The United States Air Force

For the first half of the twentieth century, American air power belonged to the Army. Aviators fought under the Army Air Service and later the Army Air Forces, whose massive strategic bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan in the Second World War convinced many that command of the sky had become decisive in war. In 1947 the National Security Act made it official, splitting the flyers off into an independent United States Air Force — the newest of the armed services.

The Air Force came of age in the Cold War, when its bombers and missiles became the sharp edge of nuclear deterrence. The Strategic Air Command kept nuclear-armed aircraft aloft around the clock, and intercontinental ballistic missiles waited in hardened silos, ready to answer a Soviet strike. The Berlin Airlift of 1948 and 1949, in which Air Force transports fed a blockaded city from the air, showed that the new service could wage peace as well as war.

Through Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War, the Air Force pursued air superiority and ever more precise ways to strike from above, from dogfighting jets to laser-guided bombs. Its reach extended beyond the atmosphere into space and, more recently, into the remote warfare of unmanned drones. In 2019 its space mission was spun off into a separate branch, the U.S. Space Force, a division that echoed the Air Force's own break from the Army seven decades before.

Today the Air Force commands the skies through which modern war is fought and watched, operating fighters, bombers, transports, satellites, and a share of the nuclear arsenal. It trains its officers at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, founded in 1954, and carries the conviction that gave it life — that whoever controls the air controls the battlefield below.