Fighting and surveillance by air are needed now, more than ever, so we came up with a list of the strongest air forces in the world: 2017 rankings.
With the current state of affairs in the United States and around the world, having a strong military seems necessary, in order to protect the rest of us. Hopefully, no war will break out in the near future where we would have to put these military forces to the test. I (and I’m sure many others) are perfectly fine with the latter. These days, it seems like every country wants to hold the title of the most powerful military. However, when it came to the most powerful military in the world in 2016, the U.S. took the crown, which is really no surprise as they also ranked number one for the strongest army in the world 2016. The United States has also been in the lead for years when it comes to the most powerful navy in the world. The U.S.’s rankings in these categories are not shocking since hundreds of billions of dollars are put into the budget. We can’t hold a candle to the top contenders for education around the world, but we have a big, strong military. For more on navies head on to our article about strongest navies in the world: 2017 rankings.
The introduction of aircraft forever changed the way we fight wars both defensively and offensively. Today, air power is one of the most dominant factors in a modern battlefield. Though the U.S. Air Force has been around for about a century, it became its own branch of the military in 1947. No wonder we already dealt with this topic in our article about largest air forces in the world. Moreover, we were writing about fastest US air force fighter planes and biggest air force bases in the world as well.
For determining the strength of a country’s air power to come up with our list of world Air Force ranking, we took into account the total aircraft strength of a country, including fixed wing and rotary-wing (helicopters) aircraft in service across all branches of the military for 2017. We took help from several online sources for this purpose, including Global Firepower, IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies) and the U.S. Department of Defense.
When it came down to ranking the strongest air forces in the world we went with the total aircraft strength of a country. This includes every aircraft a country has in active service with branches of its military, so we ranked the strongest air force in terms of total aircraft strength; the higher the number of aircraft a country boasts the higher it has been ranked in our list. Thankfully, we had workable data for the year 2017, thus making our list the most up to date.
Now that everything is said and done, there is no point in stalling, let’s get our list of strongest Air Forces in the world: 2017 rankings started.
