US Army/US Navy cold war

So I've been doing a fair amount of reading about the very early stages of the space race, when the 3 US military branches were all competing to lay claim to the plum new theater of operations... If any country was actually rich enough to have a space race with itself, it was the US.

The only plausible way I could imagine the Army and Navy maintaining their space programs was if the USAF didn't exist and if Eisenhower never became president... But even if these conditions were in place, it's hard to see much of a space race happening without some ideological rivalry to drive it...

Which led me to imagining what might happen if the US Army and the US Navy had relations as poor as those between the Japanese Army and Navy pre 1945... I suspect the results would be a fairly nasty dystopia for everyone on the planet, but it does sound like an awfully fun premise to me...

The question is: is there any plausible way to make the rivalries between the two services that strong with a PoD after the end of WW1 (I can't help but feel you'd need some sort of Authoritarian government to be running the US to make this happen, since otherwise, it is hard to see the democratic institutions of the US reigning in the bolshy Army and Navy)?

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Ian_W

Banned
To be fair, the US Army, US Air Force and US Navy are still in a Cold War, and the US's space effort is even more balkanised than the actual balkans.

When NACA turns into NACA, have even closer links between the Army, Navy and Air Force and the various NASA centers (JPL, Goddard etc etc), and there you have it.
 
To be fair, the US Army, US Air Force and US Navy are still in a Cold War, and the US's space effort is even more balkanised than the actual balkans.

Compared to the Japanese and Soviet efforts, the US programs were a model of cooperation.

When NACA turns into NACA, have even closer links between the Army, Navy and Air Force and the various NASA centers (JPL, Goddard etc etc), and there you have it.

Hmmm. A more militarized NASA could be interesting as a PoD in its own right...

Anyone have any ideas for how the US services might end up with Japanese levels of rivalry? I've been thinking that it might require the US to face two different enemies, say, to have the Army focused on a cold war with the Soviets, while the Navy was focused on a cold war with an Anglo-French alliance - the two very different enemies might then drive some rancorous debates as the Army sees the Navy weakening the US against Communism, while the Navy sees the Army weakening the US against Imperialism...

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Ian_W

Banned
Compared to the Japanese and Soviet efforts, the US programs were a model of cooperation.



Hmmm. A more militarized NASA could be interesting as a PoD in its own right...

Anyone have any ideas for how the US services might end up with Japanese levels of rivalry? I've been thinking that it might require the US to face two different enemies, say, to have the Army focused on a cold war with the Soviets, while the Navy was focused on a cold war with an Anglo-French alliance - the two very different enemies might then drive some rancorous debates as the Army sees the Navy weakening the US against Communism, while the Navy sees the Army weakening the US against Imperialism...

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My thinking is something like NASA and its various centers are a thing, but the Air Force backs JPL, Army backs Goddard, Navy backs Marshall, CIA/NRO(etc) backs Johnson and they each have their own pet projects, supported by their own pet Senators.

You had some of this with the conflict between the Manned Orbital Laboratory (*cough* planned as manned spy satellite *cough*) and the early unmanned spy satellites.
 
How did the Japanese division happen. Was it just from the navy being British trained when the army was German trained, or was there more to it?

Can we get the same kind of split in the Colonial military that carries through to the present day? I know some Prussians trained the continental army.
 
How did the Japanese division happen. Was it just from the navy being British trained when the army was German trained, or was there more to it?

I'm not sure. I have the impression a big reason for the split came from the enormous pressure Japan was under during the interwar years - the hard times caused political divisions to become more acrimonious. It probably didn't help that not only did Army and Navy men have very different ideas about how to save Japan, but the Army and Navy each had strong links with different parties. If I recall correctly, the Navy had links to the liberals in the diet and the Army the conservatives.

Can we get the same kind of split in the Colonial military that carries through to the present day? I know some Prussians trained the continental army.

I think the US military was too small for most of its history to really be able to maintain the acrimony between army and navy after both start ballooning in the 20th Century...

I think any split would need to happen, at the very earliest, in the late 19th Century, as the US caught the Mahanian bug...

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