XVIII Airborne Corps
corps of the United States Army
The XVIII Airborne Corps is a corps of the United States Army that has been in existence since 1942 and saw extensive service during World War II. The corps is designed for rapid deployment anywhere in the world and is referred to as "America's Contingency Corps". Its headquarters are at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the Airborne and Special Forces. The Corps was first created in Texas as a US Army Reserve unit after the First World War, and prior to the outbreak of the Second World War was located at Fort Sam Houston. After D-Day, its combat formations, including the 82nd Airborne Division and 101st Airborne Division took part in the campaigns in the Netherlands, including the Battle of Arnhem, and the Battle of the Bulge.
The Corps and its subordinate units would go on to participate in the Dominican Civil War, the Vietnam War, Operation Urgent Fury, Operation Just Cause, the Gulf War, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom. Along with the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne, which is today an air assault division, it also includes the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, along with various support, intelligence and logistics commands, and an airborne military police brigade, among the only of its kind. For most of its existence during and after the Cold War period it was under US Central Command, forming ARCENT's main contribution, but was later placed under the Western Hemisphere Command in 2025.
History
Earlier formations known as XVIII Corps
The modern XVIII Airborne Corps is not lineally related to two earlier U.S. Army formations known as "XVIII Corps". The first XVIII Corps was authorized by the National Defense Act of 1920 and constituted in the Regular Army on 29 July 1921. The headquarters and headquarters company were organized on 23 August 1922 with Organized Reserve personnel as "Regular Army Inactive" (RAI) units at Dallas, Texas.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q582971. VIAF identifies the subject as 140766814. The Library of Congress control number is n84054527. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1942, 2025, 1920 and 1921.
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This entry incorporates text from “XVIII Airborne Corps” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.