Continental Air Command

Continental Air Command
Continental Air Command emblem
Active	1948–1968
Country	United States
Branch	United States Air Force
Type	Major Command
Role	Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve command and control
Part of	United States Air Force
Garrison/HQ	Mitchell AFB, New York (1948–1961) Robins AFB, Georgia (1961–1968)

Continental Air Command (ConAC) (1948–1968) was a Major Command of the United States Air Force (USAF) 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 (AFRES).

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.