# U.S. Air Force The **United States Air Force** is the air-warfare service of the [[Armed Forces Hub]], established as an independent service by the National Security Act of 1947 after four decades as an Army branch. It sits within the [[Department of the Air Force]], which since 2019 also houses the [[U.S. Space Force]]. Civilian authority runs through the Secretary of the Air Force — currently [[Troy Meink]], the 27th — who is responsible for both services. ## Why the Air Force matters to this vault It is the **procurement service**. More than the other branches, the Air Force's story is a story about contracts: aircraft programmes measured in decades and hundreds of billions, a supplier base concentrated among a handful of primes, and an acquisition process that shapes the defence industry as much as it is shaped by it. The vault's [[Defense Primes Sector]] and defence-tech threads run through Air Force programme offices more than through any other buyer. The live tension is between the incumbent primes and the venture-backed defence-tech entrants. The Air Force is the main arena where that contest is decided, because it buys the categories — autonomy, uncrewed collaborative aircraft, software-defined systems — where the entrants claim advantage. Anduril's collaborative-combat-aircraft production contract and its **$1.8 billion Andromeda space-domain-awareness award** are the marker deals; see the pages under Deals for the specifics. Watch three things: whether entrants win *production* awards or only prototypes, whether programmes of record are restructured to accommodate them, and who the relevant programme executives worked for before and after. That last one is the [[Revolving Door Roster]] question, and it is where procurement policy and political economy meet. ## See Also - [[Department of the Air Force]] · [[Armed Forces Hub]] · [[U.S. Space Force]] - [[Troy Meink]] - [[Department of Defense]] · [[Defense Primes Sector]] - [[Revolving Door Roster]] - [[Federal Agencies]]