United States Air Force

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Air Force controls roughly half of the entire American nuclear stockpile. Specifically, it manages 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying 800 available nuclear warheads, plus another 1,005 nuclear weapons deliverable by aircraft. That is 49% of the US arsenal, and 19% of every nuclear weapon on the planet.

  This is not simply a military branch that flies planes. It is the world's largest air force by total aircraft, the custodian of the world's biggest strategic bomber fleet, and the sole branch of the American armed forces with the mission of global strike at any point on Earth, within hours. How did an outfit that began with reconnaissance balloons during the Civil War arrive at this position? What does it actually do, day to day? And what tensions run beneath its surface, between pilots and drone operators, between tradition and technology? These are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. From Balloons to Independence

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  Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, an aeronaut, established the Union Army Balloon Corps during the American Civil War to provide aerial reconnaissance for Union forces. That early experiment with observation balloons marked the beginning of what would eventually become the most powerful air force in history.

  The formal lineage begins on the 1st of August 1907, when the U.S. War Department created the Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps, a small unit inside the Army. Over the next four decades, it changed its name and organization repeatedly: the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, the Division of Military Aeronautics, the U.S. Army Air Service, the U.S. Army Air Corps, and finally the U.S. Army Air Forces. Each transition reflected a growing recognition that airpower was becoming central, not peripheral, to warfare.

  World War II made the case conclusively. Almost 68,000 U.S. airmen died in that conflict, a toll exceeded only by the infantry. By the war's end, the Army Air Forces were functioning in virtually every practical sense as an independent service, yet formal independence still required an act of Congress. The National Security Act of 1947, signed on the 26th of July 1947, created the Department of the Air Force. Then, on the 18th of September 1947, the first secretary of the Air Force, W. Stuart Symington, was sworn into office, and the branch became an independent institution.

  That same year, Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager flew his X-1 rocket-powered aircraft and broke the sound barrier, signaling the kind of era the new branch would inhabit: one of constant technological acceleration, in which speed and altitude kept pushing past what anyone had thought possible.

• 3. Five Core Missions

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  Air superiority is defined with precision in joint military doctrine: it is "that degree of dominance in the air battle of one force over another which permits the conduct of operations by the former and its related land, sea, air, and special operations forces at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force." That formal definition, dense as it is, points to something practical: if your side does not control the sky, nothing else can move freely beneath it.

  The Air Force pursues air superiority through two complementary approaches. Offensive Counter-Air operations aim to destroy enemy aircraft and launch platforms as close to their source as possible, before they become a threat. Defensive Counter-Air operations then protect friendly airspace through detection, interception, and area defense. Both work together to establish the baseline from which every other mission depends.

  Global Integrated ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, is the second core mission. It involves synchronizing sensors, collection systems, and analytical resources across the entire globe to support both current and future military operations. The cycle runs from planning and directing, through collection, processing, exploitation, analysis, and production, all the way to dissemination. The goal is that military and national decision-makers have the information they need, when they need it, in usable form.

  Rapid global mobility is the third mission: moving forces and equipment quickly to any point on Earth, using airlift and aerial refueling. Air refueling in particular dramatically extends the range and persistence of every other aircraft in the fleet, reducing dependence on forward staging bases. Aeromedical evacuation, the movement of patients by air under medical supervision, rounds out this mission area.

  Global strike is the fourth mission, encompassing conventional and nuclear attack options ranging from close air support of ground troops to strategic attacks designed to weaken an adversary's will to fight without necessarily first defeating its ground forces. Nuclear deterrence sits within global strike; its purpose is to maintain forces credible enough that no adversary concludes an attack on the United States would succeed.

  Command and control is the fifth and final core mission: the exercise of authority over assigned forces from strategic planning at the national level down through operational campaigns to individual engagements. These five missions, the Air Force notes, have not changed dramatically since 1947, even as the technology used to carry them out has been transformed.

• 4. Scale and Hardware

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  Approximately 5,500 military aircraft make up the USAF's total fleet, of which an estimated 4,131 are in active service. Those numbers include the world's largest strategic bomber force at 130 aircraft, and the largest crewed stealth aircraft force, which encompasses 636 fighters and bombers. The annual budget stands at $179.7 billion, making the Air Force the second largest branch of the Department of Defense.

  The bomber fleet spans three generations of design. The B-52H Stratofortress entered service in the early 1960s, built between 1960 and 1962, and is scheduled to remain operational for another 30 years, meaning a single airframe design would ultimately serve for close to 90 years. The B-1B Lancer arrived in the 1980s, and the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber entered service in the 1990s. The B-21 Raider is projected to replace the B-2 and portions of the B-1B force by the mid-2020s.

  Fighters form the largest numerical class. The fleet includes the F-15 Eagle, F-15E Strike Eagle, and the newer F-15EX Eagle II, alongside the F-16 Fighting Falcon, the F-22A Raptor, and the F-35A Lightning II. Tanker aircraft, primarily the KC-135 Stratotanker and the newer KC-46A Pegasus, underpin the global mobility mission; the KC-46A began deliveries to USAF units in 2019, and the older KC-10A Extender was retired in 2024.

  The UAS flight plan, released in July 2009, projected that one third of all future aircraft purchases would be unmanned. Air Force chief scientist Greg Zacharias stated that the service anticipates hypersonic weapons by the 2020s, hypersonic unmanned aerial vehicles by the 2030s, and recoverable hypersonic remotely-piloted aircraft by the 2040s. A sixth-generation jet fighter is intended for deployment by the mid-2030s.

• 5. Nuclear Stewardship and Its Strains

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  On the 5th of June 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates accepted the resignations of both the secretary of the Air Force, Michael Wynne, and the chief of staff, General T. Michael Moseley. Gates cited "systemic issues associated with declining Air Force nuclear mission focus and performance." Two specific incidents had prompted the investigation: a B-52 flew from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base with nuclear weapons aboard that were not supposed to be there, and nuclear weapons components were accidentally shipped to Taiwan.

  The Air Force responded by establishing the Air Force Global Strike Command on the 24th of October 2008, a command specifically focused on nuclear operations that later assumed control of all USAF bomber aircraft. But the nuclear culture problem did not disappear. In 2014, following morale and testing scandals in the missile launch officer community, Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James acknowledged that there remained a "systemic problem" in the Air Force's management of the nuclear mission.

  The nuclear surety program, which governs the safety, security, and effectiveness of all nuclear operations, exists precisely because the stakes of any failure are absolute. The program applies to materials, personnel, and procedures, and aims to ensure what the Air Force calls "no nuclear accidents, incidents, loss, or unauthorized or accidental use," referred to in doctrine as a Broken Arrow incident. Positive command, control, and communications are listed as essential to the credibility of the entire nuclear deterrence mission, which is what makes the 2007-2008 lapses so striking against the backdrop of an institution that defines itself by precision and reliability.

• 6. Culture, Class, and Pilots

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  Daniel L. Magruder Jr. defines USAF culture as a combination of rigorous application of advanced technology, individualism, and progressive airpower theory. Major General Charles J. Dunlap Jr. adds that the Air Force has an egalitarianism distinct from other military branches, born from officers perceiving themselves as their service's principal warriors working in close proximity to small groups of enlisted personnel.

  For most of the Air Force's history, officers fought and enlisted airmen largely supported them from the rear. This structure shaped a different kind of officer-enlisted relationship than exists in the Army or Marine Corps. When enlisted crew members did share direct risk, on multi-crewed aircraft for example, the shared danger created bonds and traditions that broke from the formal distance typical elsewhere in the military.

  The service's culture has been primarily driven by pilots, specifically first by bomber pilots, whose institutional influence the source refers to as the Bomber Mafia, and then by fighter pilots, the Fighter Mafia. When General Norton A. Schwartz succeeded Moseley after the 2008 nuclear scandal, it was notable precisely because Schwartz was an airlift and special operations pilot, making him the first chief of staff without a background as a fighter or bomber pilot. The Washington Post reported in 2010 that Schwartz began to dismantle the rigid class structure in the officer corps that that tradition had produced.

  Driving the newest tension is the drone. Despite round-the-clock demand for unmanned aerial systems over Iraq, the Air Force did not establish a dedicated career field for piloting RPAs until the final year of that war. By 2014 it had changed its training syllabus again, in the face of large aircraft losses during training and a Government Accountability Office report critical of how the drone programs were being managed. Paul Scharre has reported that a cultural divide between the Air Force and the Army has prevented each service from adopting the other's innovations in drone handling. Many of the Air Force's informal traditions, from dining-in ceremonies borrowed from the Royal Air Force to "Friday Name Tags," annual "Mustache Month," and the roof stomp ceremony practiced to welcome new commanders, reflect an institution that takes its own identity seriously. The challenge coins tradition itself traces back to World War I, when a member of one of the aero squadrons bought medallions for his entire unit.

• 7. Personnel and Structure

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  As of the figures in the source, the Air Force has 321,848 active duty airmen, 151,360 civilian personnel, 68,927 reserve airmen, 105,104 Air National Guard airmen, and approximately 65,000 Civil Air Patrol auxiliaries. Demographic data from the 30th of June 2017 shows the force is 70% White, 15% Black, and 4.8% Asian, with an average age of 35 and 21% of members female.

  Basic Military Training takes place at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. In November 2022, the Air Force announced it would discontinue the BEAST deployment exercise, which placed trainees in a simulated combat environment, replacing it with a program called PACER FORGE. Officers can be commissioned through the Air Force Academy, through ROTC programs at civilian universities, or through the Officer Training School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, where it has been located since 1993.

  The warrant officer ranks offer one of the more unusual chapters in Air Force personnel history. The Air Force stopped appointing warrant officers in 1959, the same year the chief master sergeant grade was created. The last active duty Air Force warrant officer, CWO4 James H. Long, retired in 1980. The last Air Force Reserve warrant officer, CWO4 Bob Barrow, retired in 1992 and was honorarily promoted to CWO5, the only person in Air Force history ever to hold that grade. The grades remained authorized by law but unused for over three decades. Then, at the AFA Warfare Symposium on the 12th of February 2024, the Air Force announced it would reintroduce warrant officers in the cyber and information technology fields, starting in fiscal year 2025, to retain technical talent outside the leadership promotion track. By the end of July 2024-78 airmen had been selected, more than double the initial target class of 30. On the 6th of December 2024-30 airmen graduated from the Warrant Officer Training School at Maxwell Air Force Base, the first Air Force warrant officers since 1992.