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The Air Force’s motto is “Aim High … Fly-Fight-Win,” adopted on October 7, 2010 — the first official motto in the service’s history. Its first two words are a recruiting slogan from 1984 that the Air Force had thrown out in 2000 for “not cutting it anymore.”
In between, the service went through four slogans in eight years. One drew a public jab from a former Marine Corps commandant. Another had congressmen asking whether it was a recruiting ad at all.
LIST OF AIR FORCE SLOGANS
| Slogan | Years | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Keep ‘Em Flying | 1941–1945 | Army air arm, World War II |
| A Great Way of Life | Late 1970s–1984 | The line Aim High replaced |
| Aim High | 1984–2000 | Longest-running ad slogan |
| No One Comes Close | 2000–2001 | Launched with a new logo |
| Cross Into the Blue | 2001–2008 | $27 million launch |
| Do Something Amazing | 2006 | Companion campaign, not a replacement |
| Above All | 2008–2010 | Dropped in spring 2010 |
| Aim High … Fly-Fight-Win | 2010–present | Official service motto |
| Aim High | 2014–present | Ad slogan, revived |
The Air Force rarely announces a slogan’s retirement. A line ends when the next campaign starts, so the end dates above mark successions, not funerals.
KEEP ‘EM FLYING
“Keep ‘em flying” was the air arm’s slogan of World War II, and it belonged to the Army, because there was no separate Air Force yet. A 1941 poster from the Army’s Recruiting Publicity Bureau wrapped the words in a red circle around three pursuit planes — “Let’s go! U.S.A. Keep ‘em flying!” — above the caption “Uncle Sam needs pilots.”
The phrase escaped the recruiting office fast. It ran on War Production Board posters in aircraft factories, and by November 1941 it was the title of an Abbott and Costello comedy. The wartime version above, with its Boeing B-17s, asked for “aggressive, alert, patriotic” young men.
The service it recruited for changed names three times — Air Service, Air Corps, Army Air Forces — before becoming the U.S. Air Force on September 18, 1947. None of those versions had an official motto. Neither did the new Air Force, for the next 63 years.
THE AIR FORCE SONG
The Air Force’s oldest surviving line is one most Americans can hum: “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.” It began as a magazine promotion. In September 1938, Liberty publisher Bernarr Macfadden offered $1,000 for an official Army Air Corps song, with lawyerly care: “This is not a contest, and the committee reserves the right to return any or all scores submitted.”
More than 700 entries arrived. Robert MacArthur Crawford, a concert singer who billed himself “The Flying Baritone,” delivered his two days before the deadline. Air Corps members voting in officers’ and enlisted clubs gave it roughly 90 percent of first-place votes, according to the Air Force Historical Research Agency. It premiered in Cleveland on September 2, 1939.
The lyrics followed the service through its renamings — “Army Air Corps” became “Army Air Forces” in 1945, then “U.S. Air Force.” The only other rewrite came in 2020, after female Air Force Academy cadets asked Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein why the third verse saluted only men. “His brother men who fly” became “the brave who serve on high.”
AIM HIGH
“Aim High” replaced “A Great Way of Life” in 1984 and lasted until 2000 — sixteen years, the longest run of any Air Force recruiting slogan. It filled recruiting ads and literature, and its logo turned up on official Air Force memorandums and stationery.
For a while the old line and the new one ran together. The print ad above splashes AIM HIGH across the top in red and still signs off at the bottom: “Air Force. A great way of life.”
It also stuck. In a 2011 Air War College paper, Col. Matthew Lloyd found that many Americans still believed “Aim High” was the Air Force motto in 2008, eight years after it was dropped.
Leadership had decided otherwise. By 2000, the paper records, the service’s top officers thought “Aim High” was “not cutting it anymore,” and wanted an image that would “excite the public.”
NO ONE COMES CLOSE
The replacement arrived in September 2000: “America’s Air Force — No One Comes Close,” rolled out with a new Air Force logo. The first candidate, “World Ready,” died after a weak reception from the service’s four-star generals.
The target audience was partly inside the Air Force. “Our recruiting problem begins with a retention problem,” said Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Ryan, and the campaign was meant to make serving Airmen proud enough to reenlist.
Other services heard a boast. Retired Gen. Charles Krulak, the former Marine Corps commandant, said: “I’m sure there are pilots in all the other services who don’t feel as if they are second to those in the Air Force.” Air Force Secretary Whit Peters answered that the slogan “compares the Air Force to other air forces, not to the Army, the Navy — or the Marines.” It lasted about a year.
CROSS INTO THE BLUE
“Cross Into the Blue” launched in mid-November 2001, two months after September 11, as a $27 million national campaign built by the agencies GSD&M and Tribal DDB. It sold careers, not cockpits. “When you say Air Force, people naturally think of planes and pilots,” said Air Force Secretary James Roche, “however, the variety of Air Force specialties is broad and rich with opportunity, ranging from flying sophisticated satellites to putting up portable hospitals.”
On September 18, 2006, the service’s 59th birthday, GSD&M added “Do Something Amazing”: handheld-camera spots of real Airmen at work, the first of which debuted during Fox’s Prison Break. “‘Do Something Amazing’ does not replace our main campaign theme, ‘Cross into the Blue,’” said Tim Talbert of Air Force Recruiting Service. “It complements it.”
One thing never changed between campaigns. The end card above, from a 2004 commercial, gives the same toll-free number as the 1980s Aim High ad two decades earlier: 1-800-423-USAF.
ABOVE ALL
“Above All” arrived in February 2008, and the Air Force knew what it was doing. “The new slogan is admittedly a bold one,” said Col. Michael Caldwell of Air Force public affairs, “but so are Airmen.”
Caldwell’s team picked it from more than 50 phrases the agency pitched. By his account, it tested better with potential recruits than any slogan before it — “Aim High” included.
Washington heard something else. Rep. Allen Boyd said the ads looked like the kind an advocacy group would run, and Rep. John Murtha agreed; a senior Pentagon official said, “It doesn’t look like a recruiting ad.” The New York Times reported that “across the Pentagon, the new motto was seen as boasting of a different kind of exceptionalism, one that put the Air Force above the rest of the military.”
It was never a motto, but it was treated like one. In the spring of 2010, Air Force leaders stopped using it. A base commander’s commentary that August opened by quoting the Air Force Times headline: “‘Above All’ is out.”
WHAT IS THE AIR FORCE MOTTO?
The Air Force motto is “Aim High … Fly-Fight-Win,” a call and response adopted on October 7, 2010. “Aim High” is the call; “Fly-Fight-Win” is the answer. The service had gone 63 years without an official motto — through Korea, Vietnam and manned balloon flights to the edge of space.
The officer who ran the search, the project’s lead scientist, Lt. Col. Clark Groves, described his brief this way: “Find the Semper Fi for the Air Force.” His team spent almost nine months on it — face-to-face sessions with nearly 300 Airmen in every major command, then about 250 more, then two service-wide surveys. Five finalists went to CORONA, the senior leaders’ conference. The announcement came with a line meant as a verdict on the decade before it:
“Slogans and ad phrases come and go, but a motto is meant to be passed from one generation of Airmen to another,” said Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force James Roy.
The winner was assembled from spare parts. “Aim High” was the slogan dropped ten years earlier; “fly, fight and win” was already the service’s mission statement, which since 2021 has read “To fly, fight, and win … airpower anytime, anywhere.”
AIM HIGH, AGAIN
The Air Force brought “Aim High” back as its advertising slogan on September 8, 2014, “after a 15-year hiatus,” with GSD&M’s “I am an American Airman” campaign. One spot starred Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh; another stitched together Air Force Academy commencement speeches by Presidents Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush.
GSD&M won a third Air Force contract in 2018, worth $741 million and running through September 2027. Then the plan changed: in April 2025, according to the GAO, the Air Force began moving to a new marketing contractor.
The recruiting numbers swung hard under the same two words. In fiscal 2023 the Air Force missed its active-duty goal for the first time since 1999, nearly 2,700 short of 26,877. In April 2026 it hit its 32,750-recruit goal five months early.
The slogan never moved. In October 2026 the top of airforce.com reads, in two words, “AIM HIGH” — the line that was “not cutting it anymore” in 2000, still outlasting everything that replaced it.
AIR FORCE SLOGANS FAQ
What is the current Air Force slogan?
The current Air Force slogan is “Aim High,” the recruiting line at the top of airforce.com as of October 2026. It first ran from 1984 to 2000, returned in 2014, and also forms the first half of the official motto, “Aim High … Fly-Fight-Win.” The mission statement is separate: “To fly, fight, and win … airpower anytime, anywhere.”
What is the Air Force motto in Latin?
The U.S. Air Force has no Latin motto. Its only official motto, adopted in 2010, is in English: “Aim High … Fly-Fight-Win.” The Latin line people often have in mind belongs to the Space Force, which unveiled “Semper Supra” — “Always Above” — along with its logo on July 22, 2020.
What was the Air Force motto before 2010?
The Air Force had no official motto before 2010 — not as a separate service after 1947, nor as the Air Service, Air Corps or Army Air Forces. What people remember are recruiting slogans: “Aim High” from 1984 to 2000, then “No One Comes Close,” “Cross Into the Blue” and “Above All,” which many mistook for a motto.
What are the Air Force core values?
The Air Force core values are “Integrity First, Service Before Self and Excellence in All We Do,” first published in 1997. They are often confused with the motto, but they serve a different job: the values describe how Airmen are expected to behave, while “Aim High … Fly-Fight-Win” is the call and response that expresses pride in the service.
