TO BE FAIR, IT'S LESS USELESS THAN THE NAVY:

Folding the assets and missions of the USAF back into its parent services would enhance the flexibility of the United States, releasing U.S. military planning and procurement from the institutional rules that invariably bring air, land, and naval power into conflict, and that make aligning military tools with political ends nearly impossible.

With the Iraq War over and the fighting in Afghanistan winding down, why does the United States need to maintain two large land armies, the Army and Marine Corps? The question seems perfectly reasonable given the apparent absence of large terrestrial threats, but it leads us down the wrong path.

The United States military is all about redundancy; in addition to two armies, it also fields two navies -- the Navy and the Coast Guard -- and five or six air forces, depending on how you count the aerial arms of the various branches.

The real problem isn't that the Army is marginally more or less useful that it was 10 years ago, but rather that the institutions that were designed in 1947, when the Army and Air Force split, are insufficiently flexible to negotiate the modern security landscape.

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