The Department of the Air Force

Air power spent its first forty years inside the Army, as the Signal Corps aviation section, then the Air Service, the Air Corps, and finally the Army Air Forces that flew the bombing campaigns of World War II. The war's airmen argued that strategic bombing was a mission the Army would never prioritize, and the National Security Act of 1947 agreed. On September 18, 1947, the United States Air Force became an independent service inside its own Department of the Air Force, equal to the Army and Navy. Stuart Symington was its first Secretary and Carl Spaatz its first Chief of Staff.

The department organizes, trains, and equips two services. The Air Force operates about 5,000 aircraft, from fighters and bombers to the tankers and transports that make every other service's global reach possible, along with the land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles that form one leg of the nuclear triad. The Space Force, created in December 2019 as the first new service since 1947, handles satellites, launch, missile warning, and the Global Positioning System on which the entire economy depends. Each has its own uniformed chief on the Joint Chiefs, but both answer to the single civilian Secretary of the Air Force.

About 320,000 airmen and roughly 9,400 Space Force Guardians serve on active duty, with another 175,000 in the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve and a civilian workforce near 170,000. The Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs has commissioned officers since 1959. The department's budget, about 260 billion dollars including Space Force, is the largest of the three when its share of nuclear and space programs is counted. Its research arm developed the satellite, stealth, and precision-guidance technologies that defined modern war.

The Air Force faces an aging fleet and a bill for modernizing all three of its biggest programs at once: the F-35 fighter, the B-21 bomber, and the Sentinel missile that will replace fifty-year-old Minutemen at a cost that has already breached statutory limits. Drones and autonomous aircraft are reshaping what the service buys and who flies it. The creation of the Space Force settled a decades-long argument over whether space deserved its own service, and the department now spends much of its time defining how the two services divide their shared sky.