pr00ne,
I may have been just a few years out but, when I joined the RAF in 1959, we had Hunters, Meteors, Javelins, Canberras, all 3xV-bombers either in-service or about to enter, Shackletons and the Lightning entering service. The numbers of aircraft available for war would make today's force look more like a Wing and the number of operational bases in UK and around the World gave a generous degree of redundancy.
OK, let's joke about the individual capability of each weapons system but they were state of the art in their time and they constituted a formidable force in the World.
Today we have such a piddling little capability that we can't even get our boats back from Iran.