Easily: thanks to the development and maintenance of the US nuclear forces, the US will never enter into a direct military conflict with any other first-world country with nuclear weapons of its own. Thanks to the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, what could have easily been a massively destructive total war between two superpowers was restricted to a half-century of posturing and proxy warfare, all of which killed at least an order of magnitude fewer people than would have died in a direct, total war.
No, it's not warm and fuzzy to think about things in this way, but we're not children and we don't have the luxury of idealistic naivety.
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Can you name a specific example?
Yes, easily. One responsibility of the Canadian Air Force is search and rescue on land and at sea.
Yeah, right. Couldn't that be implemented by some specialty rescue team?
Looks more like something that was assigned to the Air Force mostly for public relations ("look, we also save lives").
You mean like this specialty rescue team?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Parares...
Yes, except not having ANYTHING to do with the military.
Easily: thanks to the development and maintenance of the US nuclear forces, the US will never enter into a direct military conflict with any other first-world country with nuclear weapons of its own. Thanks to the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, what could have easily been a massively destructive total war between two superpowers was restricted to a half-century of posturing and proxy warfare, all of which killed at least an order of magnitude fewer people than would have died in a direct, total war.
No, it's not warm and fuzzy to think about things in this way, but we're not children and we don't have the luxury of idealistic naivety.