Perhaps the most incendiary statistic of the Korean War is the aircraft kill ratios. Here's What You Need To Remember: But the air war over Korea was a throwback to the past. The Korean War was the first of the post-1945 small wars, those millstones that dragged the American eagle through Vietnam and then Afghanistan and Iraq. Communist and UN armies surged back and forth over the Korean hills, without quite understanding who they were fighting and what they were fighting for. But the air war over Korea was a throwback to the past. Not World War II, even though many of the pilots in Korea had drawn first blood in that earlier conflict. That massive global struggle was industrialized aerial warfare, where the combatants flung thousands of aircraft at each other and pilots and machines were just so many expendable munitions.