NATO COMBAT PILOT

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.