United States Air Force (institutional actor)

Air Force operates as the institutional voice of U.S. military airpower within the series, invoked here when Bob Engler reports Air Force jets tracking an unidentified contact across the Pacific. The jets remain in the area for hours but cannot establish visual contact, highlighting both the service's instrument-driven authority and the operational limits of aerial surveillance. The Air Force functions as a non‑individuated actor—procedural, authoritative, and technocratic—injecting scale and urgency into civilian decision-making while remaining outside the personal narrative arcs of named characters.