new military branch for unmanned and robotic air, sea, and ground systems.

Hmm.

I have to admit – without knowing any of the factors that went into making the decision to do this – that my kneejerk reaction is that this isn’t a great idea.

Unmanned vehicles do have some cross-service commonality (e.g. the operators can be remote, there are probably common concerns with knowing how to navigate or report issues, etc), but it seems to me that there is a lot more commonality and interaction with the specific branch of the service in which they are used (air, land, or sea).

My impression is that few militaries seem to have created dedicated branches of the military for a specific technology, and where they do, there tends to be limited interaction (e.g. Russia has the Strategic Rocket Forces, but those deal specifically with strategic weapons, not the kind of missiles that the other forces would be using much directly in their own operations).

Rather, a separate military branch tends to exist to deal with a given domain of operation (air, land, sea) not a given technology.

I also remember reading in the past about how sometimes it was something of a problem where in the past where a branch of a military needed to make use of a new technology on a tactical level but didn’t have fairly-close integration with it, so it was harder to get access to it on the battlefield.

One thing that the US does, when there is a technology/specialized area that affects multiple branches of the military, is sometimes to create a “unified combatant command” that stretches across multiple branches of the military, to help them coordinate. That’s true for something like the United States Cyber Command. I wonder if that would maybe make more sense.

That being said, only the title here says that it’s a new branch. It’s not completely clear to me that this is actually what the decree mandates. It does say “separate type of force”, but I’m not sure that that entails that it be a separate branch.