SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Illinois - The secretary of the Air Force announced recently that Headquarters Air Mobility Command will consolidate with Headquarters Military Airlift Command, effective Oct. 1.

With this, AMC will add 51 years to its history, tracing its lineage back to May 29, 1941, and the Air Corps Ferry Command.

"This consolidation makes AMC the oldest major command in the Air Force," said Gen. Carlton D. Everhart, AMC commander. "For more than seventy-five years, Mobility airmen have been critical to growing global reach and operational agility for the joint warfighter. As we inherit the rich history of MAC, we will continue to build upon their legacy through our dedication to rapid global mobility."

The Air Force established the Air Mobility Command in 1992 as part of a post-Cold War reorganization that inactivated three major commands: Military Airlift Command, Strategic Air Command and Tactical Air Command. These three major commands were replaced with two new major commands: Air Mobility Command and Air Combat Command.  

Through this change, AMC received the airlift and aeromedical evacuation mission from MAC along with the air refueling mission from SAC.

During that same year, U.S. Strategic Command was established as a unified command of the Department of Defense. As a result, the Air Force authorized the use of the SAC emblem while AMC used the MAC emblem and ACC used the TAC emblem. Although this decision helped preserve the emblems of the Air Force's inactivated commands, there was no lineage connecting the new organizations and the old ones with their predecessors.

"This created confusion as an emblem should belong to one organization only," said Ellery Wallwork, AMC command historian. "In 1992, the Air Force reorganized to acknowledge the diminishing traditional division between strategic and tactical missions. This inappropriate use of another organization's emblem continued to cause confusion over the separation of AMC and MAC ever since."

In 2009, the Air Force redesignated and reactivated the inactivated SAC as the Air Force Global Strike Command.

In an effort to eliminate the confusion and validate the use of past command emblems, the Air Force Historical Research Agency advocated for the AMC consolidation with MAC along with the ACC consolidation with TAC, said Wallwork.

Now that MAC and AMC share one genealogical line, the history of the two organizations will remain a part of the Air Force's active history.

"AMC now shares in the honors and campaign streamers earned by MAC," said Wallwork. "All of this does not lessen the creation of AMC in 1992 which still highlights the mission merger of MAC's airlift and aeromedical evacuation with SAC's air refueling force creating the strong mobility team that has been so successful in meeting today's global peacetime, contingency and humanitarian missions."