junk wrote:
Isn't the USMC basically just the army with foreign deployment capacity? At least I get that impression from the US military. In essence no different from armies of other nations. I doubt germans for instance make any distinction between the two on their own turf.
It is not. The US Army is fully capable of foreign deployment. They make up a majority of the forces in Afghanistan, and made up of a majority of the forces in Iraq. The US Marine Corps is a wholly independent armed force, though it has close military ties with the US Navy, and in terms of civilian leadership, it falls under the US Department of the Navy.
The first major difference between the US Army and the USMC is that the Army is solely land-based. Furthermore, the US Army is purposely limited to land-based theatres of operation. By and large, they must rely on the US Air Force for fixed-wing air support (ground attack, bombing, and they have no significant airlift capacity). The US Army almost exclusively uses rotary-wing aircraft. They have no naval capacity, either. Additionally, they aren't necessarily a rapid deploy force.
The USMC, by contrast, is a rapid deploy force. They are able to perform nearly all of the functions of the other armed forces. They maintain infantry, armor, air (fixed and rotary), and thanks to the Navy have a massive sea lift capacity. All of these components are fully organic, and this is the idea behind the modern Corps. To be able to provide overwhelming force, anywhere on the globe, from the land, air and sea, within days, and then be able to hold whatever they take until the much larger Army can move in and occupy the territory (the Corps takes, but is too small to hold onto territory; that's what the Army does). It is quite literally possible for an entire Marine division to be deployed halfway around the world within a week.
Arioch wrote:
The Unsheathed don't have a direct analogue in our modern military; they are "marines" in the sense that they are shipboard infantry, distinct from the regular crew, but so are the dedicated Soroin security officers (such as Reed and Flint). Unsheathed are few in number, but they aren't really "special forces", as their operations aren't usually covert; they're deployed as officers with the regular Soroin troops. They're sort of a dedicated infantry officer corps. Or kind of like having a Cave Troll in your unit of Orcs.
As to the difference between the US Army and US Marines, that's a discussion on its own. The US Marines are unusual in that they're an indepedent armed service (whereas most marine services are a division of the Navy), and though the US Marines have a very strong internal cutlure that's distinct from the Army's, in terms of equipment and capability, there's a great deal of overlap between the two (especially in a modern environment where aircraft have made amphibious landings more or less obsolete).
While I can't speak to how the Unsheathed would fit into current US armed forces, and I already touched on the differences between the US Army and the USMC, I can say that amphibious landings aren't anywhere near obsolete. Of all the nations of the world, only 48 are fully landlocked (yay, Google). And, to date, no aircraft can carry and deploy the amount of men and materiel that a ship can (it would take multiple aircraft with multiple trips to do so). It can take the US Army months to fully deploy a division. The USMC can do it days from a couple of ships.
This, of course, doesn't deny the vital role air support plays in deployment. In fact, the USMC make heavy use of it as a spearhead to make way for the larger sea-based forces. The US Army makes extensive use of it as well to get boots on the ground as quickly as possible. But, believe it or not, when it comes to getting their armor and a bulk of their personnel onto a battlefield, the US Army uses the US Navy.
Also, none of this is to disparage what the US Army does. I grew up in the armed services; my father is a career Marine. I am fully aware of the sacrifice all of our servicemen and -women make. I'm only trying to point out the two different, but overlapping, roles the US Army and USMC fulfill.