United States Aerospace Force

The United States Aerospace Force is a military and transportation system in the Cyberpunk world.

Overview
In the beginning, there was the Army Air Corps, encompassing tactical, strategic, and logistic air command of every aircraft the Army flew. At this time, the Navy and Marine Corps acquired their own air arms.

After the end of the Second World War, a new service was formed that took over all the duties of the AAC: The USAF. The commanders of this group seized every responsibility and area of control that they could, and would have taken the air arms of the Navy or USMC if they had been allowed to.

The Air Force continued to do the job of the old AAC, and often better than the AAC did.. However, as time passed, emphasis on ground support roles was degraded in favor of air superiority and strategic bombing (even though the bombing role had been rendered obsolete). This lack of close support contributed to the development of helicopter gunships -the Army needed something to replace the lack of dedicated ground-attack aircraft and eventually to AVs. After the Air Force scrapped the A-10 Thunderbolt II, they had nothing to replace it in a ground attack role, so when the First Central American War heated up, there was inadequate air support for the ground offensive. During the martial law period, military governors all but absorbed Air Force units into their own unit structures. When military rebuilding and restructuring occurred after the restoration of civil law, the Army and the Air Force reached a compromise: If the Air Force yielded all control of terrestrial air support to the Army, the Army would help push the concept of an aerospace force, devoted entirely to the orbital arena. So the new USAF came into being.

Faced with the opposition of the ESA and the Neo-Soviet forces in orbit, the USAF started building scram jets, attack shuttles, and space stations at an alarming rate. The ESA and Neo-Soviets responded in kind, and the arms race culminated in the USAF attack on the Mir station in 2008. The short war was ended by the rockdropping incident, but in the meantime the USAF revealed its intentions, and the ESA took the lesson to heart. Since that time, the USAF has been rebuilding its forces. While the ESA has a firm hold on the high orbit, the USAF has the greatest number of attack craft in low orbit of any of the space powers. With its battlestations, assault craft, and EVA troops, the USAF watches and waits for a chance to strike.

Organization
The USAF's organization is a bit sporadic by the standards of the other military services. The reason for this is that the USAF's operational theater is very different, and completely hostile to human life. Usually, organizations are ad hoc outfits, thrown together for their capabilities. Only the orbital assault fighters and the EVATs have somewhat rigid organization. The assault fighters are assigned to wings of sixteen craft; four craft make up a squadron, and two craft make up a flight. The EVA troops are organized in platoons of twenty troopers, further split into four squads of five men, each with its own squad officer. One squad officer commands the entire platoon.

Deployment
In orbit, USAF forces are spread throughout the orbital workstations and battlestations. Since the workstations can't sustain large quantities of people for very long, the deployment of living orbital assets is highly variable. EVATs are always deployed aboard attack shuttles, if an attack is imminent; aboard battlestations to guard them from enemy attack, and at USAF facilities on the ground.

Tactics
In space, terminal velocity is light· speed. At the fantastic relative speeds attained by simple orbital junk, an impact is catastrophic. Furthermore, there's very little terrain to hide in. Consequently, USAF tactics concentrate more on shielding one's signature, fooling the enemy, and dealing a telling blow from a low-signature weapon before the enemy can respond. EVA Troops are used when individual astra-soldiers working independently of a space ship can accomplish significant objectives-a space dogfight at nearly a thousand miles range is right out, but a furball around an orbital station is their oyster.

Equipment
The USAF's main equipment is its space craft: 118 Delta interceptors deployed from numerous ground bases, four battlestations, and two mighty, nuclear-driven gunships (there is a proposal on the boards to build a couple of modified cargo clippers for carrier work). For close work, space-suited EVATs armed with EVAWs are used, as well as combat powered armor suits.

The USAF is the U.S. military's single greatest user of powered armor. In space, a powered armor suit doesn't need to support its mass in a G-field, and with maneuvering vernier jets, a powered armor suit becomes a one-man, man-shaped spacecraft. When a job calls for extended EVA activity, more often than not, a powered armor suit is used.