USNAvUSAFA -must decide which to attend in FOUR days - PLEASE HELP!!

forumjunkie said:
I have sworn for years that the Marines have the Best Marketing People in they world civilian or Military. Don't know if they do it in house or contract it out but it is incredible when a darn billboard makes you well up.
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Marines have a 65+ year relationship with J. Walter Thompson ad agency. They figured out the magic a long time ago. "The few, the proud...the Marines."

Marines send top officers to USNA as battalion, company, instructor and staff officers. They know their mission and they do it well. Since Marines are a smaller force, they really pay attention to who they take. Not that Navy doesn't, it's just Marines have such a strong culture, they have to know someone will fit in from the get-go.
 
forumjunkie said:
I have sworn for years that the Marines have the Best Marketing People in they world civilian or Military. Don't know if they do it in house or contract it out but it is incredible when a darn billboard makes you well up!

I do think the actual fighting force and attitude is awesome. Never has so much been done with so little!

I laid a bet with my Husband when Son went to USNA that he would get recruited to go Marines, Guess who may be doing leatherneck for summer block this year ;)
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So little is a bit of a stretch. The Marines make interesting budgetary choices (spend all their money on aviation) and simultaneously propagate the myth that they only get hand-me-downs against their will. But that's all at a high policy level and has little to do with the quality of leadership in the Marines, which is typically very very good.

Congrats to your son. I hope it's a fulfilling and enlightening summer.
 
Capt MJ said:
Marines have a 65+ year relationship with J. Walter Thompson ad agency. They figured out the magic a long time ago. "The few, the proud...the Marines."

Marines send top officers to USNA as battalion, company, instructor and staff officers. They know their mission and they do it well. Since Marines are a smaller force, they really pay attention to who they take. Not that Navy doesn't, it's just Marines have such a strong culture, they have to know someone will fit in from the get-go.
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Glad for that info on the Marketing. I have always wondered.

So much better than "An Army of one" Ugh I hated that one!
 
Marine Aviation comes from blue dollars, not green. Totally different budgeting from the rest of the Marine Corps works with green dollars. It's all managed out of NavAir.

Yes Marines love being Marines. Theh advertise well and it works. I have had some buddies work in that department, interesting how the machine works.
 
NavyHoops said:
Marine Aviation comes from blue dollars, not green. Totally different budgeting from the rest of the Marine Corps works with green dollars. It's all managed out of NavAir.

Yes Marines love being Marines. Theh advertise well and it works. I have had some buddies work in that department, interesting how the machine works.
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"All their money" was a glib way to put it, and I should've been better at describing it.

NavAir (LOVE those guys...eesh...so hard to deal with) runs the show from a procurement standpoint, but the Marines still spend heavily on air. This year the Marines predict to spend $649 million on air operations. In addition to the GAAP trickery of the Navy "paying" for the 108 new helicopters and 37 MV-22s the Marines received last year, the Marines will use their own modernization budget to procure 37 F-35B JSFs (the STOVL version that only they get) and the plans to replace or refurb all 149 CH-53s over four years. Plus a KC-130 or two and some other depot work on their nice fighter jet fleet.

Even with the NavAir piece, it's budget dollars the Marines don't get otherwise because the DoD pot is relatively fixed, and aviation as a venture still costs the Marine Corps that portion of their green dollars. There's no such thing as a free lunch. To be totally fair, SOF plays the same game by making the parent services foot the bill for a lot of major end items and only paying for mod line components/labor. But the end result is that the parent service (or sister service in the USMC/Navy team) isn't dumb.

Even if we ignore aviation, the idea that the Marines "do more with less" is thankfully out of date. They're the only ground service with tilt-rotor aircraft, they chose to diverge from the Army's bought-and-paid for FMTV truck system and instead spend their own money to develop and procure an OshKosh truck at a far greater expense. They spend money on the weapons they choose (i.e. the HK416 program) and the LAV upgrade, and were the pushers on the XM777 Howitzer. The war years did wonders to modernize the USMC arsenal, as money so often does. That's a good thing.

The Marines are a great service and they certainly excel at many things, including protecting their image and culture. Sometimes it's all truth. Often it's not. But that's the way with everything, isn't it?
 
I'm just a dumb boot, but...

The Marine Corps also hitched its aviation wagons to a few oxen that have turned out to be if not disabled more than a little bit diseased. All new programs have issues, but some of the F-35/Plopter/H-1 Upgrades struggles are baffling and infuriating. This is what we get when the decision makers for this kind of thing retire from the Marine Corps on Monday and start drawing fat paychecks from Bell/Boeing on Tuesday.

If anything, snuffing our own glue of the "do more with less" mantra has screwed us by letting us string along our older platforms through the war years (legacy hornets, ****ters) by pillaging the depots and the FRS to meet readiness and then pretending it's sustainable. Shocker, it's not, and the process of unscrewing it will be costly and painful in every possible way.

I love being a Marine and I love being an aviator, but our decisions on a large scale level have not always been great.
 
Jumping the table happens in every branch. (As in sitting on one side of the negotiating table in uniform on Friday, and sitting on the other side of the table in civy's on Monday)
 
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