BUDs/SEALS are for the most part coming in completely green to what they are learning (either they volunteered straight out of basic or from another Navy job which has very little to do with what the SEALS do), the Rangers are for the most part honing and advancing skills they already have. People put too much emphasis on the training/qualifying portion to justify "who's better". Individual units and their training are so much more important, regiment Rangers qualifying course is short compared to most other pipelines, but the stuff those guys learn in the regiments is comparable to just about any other "elite" unit, for example breaching is taught to enlisted Rangers while in SF and SEAL units it's usually taught (somewhat more extensively) to specific individuals. They each have a task, although sometimes the lines get blurred especially when it's interservice mostly because people are trying to prove who deserves what funding. Also who is in charge of the Joint Chiefs has an impact. Like the Bin Laden raid, if it weren't for the Joint Chief being a Navy Admiral the raid may have just as easily gone to the army.

I believe the marines were originally conceived as a division of the navy to be infantry that fights ship to ship back in the day. Now a days they have marine expidinionary units that go to sea on navy ships and sail around the world so marines can be on the ground as soon as possible if something kicks off.

People fight over water and air all the time. Air superiority is key to having the upper hand on the battlefield and total situational awareness. I don't know if you know what you are talking about.
Marines are a concept as old as the Phoenicians, you have to remember originally the only way to fight a naval battle was to either ram the other guy's ship or have a bunch of your guys go on his ship and beat his guys. They also acted as a kind of raiding party when you needed to get supplies for the ship and needed someone to use a heavy hand to do it. A lot of the Marines traditions such as the coiled rope on the officers hat date back to ship boarding/repelling fighting.

The Army has divers? Why?

If they need to go do something underwater, why not just ask their friends in the Navy?
insertion by rivers or parachute drops off a coast. Recovery of downed aircraft or assets in water. Each branch wants it's own assets for just about every occasion. The only exception being that the army isn't allowed to have fixed wing aircraft since the creation of the air force.

If evil doers retaliated against the warships that Tomahawk missiles launched from, do the warships have anti-missile defenses or are they screwed?

They do have self defense systems such as missiles and radar guided gatling guns. More importantly though they have engines to move the ship so they can move either out of range or make it more difficult to find them.

Why would you fight for land you don't want? The U.S. is fighting against the Assad regime. U.S. forces on the ground (a few hundred Marines and U.S. Army Special Forces) are supporting the rebels. The problem is Russia is supporting the Assad regime. Russia has a huge military base in Syria and will never give that up. Look at how close Syria sits to Israel.

People are dying by the thousands by their own government in many parts of the world (i.e. Africa and Myanmar). You don't see a U.S. presence there. Well, there was a very small presence in Niger (U.S. Army) and they were killed. Europe does not care either. No oil and no strategic value. But big conflicts generate a lot of money for the U.S. WWII brought us out of the depression and turned us into a first world power. Having the Atom bomb helped a lot and it was a U.S. Army project (funding).

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were all fought because of Communism or terrorism. The U.S. does not want to move into those countries, but it does want them to be on our 'team'. Not sure Syria, Israel, and even South Korea need to be on our team. Are these countries worth the cost of American lives or the risk of nuclear war?

The US also still has the attitude that we let Europe/the rest of the world try to resolve their own issues before and it dragged us into two world wars. I think that's created a paranoia in the US that we need to have our fingers in things to some extent, sometimes to our own detriment since sometimes we are getting into things we don't really know enough about and sometime we just make a bad situation worse.
 
You are also talking apples and oranges, Ranger tab course which you are talking about is a combat leadership course that's a bitch to get accepted to, while anyone in the Navy can volunteer for BUDS/SEALS. While BUDs is longer than the Ranger school you have to remember that the Ranger school is basically like going back to school for a Masters degree in war fighting. I don't know if it's still the same but the land warfare portion of BUDS/SEAL is eight week. People going into BUDs/SEALS are for the most part coming in completely green to what they are learning (either they volunteered straight out of basic or from another Navy job which has very little to do with what the SEALS do), the Rangers are for the most part honing and advancing skills they already have. People put too much emphasis on the training/qualifying portion to justify "who's better". Individual units and their training are so much more important, regiment Rangers qualifying course is short compared to most other pipelines, but the stuff those guys learn in the regiments is comparable to just about any other "elite" unit, for example breaching is taught to enlisted Rangers while in SF and SEAL units it's usually taught (somewhat more extensively) to specific individuals. They each have a task, although sometimes the lines get blurred especially when it's interservice mostly because people are trying to prove who deserves what funding. Also who is in charge of the Joint Chiefs has an impact. Like the Bin Laden raid, if it weren't for the Joint Chief being a Navy Admiral the raid may have just as easily gone to the army.

I've often wondered why the Bin Laden raid went to the Navy instead of the Army. I knew there was an Admiral in charge at the time so I figured that was why. Sounds like it just came down to personal preference as I'm sure either branch could have gotten it done just as easily.

Otherwise, I wonder why they didn't mix teams and go in with an Army/Navy unit? I guess that'd be overkill and unnecessary, but at the same time, mixed units have been known to take down badguys before, so it makes you wonder why they didn't do that for this too?
 
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