Fighter pilot victories in clear-air combat are rare; it follows that they are Poisson-distributed, and that you would expect to have a few extreme outliers and a great mass of apparent "non-killers"

I don't see how that follows at all. You don't know it was a Poisson distribution (there are lots of distributions natural phenomena follow; the negative binomial and lognormal also pop up a lot in human contexts), and even if you did, you don't know the the relevant rate parameter lambda to know how many pilots should be expected to have 1 success, and since you're making purely a priori arguments here rather than observing that the studies have specific flaws (eg perhaps they included pilots who never saw combat), it's clear you're trying to make a fully general counterargument to explain away any result those studies could have reached without knowing anything about them. ('Oh, only .001% of pilots killed anyone? That darn Poisson!')