NATO's air power is not just purely advanced fighter jets and stealth bombers, but more so the men and women in uniform that operate and maintain these air forces. Countries like Turkey and France have formidable air forces within the Alliance, but they all fall short of the US Air Force in terms of tech and scale. The USAF, in fact, has more personnel than many NATO militaries in total,
Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can't match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, "Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done."