page_title: Air Corps Tactical School
section_title: Course restructured
hierarchical_section_title: Air Corps Tactical School / Maxwell Field, 1931–1940 / Course restructured
caption_attribution_description: Maxwell Field, Alabama
context_page_description: The Air Corps Tactical School, also known as ACTS and "the Tactical School", was a military professional development school for officers of the United States Army Air Service and United States Army Air Corps, the first such school in the world. Created in 1920 at Langley Field, Virginia, it relocated to Maxwell Field, Alabama, in July 1931. Instruction at the school was suspended in 1940, anticipating the entry of the United States into World War II, and the school was dissolved shortly after. ACTS was replaced in November 1942 by the Army Air Force School of Applied Tactics.
  In addition to the training of officers in more than 20 areas of military education, the school became the doctrine development center of the Air Corps, and a preparatory school for Air Corps officers aspiring to attendance at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College. The motto of the Air Corps Tactical School was Proficimus More Irretenti—"We Make Progress Unhindered by Custom".
  The Air Corps Tactical School was notable as the birthplace of the Army Air Forces doctrine of daylight precision bombing.
context_section_description: In 1934 Curry, now ACTS Commandant, reorganized the academic structure of the school along functional lines into three principal departments: Air Tactics, Ground Tactics, and Basic and Special Instruction. Flying was a fourth department. The "Air Force", "Attack", "Bombardment", "Pursuit", and "Observation" sections were placed within the Department of Air Tactics. The next year these departments became the Department of Air Tactics and Strategy, Department of Ground Tactics, and Department of Command, Staff and Logistics.
  Four faculty committees were also established to administrate scheduling, the school library, and publication of doctrine. The Air Corps Board, which had been inactive since the move from Langley, was permanently relocated to Maxwell in 1933. Restructured by the Tactical School faculty, who doubled as its members, the Board was directed by the War Department to formulate Air Corps doctrine. The Board became indistinguishable from the Tactical School and undertook 77 projects between 1935 and 1942, a third of which dealt with tactical doctrine, and the remainder with equipment, armaments, field manuals, and training texts.
  After the move to Maxwell, the practice of requiring students to fly actual missions as part of the instruction process was discontinued for safety reasons. Plans for a composite school group were suspended by the Chief of the Air Corps because of a service-wide shortage of personnel and aircraft, and attempts to have demonstrations by existing combat units were mostly unsatisfactory. The demonstration group was not authorized until August 1939 and was utilized for less than a year before classes were suspended.
  In 1938 the Department of Flying Instruction was dissolved and its functions parceled out to the remaining departments. The Department of Air Tactics and Strategy became the dominant division at the school, and its Air Force Section the most important course, in which airpower theories were presented and explored, doctrine emerging as much from the students as from the faculty.
  Association with the Infantry School increased, but inspection trips formerly used at Langley first became voluntary and then were discontinued. Only a handful of graduates had gone on to attend the Command and General Staff School, and as a result the Tactical School ended its role as a preparatory school. Instead the ACTS became the equivalent for Air Corps officers of C&GSS, and increased the emphasis on air subjects to more than half of the total course hours by 1934–1935, with an accompanying decrease in hours for ground and administrative subjects. Classroom studies were similarly altered. Lectures occupied only half of a classroom hour, with the remainder given over to discussion and debate of concepts presented and of alternative ideas.
caption: Aerial view of Maxwell Field in 1937
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