The U.S. Air Force broke free of the Army
On this day · 18 September 1947
On September 18, 1947, American airpower stopped being an Army stepchild and became a service in its own right.
For decades, the men who flew America’s warplanes answered to the Army. That changed on September 18, 1947, when the National Security Act of 1947 took full effect and the United States Air Force became a separate military service, equal to the Army and Navy.
The same sweeping law reorganized the entire defense establishment. It merged the War and Navy departments under a single Secretary of Defense and created a new Department of the Air Force to run the freshly independent service. The first uniformed chief, General Carl Spaatz, and the first Secretary of the Air Force, W. Stuart Symington, took office that month.
The 1947 law caused far-reaching changes in the military establishment.
Independence had been a long campaign. Airmen had argued since the 1920s that flight was a distinct kind of warfare, not merely artillery with wings. World War II settled the case, and a peacetime law finally gave the argument a flag of its own.
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