US Marine Corps Hates Central Command

Which frankly is no surprise. Thanks to Geitner Simmons for sending the link to this Washington Post story:

In an official report on the first eight months of the war, the Marine Corps depicts Central Command, the major U.S. headquarters for the war, based 7,000 miles from Afghanistan in Tampa, as a distant and troublesome overseer. This command structure has been a unique feature of the Afghanistan campaign, departing from past conflicts, including the Gulf War, in which U.S. military commanders moved their headquarters closer to the battlefield.

First of all, the Marines generally just hate being under anyone else's command. There are still a significant number of Marines who don't seem quite to understand what the other services are for, except the Navy, which the Marines let take them to operations areas. As for the Air Force, the Marines say they have one (nothing bigger than a C-130, though), and they have a ground force also, obviously. I remember very well the real anger from the Marines that their part in Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989 was limited to one battalion. Many high-ranking Marine officers said that the whole operation should have been a USMC one from start to finish. (However, there was a USMC brigadier general who publicly stated that the Marines could have done it all, but it would have had to be in daytime and there would have been a thousand casualties. Needless to say, his popularity in the Corps dropped like a rock.)

Even so, the command setup seems a bit strange, and the Post article details a few problems, as well as triumphs, that all the services identified.