Continental Air Command
Continental Air Command was a Major Command of the United States Air Force responsible primarily for administering the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve.
During the Korean War, ConAC provided the necessary augmentation to the regular Air Force while it rebuilt itself under wartime conditions. Later, during the 1950s, it was a training force for reservists with no prior military service. ConAC provided peacetime airlift missions for the Air Force. It was mobilized twice in 1961 and 1962 by president Kennedy for the Berlin and Cuban Missile Crisis. Lastly, it was used by president Lyndon B. Johnson for airlift operations into the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam.
It was inactivated in 1968 and replaced by Headquarters, Air Force Reserve.
History
Origins
After the end of World War II, the Truman Administration was determined to bring the Federal budget back into balance. An enormous deficit had built up, so expenditure was cut, resulting in relatively little money for the new United States Air Force to modernize its forces.Officials of the Army Air Forces were convinced that the service required some kind of a reserve force in peacetime, although they had no clear concept of what the size and scope of such an effort should be. Consisting of duly appointed officers and enlisted personnel the Air Reserve was to be a federally controlled reserve component of the Air Forces, ready for mobilization and active duty at the time, places, and in the numbers indicated by the needs of national security. Planning for reserve forces took second place, in any event, to the officials' efforts to win the separation of the air forces from the Army. Their single firm conviction about the nature of the reserve program was that it must provide opportunities for pilots to fly.
This was fundamentally different from the National Guard concept. The National Guard is the designated state militia by the Constitution of the United States. Although the Air National Guard fulfills state and some federal needs, it fails to satisfy others. In the first place, not every person in the United States with an obligation or desire for military service wants to serve in a state militia. Second, the legally prescribed nature and organization of the National Guard does not provide for service as individuals; the guard consists of units only.
In 1944, the National Guard Association of the United States compelled the Army Air Forces to plan for a significant separate Air National Guard reserve force separate from the observation units of the prewar National Guard units controlled by the Army. As the Army Air Forces demobilized in 1945 and 1946, inactivated unit designations were allotted and transferred to various State Air National Guard bureaus. As individual units were organized, they began obtaining federal recognition, and the state Air National Guard units were established.
Army Air Forces Air Reserve program
The Army Air Forces Air Reserve program was approved by the War Department in July 1946. Army Air Forces Base Units were organized by Air Defense Command at each training location. They were located at both Army Airfields and civil airports where the Air Force retained partial jurisdiction after turning over the facility to the civil community after the end of World War II. ADC was given the air reserve mission as the fundamental mission of the command was the air defense of the Continental United States, and the reservists were considered as reinforcements for that mission; however the reserve program was a national endeavor and the Army Air Forces required both Strategic Air Command and Tactical Air Command to conduct some form of reserve training on their bases.The reservists were to report to a base unit located in their area. The base unit furnished the personnel to operate the detachment and provided essential base services. ADC programmed to have AT-6 Texans, AT-11 Kansans and P-51 Mustangs available for reserve pilots to fly four hours per month to train and maintain proficiency. ADC intended to activate forty base units operational by 1 July. The 468th Army Air Forces Base Unit at Memphis Municipal Airport, Tennessee, reservists conducted the first postwar Air Reserve training flight in an airplane, probably a C-47, borrowed from the 4th Ferrying Group. By the end of 1946, the command had organized Air Reserve training detachments at seventy bases and airfields. However, limited budgets for the active Army Air Corps meant even less for Reserve Training and a lack of available aircraft led to severe constraints on the Reserve program with training being conducted in World War II training aircraft, which cost much less to operate than single-seat fighter planes. On 21 February 1947, Headquarters Army Air Forces informed ADC to eliminate twenty-nine reserve training detachments as quickly as possible.
The program's contractions caused by the fiscal year 1947 budget reductions made it even more evident that there would never be enough units
to accommodate all Air Force Reservists who wished to be trained.
The Air Force Reserve was affected by fundamental legislation pertaining to the parent Air Force. Even after the Unification Act of September 1947 established the United States Air Force, much of the statutory authority upon which it operated still stemmed from various laws pertaining to the U.S. Army. Under criticism for the inadequacy of its Air Force Reserve program, the new United States Air Force began to revise it in 1948. Contrary to the tendency of the Army Air Forces to orient the Reserve program as an individual augmentation force, it was decided that the Air Force's mobilization requirements called for organized units, both for training and combat. It recommended that all Air Force Reservists be organized into tactical or training units to facilitate administration and training.
Post World War II Air Force Reserve
To clarify the situation and provide both services sounder legal bases from which to operate, Congress passed the Army and Air Force Authorization Act of 1949 which became law on 10 July 1950. The law stipulated that the Air Force of the United States would consist of the U.S. Air Force, the Air National Guard of the United States, the Air National Guard when it was in the service of the United States, and the U.S. Air Force Reserve. The Air Force of the United States was to have an authorized strength of not more than seventy groups with separate Air Force squadrons, reserve groups, and whatever supporting and auxiliary and reserve units as might be required.The Air Force established the Office of the Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff for Reserve Forces in Headquarters USAF. It also reorganized its field structure for reserve matters, establishing the Continental Air Command on 1 December 1948, with headquarters at Mitchel AFB, New York. ConAC had responsibility for both Air Force Reserve as well as coordination with the state-controlled Air National Guard organizations. At the same time, the Air Defense Command and the Tactical Air Command were subordinated as operational air commands of the new organization. ConAC controlled the First, Fourth, Tenth and Fourteenth Air Forces. The Ninth and Twelfth Air Forces remained under TAC control, although they were assigned to ConAC.
The Air Force Reserve program for fiscal year 1950 consisted of four distinct parts: the Air Force Reserve training centers now would support reserve combat wings, individual mobilization assignments, a new program of corollary units integrated with active force units, and a Volunteer Air Reserve training program to accommodate all reservists not fitted into one of the other three programs. Headquarters USAF and the major commands were to conduct the corollary unit and mobilization assignment programs while ConAC would handle the rest. ConAC was to operate 23 centers to train 25 combat wings. The Air Force Reserve program was to become effective on 1 July 1949 would include twenty
troop carrier wings equipped with C-47s or C-46s and five light bombardment wings flying B-26s.
With regards to Air Defense Command and Tactical Air Command, ConAC faced severe issues as the tactical air support mission was fundamentally different from the air defense mission. Units assigned to ConAC were dual-trained and in case of war, were expected to revert to their primary roles after the North American air defense battle was won.
Korean War
With the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, it was necessary to deploy large numbers of tactical aircraft to Japan and South Korea.The Korean War gave a new emphasis to tactical air operations and resulted in the restoration of Tactical Air Command as a major air command on 1 December 1950 and relieved it from assignment to ConAC. TAC's mission would be to supply these tactical forces to FEAF and USAFE, and also be able to deploy its CONUS forces worldwide in response to Cold War threats by Communist China and the Soviet Union. In addition, the need to support the new NATO alliance meant that entire wings of aircraft would be deployed to Europe for tactical air defense.
The air defense mission, relegated to a secondary status in the postwar years, received much more attention as Cold War tensions heightened. Following the explosion of a Soviet nuclear weapon in August 1949, the Air Force issued requirements for an operational air defense system by 1952. The perceived threat of an airborne atomic attack by the Soviet Union with its Tu-4 copy of the B-29 or Tu-95 strategic bomber led to the separation of Air Defense Command from ConAC, and its reestablishment as an Air Force major command, effective 1 January 1951 to counter the perceived Soviet threat.
Reserve Unit Structure, 25 June 1950
Air Force Reserve Mobilization
One of the immediate needs of the Active Duty Air Force was to assemble a tactical airlift force. In June 1950, the United States could count three troop carrier wings: the Regular Air Force's 314th Troop Carrier Wing at Sewart AFB, Tennessee, and the mobilized 375th and 433d reserve wings at Donaldson AFB, South Carolina.To fill the airlift void, six Air Force Reserve C-46 Commando wings were identified for mobilization in January 1951. On 28 March 1951, Tactical Air Command activated the Eighteenth Air Force at Donaldson AFB, South Carolina, immediately assigning to it the Reserve 314th and 375th Troop Carrier Wings. As the reserve wings came on active duty, they too joined the Eighteenth Air Force.
The 435th Troop Carrier Wing at Miami IAP, Florida, the 403d Troop Carrier Wing at Portland MAP, Oregon, and the 516th Troop Carrier Wing at Memphis MAP, Tennessee, were mobilized on 1 March 1 April, and 16 April, respectively, while the 434th Troop Carrier Wing at Atterbury AFB Indiana, the 514th Troop Carrier Wing at Mitchel AFB, New York, and the 443d Troop Carrier Wing at Hensley Field, Texas, all came onto active service on 1 May.