A Future Single-Service Military vs Branches of Service?

I am for ONE Military Medical Department. But the rest should be left as is.
LtCol (ret)

So you want to save money in hard economic times by consolidating all the branches together?

A move that will cost untold millions during a time of economic hardship?

dont think it really matters what we think. the government is going to do what it wants regardless!! thats why the Rangers now wear tan berets and the army has those great blend into or camo from nothing ACUs that have a 6 month wear out life!!

As I kneel at my bedside tonight I will add to my long list of petitions; " Please Sir, let this nonsense die in committee."

Disagree ENS Izdepski, and here's the reason why;
1) Training that is redundant has already been or is moving to be more consolidated.
2) Your MP, SP, MA example is a good point, but they all have their own unique missions that really can only be served by wearing that branches uniform.
3) Look at all the intelligence units, each branch has specific and unique missions as well. As a Navy IS I have large amount of training and experience relating to sea and naval air threats, that is unique and specific for the Navy, and Army or Air Force couldn't or shouldn't be required to know these types of threats. Most of the intelligence community have served or will serve in a Joint command and there they will combine some of the same tools in a generalized way, but it is rarely at the tactical level its more of a strategic intelligence war plans. The cryptological community already does this, but a Navy CT needs to be on a ship or sub and the Army or Air Force CT's aren't qualified to do this; its unique for this specific mission.
4) Lets look at aviation, some of the platforms are or can be used by each branch, but lets look at why each branch has their own Air Force. When you see why the Navy for example has its specific mission it is clear that they are the forward deployed forces that can get close to the problem within a few days and they bring their entire support group with them. If we were to train all our aviators the same that would take enormous amount of extra time and money to qualify all our fighter jocks to land and take off from carriers. Each branch has its own unique mission with the Air Force being part of our strategic global strike as well as forward air to ground support for mainly the Army.
5) It would be too time consuming and expensive to have a generalized military, we would have to train everyone how to use a rifle and extinguish a fire on a ship. That just isn't practical.
6) As with the medics, I really don't know the specific types of training they do for each branch of service, but again it goes down to the generalization of the military, the medical staff needs to speak the "language" of the patient they are helping.
7) This is the kicker; the first politician that really tries to do this, and it would be the President, the public would consider him or her to be so UnAmerican that they would throw him out of office and he or she would never be able to get the Congress from his or the opposition party to help get anything else done. It's too much of an American tradition and the American people just wouldn't want to see it happen.

Sir, you just brought me back some memories from my very first post: should army and marines consolidate? It was meant with quite a bit of "resistance" from all sides.

Yeah, consolidation makes sense, but it's a slow, tedious, multi-generational process, that in my opinion will never fully happen. Many specialties, following footsteps of special forces and Seabees however will probably form a joint command in due time

Over the past several years, the emerging joint environment has made all the services more aware of what each one contributes to the whole effort. Better integration and interoperability has been born from these joint ventures but don't think we can combine as one.

Each branch serves a distinct mission and you need a specialized chain of command to know and deal with those missions - the Navy doesn't have flying boats ant the AF doesn't have boats that fly. If we finer tune the interoperability, I think that will get us to the peak performance we need to go further.