I work in this field, so I sometimes take it for granted that people understand this stuff. Here's a good briefing (and the associated slides are here individually or here in PDF format) on US military space capabilities. You might want to open two browsers, one for the briefing and another for the slides.

There's some good background material in there. I especially like the 17th and 18th slides provided below.

Keep in mind that each of those 1000 B-17 bombers carried a crew of 9 or 10 men. They were escorted by hundreds of fighters. On a typical mission, they'd lose quite a few of those planes (60 bombers were lost on two separate missions in 1943 out of less than 400). Today, we can hit the same target with a single plane. In fact, we can hit several targets with a single plane instead of 1000 planes to hit a single target.

That dramatic increase in accuracy has revolutionized warfare and has radically reduced civilian casualties. During WWII, our forces often attacked population centers precisely because they couldn't hit small targets. "Bomber" Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, once said something to the effect that "It takes 3 years to build a factory. It takes 20 years to raise a factory worker." We don't operate that way any more.