NATO, that is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the North Atlantic Alliance, is a military alliance of the countries of Western Europe and North America, concluded in 1949 as a response to the aggressive foreign policy of the USSR at that time. It assumed the collective defense of all member states in the event of a possible aggression by the Soviet troops, and from 1955 – by the troops of the Warsaw Pact. NATO includes countries such as the USA, Canada, Italy, Great Britain, West Germany (now West Germany) and – since 1999 – also Poland. It is estimated that at the end of the 1980s, the total number of combat aircraft in NATO forces amounted to approximately 11,300 machines, of which approximately 7,300 were part of the American armed forces. Of course, this huge number of machines required a properly trained ground crew. In most NATO countries in the 1980s, it was composed of professional soldiers and well-paid civilian workers, which in turn translated into a high degree of professionalism and good or very good training. Very often, the ground staff at NATO bases had modern technical and diagnostic equipment, which allowed for the efficient operation of the aircraft. It is assumed that the average time to prepare a machine for flight in the 1980s was shorter or much shorter at NATO air bases than in the Warsaw Pact. Electronic electronics, which were often of much better quality than in the Warsaw Pact, were also used on a larger scale. The largest NATO air bases in Western Europe at that time included Rammstein in Germany and Waddington in Great Britain.
NATO, that is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the North Atlantic Alliance, is a military alliance of the countries of Western Europe and North America, concluded in 1949 as a response to the aggressive foreign policy of the USSR at that time. It assumed the collective defense of all member states in the event of a possible aggression by the Soviet troops, and from 1955 – by the troops of the Warsaw Pact. NATO includes countries such as the USA, Canada, Italy, Great Britain, West Germany (now West Germany) and – since 1999 – also Poland. It is estimated that at the end of the 1980s, the total number of combat aircraft in NATO forces amounted to approximately 11,300 machines, of which approximately 7,300 were part of the American armed forces. It is also worth adding that, unlike the air forces of the Warsaw University, the NATO air force was not so much unified when it comes to the types of aircraft used. For example, they used several types of interceptors, e.g. F-15 in the USA, but also PANAVIA Tornado in Great Britain and Germany, or Mirage 2000 in France. The main tasks of the NATO air force were to ensure air superiority in a given theater of hostilities (implicitly – over the Atlantic and Western Europe), to carry out strikes with conventional weapons at the tactical and operational level, and nuclear weapons at the operational and strategic level (e.g. British bombers with series “V”). It is also worth adding that the aircraft of NATO countries – mainly in the second half of the 1970s and 1980s – had significantly better avionics, especially radars.
