The course is structured around four primary areas: Leadership, building highly-effective teams, logical and ethical reasoning in decision making, and multi-domain joint warfare.

The USAF Air War College (AWC) is a 10-month resident course for USAF, U.S. Army and USMC lieutenant colonels and colonels (pay grades O-5 and O-6), USN and USCG commanders and captains (pay grade O-5 and O-6), their international counterparts, and Department of Defense and Department of the Air Force civilian equivalents (GS-14/GM-14, GS-15/GM-15).

AWC prepares students to lead in a joint, interagency and multi-national environment at the strategic level of military operations.

The Secretary of the Air Force's annual National Security Forum (NSF) conducted for select influential civilian leaders in business, industry, state and local government, law, academia, media, and the clergy is administered and hosted by the AWC.

The goal of the program is to provide senior airmen an opportunity to understand more fully their position in the USAF organizational structure and the continued need for professional development to be effective NCOs.

The institute achieves this by featuring artifacts, collections, and pictorial exhibits, written and oral documentation, audiovisuals, equipment, and selected aircraft parts.

This was also true of Air National Guard's since-disestablished Academy of Military Science, which has now been merged into OTS at Maxwell AFB.

The director of the Air National Guard and the NGB still control input of prospective direct accession ANG officers via OTS.

[10] HQ CAP-USAF and the collocated National Headquarters, Civil Air Patrol remains as a tenant command at Maxwell AFB.

The Community College of the Air Force (CCAF) is the only degree-granting institution of higher learning in the world dedicated exclusively to enlisted military personnel.

Located at Maxwell AFB, this center capitalizes on the resident expertise of Air University, while extending its reach far beyond - and influences a wide audience of leaders and policy makers.

This mission was transferred to the CPC in 2012, broadening its mandate to providing education and research on not just countering WMD but also nuclear operations issues.

In May 2018, the name changed again to the Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies (CSDS) in recognition of senior Air Force interest in focusing on this national security topic.

The agency's collection, begun during World War II in Washington, DC, moved in 1949 to Maxwell Air Force Base, the site of the present-day Air University, to provide research facilities for professional military education students, the faculty, visiting scholars, and the general public.

Units and various main operating bases and auxiliary airfields were established throughout an 8,000-square-mile (21,000 km2) area of central Florida designated as a mock "war theater" and stretching roughly from Tampa through Orlando, east to Titusville, north to Starke, and northwest to Apalachicola in which air war games were conducted.

It was in the early 1930s when the Army Air Corps Tactical School moved to Maxwell Field and Montgomery became the country's intellectual center for airpower education.

Today, AU has a reach worldwide affecting the careers of every member of the United States Air Force.

Major General Orvil A. Anderson was appointed the first commandant of the Air War College, the senior school in the three-tiered AAF officer professional military education (PME) system.

The Air Tactical School, the junior officer PME program of the AU educational system, began classes at Tyndall in January 1947.

Later that year, the Royal Canadian Air Force sent its first group of students to the two-week indoctrination course at Maxwell.

As a result of the National Security Act of 1947, the United States Air Force became a separate and independent branch of the U.S. military on 18 September 1947.

It was one of three USAF field agencies created to conduct research on the human factor in Air Force planning and operations.

The USAF Historical Division relocated to Maxwell AFB from Washington, DC in September 1949 and became a part of the Air University Library.

The Air University is accredited by the Commission of Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), and is authorized to grant the following degrees: In 2010, SACS upgraded AU's accreditation to Level V, a move that will eventually enable AU to eventually award three different doctoral degrees.