Interservice rivalry

Interservice rivalry is rivalry between different branches of a country's armed forces. This may include competition between land, marine, naval, coastal, air, or space forces. Interservice rivalry can occur over such topics as the appropriation of the military budget, prestige, or the possession of certain types of equipment or units. The latter case can arise, for example, when a navy operates naval aviation units, which can be viewed by the air force as an infringement of its traditional responsibilities. For the most part, interservice rivalries may only be limited to administrative or internal functions, and the branches may otherwise have warm relations and a willingness to work together when necessary. However, in rare instances, interservice rivalries may be so severe that the branches will outright refuse to cooperate or may even sabotage each other, even during an ongoing war or when lives are at stake (such as the rivalry between the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy). The term also applies to rivalries between a country’s intelligence services and law enforcement agencies (e.g. the FBI and CIA in the United States), the emergency services of a jurisdiction (e.g. the NYPD and FDNY in New York City), or separate agencies in similar fields (e.g. the LAPD and LASD in Los Angeles County, California). Many military analysts consider the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany's armed forces, pioneers of "jointness" (integrierter Kriegführung, in German). They point out that Blitzkrieg, the war-fighting style that brought the Wehrmacht stunning victories between 1939 and 1941, depended upon the close integration of ground and air (and sometimes naval) forces and that even after the Blitzkrieg campaigns gave way to a drawn-out war of attrition, the Wehrmacht routinely conducted operations in a way that would today be called "joint". That is, elements of two or more services participated in close cooperation with mutually agreed goals, relatively little interservice rivalry, and a command structure that, at least at the "sharp end" of operations, promoted, rather than inhibited, a spirit of jointness.