Which sounds like a separate service.
Yes and no. I could see the Marines becoming the mobile, power-projecting ground force, and the Army becoming a garrison force that drills and defends a specific place - usually major colonies and core worlds. In other words, the army no longer deploys; the Marines do all that. This would permit a much smaller Army - which would be more politically palatable, because many think armies only exist for defense and conquest, but navies have a much broader remit, and marine forces are seen as an adjunct to that. So the UPF could easily maintain a UPFMC/SFMC larger proportionally than today's US ARMY, while having a rump Army just big enough to man defense installations on selected planets, and all the big-idea visioneers who want to believe in a peaceful, non-military Starfleet can convince themselves that SF is really a super-NASA that can fight when needed, and the MC are just a tool they keep for when that becomes necessary, but that they have just enough Army to hold their homes safe - rather like the big-idea men in the late 18th century wanted a militia, not a standing Army, to provide for adequate defense without permitting conquest.
But then I'd expect Kirk, Picard, et alia to refer to themselves as sailors or spacers in the Federation Starfleet Navy.
Possible, even plausible, but I doubt Roddenberry ever thought that out.
True, but Roddenberry deliberately chose to use the structure and ranks of the US Navy as it existed then to connect to the audience more easily. When TMP was made, their research company advised them to make Kirk an admiral,not a commodore, because the US Navy had changed the rank between TOS and TMP, and they went with it because they were still tied to following their real-world model. Now, by TNG, they no longer used a research company (it was a department of Desilu during TOS, and during TMP, movie companies still contracted that service, but by now it's mostly just a search service to avoid using copyrighted or real-world names without permission), and stopped trying to match things up to the real world, but if Roddenberry had intended the "combined service" thing to cover this, I think he'd have included some dialog to that effect and shown somewhere some naval infantry or other service types rolled under the Starfleet umbrella.
Well, the CG still trains on them, and Annapolis used to. The US Navy still operates the Constitution. So the FNP could be a wet-navy adjunct to a garrison army as I explicated above
.I tend to think that "Starfleet" would be the umbrella name, and Navy would describe which arm of that ovarall organization they served in. But in a galaxy, the navy would cover the largest volume, and become the tail that wags the dog, so in common usage, you might understand "Starfleet" to mean "Starfleet Navy", while other services would be described the opposite way: "Army" meaning "Starfleet Army". But when introducing himself to the government of an independent planet, he'd say "Starfleet Navy", and when meeting a governor on a UPF world, he might say "Starfleet", only to have the governor say "you're probably wondering why I asked for the Navy..."Naturally, "Starfleet" might be the part that is analogous with "Navy", while "Federation" we know is the armada-like defense organization defending, well, the "Federation" (as explicated by Chris Pike).
Timo Saloniemi
Redshirts are definitely NOT the Marines of StarFleet. They are usually the FIRST ones to get themselves killed on landing parties!
Redshirts are definitely NOT the Marines of StarFleet. They are usually the FIRST ones to get themselves killed on landing parties!
No such thing as "too militaristic" when it comes to the existence of a force, only in how it's employed.
Read Starship Troopers, Heinlein argues that there will always be a need for the poor, bloody infantry to actually be on the ground.
The US experience with that showed that an overall organization was needed, or they wouldn't work together and coordinate well. It's part of why we no longer raise a unit and leave it at home. We raise a unit, station it, then rotate the personnel between units for turnover and to cross-pollinate. Everyone gets the same training and keep levelling out local ideas so all units are more or less on the same page. I'd argue that an army would prove necessary just so different worlds didn't have better or worse local defenders, and so that those troops would be loyal to the whole UFP, not the local gov't, and therefore less likely to seem a potential threat to other member worlds during tense political crises.
