Future WARTHINK 039: How "TOP GUN" Sank the U.S. Navy--and Weakened Amerika: Alternative "Ending" Needed

"For every ACTION, there is an equal and opposite RE-ACTION".

--Sir Isaac Newton's 3rd Law

"BATTLE STATIONS! This is not a drill! Hard a Starboard 180 degrees! We have been GPS spoofed into enemy ballistic missile range!"

DoD to Boeing: TOP SECRET. Utmost urgency. Drop everything you are doing and navalize a long-range,  F-15EX Silent Eagle prototype with Vectored Thrust Canards (VTC) for STOL capabilities. Wings must fold for naval ship storage. "Q" unmanned version built-in option. Work around-the-clock. Have prototype ready for proof-of-concept testing within 30x days. Prepare to modify 100x existing F-15Es to this "QN" standard. Prepare to new build another 100x QF-15Ns. You have a blank check. Execute.

DoD to LockMartSky: TOP SECRET. Utmost urgency. Drop everything you are doing and SMALL SHIP-navalize a QF-35B VTOL prototype. Wings must fold for naval ship storage.  "Q" unmanned version built-in option.  Have prototype ready for proof-of-concept testing within 30x days. Prepare to modify 100x existing F-35Bs to this "QN" standard. Prepare to new build another 100x QF-35Bs. You have a blank check. Execute.

Prologue to Naval Disaster

It's now sadly clear that the 1986 movie, "TOP GUN" accomplished unintended NEGATIVE (-) consequences--potentially fatal--by ego-exalting young naval aviators at the expense of everything and everybody else. Did anyone security check TOP GUN producers Simpson/Bruckheimer/Scott for Communist ties? Very clever divide & conquer psyop. When the time came to finally re-engine the F-14 Tomcat's defective TF30 turbofans, the middle-aged, non-flying men at the Pentagon RETIRED the TOP GUN ego-icon out of emotional--and dangerously unprofessional spite--without replacing it with something better or at least as LONG-RANGED. It's humorous how the upcoming "TOP GUN 2" movie featuring the failed short-range, overweight, under-powered F/A-18 Super Hornet is going to gloss over the fact that the entire U.S. Navy is now without air cover from enemy business jets launching Exocet Anti-Ship Missiles (ASMs) into them like how the USS Stark was destroyed just 2x years after the movie was made public. How the entire "super carrier" navy can't land attack targets with its short-ranged planes without placing the entire TIN CAN surface battle group within enemy ballistic missile range like the Chinese Communist DF-21 carrier-killers. LTG Gavin's 1958 War & Peace in the Space Age warnings have not been heeded and have come true.

The movie pandering to the public's low I.Q.s poorly depicted the ASM threat in the final scene by absurdly NOT showing the Exocet ASMs being carried by enemy aircraft--just their "MIG-28" air cover that was intercepted, mostly destroyed and sent away. This could be fixed by adding scenes of say a pair of business jets with Exocets flying fast and low towards the carrier turning away when their air cover was lost. Too late now. The bureaucratic egotistic knee-jerk damage has been done.

Military futirst BlacktailFA adds:

I have a few additional insights into these issues as well, which you might find useful in this paper.

Top Gun did indeed ruin the U.S. Navy's airpower, but the consequences were felt much sooner than almost anyone is aware of --- and in fact, these consequences were felt even *before* Top Gun was conceived. Largely ignored in pop culture since the 1980s onward (the blurb from the intro to the Top Gun movie was more than sufficient to prevent most people from investigating the matter any further), Top Gun was actually the navy plagiarizing the USAF's creation of the FWS (Fighter Weapons School) in 1954. The NFWS (Naval Fighter Weapons School), more popularly called "Top Gun", wasn't established until 15 years later!

https://www.pogo.org/report/2020/04/preventing-train-and-defeat-in-future-conflicts/

Those truths are a matter of public record, and that alone says volumes of how inept the Navy was in this matter;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAF_Weapons_School#Origins

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Strike_Fighter_Tactics_Instructor_program

No one ever seems to ask why the Navy put such a low priority on training their airmen compared to the USAF throughout all of those 15 years, despite the Navy's experiences in World War 2, the Korean War, and eventually the Vietnam War?

Some of the best pilots the USAF had trained airmen at the FWS, not the least of whom was Captain (later Colonel) John R. Boyd. Boyd is specifically worth mentioning here, as he was the co-creator of the OODA Loop and Energy Maneuverability Theory, and he proved himself utterly unstoppable in mock dogfights (he was known throughout the USAF as "40-Second Boyd", because he boasted that he could defeat any opponent under any circumstances within 40 second in a dogfight; many other pilots challenged him, but never beat him). Boyd also taught pilots to immediately initiate a broad s-turn if the enemy fired a SAM at them, and throughout the Vietnam War, many pilots reported back to him that this simple tactic saved their lives.

Yet despite their pilots being so well instructed, USAF aerial victories slowly waned over time over Southeast Asia, while losses waxed. The pilots themselves all knew why and told everyone who listened, that the Pentagon's mandatory officer rotation policy was the cause; for each year an airman was in the pilot's seat, he was required to either man a desk through the following year, or leave the service. Pilots were constantly rotated-out just as they started to become competent veterans, as greenhorns were rotated-in to replace them. Perishable combat skills were allowed to atrophy, and no one was given the chance to maintain proficiency.

The Navy then created the NFWS in 1969, and got their much sought-after increase in their exchange ratio, but it was only a peak. The inevitable consequences of the Navy's decisions played-out two years after the movie Top Gun brags about the increase in the Navy's kill tally in 1970. In 1972, the Navy, Air Force, and marines combined scored only 34 kills against the VPAF, while VPAF Mig-21s shot-down 52 U.S. aircraft during the same year. Note that this is only for the Mig-21 *specifically*; the VPAF also flew Mig-17s and Mig-19s, both of which scored a fair number of kills as well.

The VPAF also churned-out 16 aces during the war, while the US had only 5 aces, only 2 of which scored all their kills over Southeast Asia. Their highest-scoring ace, Nguyen Van Coc, had 9 confirmed kills and 7 additional claimed kills, while the highest-scoring U.S. ace only had 6 kills. The skills of their pilots just kept going up and up with every passing year, simply because they never rotated pilots into and out of desk jobs

http://acepilots.com/vietnam/viet_aces.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Vietnam_War_flying_aces

Also notable is that Top Gun attempted to capitalize on the U.S. Navy's success in air-to-air combat in the Mediterranean in the 1981 First Gulf of Sidra Incident, but considering who they were up against and what transpired, they never had anything to brag about.

They fought Su-22 Fitters, which were ground attack aircraft that lacked much of an air-to-air capability. Even then, they first attempted to engage them with the vaunted AIM-54 Phoenix missile, which fell into the sea after flying just 50 miles (half that missile's range). Despite the F-14 Tomcat's much-vaunted "look-down, shoot-down" radar, and the Navy insisting that the AIM-7 Sparrow's (range of 15 miles) performance was improved since the Vietnam War, the F-14s instead closed to within 5 miles and shot-down the Su-22s with much more simple and inexpensive AIM-9 Sidewinders (with a range of 10 miles) --- a feat that the rickety old F-8 Crusader, long-since retired from the fighter role by the U.S. Navy, was capable of.

The Navy's F-14s later fought the Libyans again in the 1989 Gulf of Sidra Incident, this time against 2 Libyan Mig-23 Floggers. This time the Navy didn't even bother to send-up the F-14s with the Phoenix, and they attacked instead with Sparrows --- which only got a hit after two misses. The first Sidewinder launch got an instant kill.

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BlacktailFA is right and Top Gun the movie's 2nd most major technical fault is a LIE--no short-range, infared heat-seeking missiles are used which is absurd in ACM dogfights but "radar-guided" ones somehow getting snap-shot lock-ons. Autocannon high-explosive-shell-shooting cannon are depicted at dogfight close range but not heat-seeking Sidewinders. Tom Cruise's F-14 is hit by some MIG-28 cannon fire yet he decides to irresponsibly and unsafely fly by the carrier's superstucture control tower--intolerable mistake #3.

Blacktail FA continues:

Shooting-down the Flogger is no difficult feat either. The Israelis shot-down almost a dozen Syrian Mig-23s (along with more than 100 other aircraft) without a loss to themselves in a single firefight in 1982, and the Syrians were easily better pilots than the Libyans. In fact, Libyan Mig-23s even suffered heavy losses to Egyptian Mig-21s in 1977, with no Mig-21 kills to show for it. In fact, Egypt had previously acquired Mig-23s as one of the earliest export customers, only to mothball them in 1975 (they were never returned to Egyptian service --- gee, I wonder why?).

To put it another way, consider that although half as many Mig-23s as Mig-21s were built (5,000 versus 10,000), there are at least as many operational Mig-21s and Mig-21 users today as for Mig-23s (remember that the Mig-21 entered service more than a decade earlier).

In DESERT STORM, U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornets shot-down 2 Iraqi Mig-21s (one of which was the first kill of the war), but the Navy tends not to mention that 2 F/A-18s were also lost in air-to-air combat as well; F-18C #163502 and F-18C #163484, which were shot-down by an F-7A (Chinese export-model Mig-21) and a Mig-25, respectively. Meanwhile, F-14s were held-back by the Navy so much that they only scored a single kill (with a Sidewinder, naturally) against the Iraqi Air Force, while USAF and RSAF F-15 Eagles shot-down more than 30 Iraqi aircraft. The Navy's flimsy excuse was that F-14 patrols were more urgently needed over the Gulf to protect Coalition naval assets; which is belied by the fact that one of their F-14s was shot-down by a ground-launched SA-2 Guideline SAM over Iraq.

In short, there's no evidence that Top Gun did any favors for the U.S. Navy. It was a temporary success that created and deeply-entrenched a long-term false confidence in U.S. naval airpower, even as it gradually atrophied over time. The US Navy chose the wrong aircraft, the wrong Carriers, the wrong weapons, and the wrong personnel management policies, and the long-term consequences of those decisions are only just beginning to unfold.

As for the F/A-18 Hornet, I have so much dirt on that airplane, it's not even funny. Get yourself copies of the books The Pentagon Paradox and Fall From Glory to see just how far gone it was from the very start. In no particular order, here are the various "bloopers" I've learned about it. The following is a sample plate of some of the dirty little secrets I've learned about the F/A-18.

There was never originally supposed to have been an F-18 at all. The Navy committed to buying whatever aircraft the USAF chose as the winner of the Advanced Combat Fighter competition, and were contractually obligated to do so by Act of Congress. The USAF chose the YF-16 over the YF-17, and the YF-16 became the F-16. The Navy brazenly dismissed their obligation to buy the USAF's aircraft, and backed the loser instead.

The F-17 was inferior in all respects to the F-16. It's maneuverability, range, payload, maintenance, cost, size, and weight were all much worse. The F-16 was much-criticized for being powered by a single engine, but it was the same F100 engine used in the already-operational F-15, and half the engines simultaneously running inside an aircraft means half as much wear and maintenance (and thus, twice the reliability and availability); the YJ101 engine that powered the F-17 was still only a prototype, not an operational engine in mass production like the F100.

The Navy argued that the F-17 was better for use on Carriers, because it required extremely little modification for that role. It was so heavily-modified by the time the design was finalized, that the only remaining common components with the F-17 were it's vertical stabilizers, and the designation was changed to F-18. It ended up entering operational service 6 years after the F-16, by which time more F-16s were in service than the number of F-18s that were ever built.

Furthermore, the Navy insisted that the F-17 was safer for use far out at sea, because in the even that one engine fails, it can fly home on the other engine. Problem is, only one engine in the F-17 had an oil pump, while only the other engine had an alternator to keep electricity flowing. Lose the engine with the oil pump, and you have less than 10 minutes to land before both engines seize; lose the engine with the alternator, and the aircraft falls out of the sky like a rock. This limitation was carried-over from the F-17's YJ101 to the F-18's F404.

F404s with both an alternator *and* an oil pump were developed later for single-engine aircraft (several aircraft used this engine, including the A-4SU Super Skyhawk, JAS-39 Gripen, and F-20 Tigershark), but these were never incorporated into the F-18.

The whole point of the Advanced Combat Fighter competition was to field an aircraft that was cheaper than the F-15 Eagle, which had earned great scorn from Congress and the public over it's $25 Million unit cost. The initial F-16 design cost $10 Million, growing to $15 Million after the modifications the USAF's "Add-On" committee forced onto it. The F-14 at that time was considered beyond the pale in cost, at an unprecedented $35 Million. When the F-18 entered service in 1984, it cost $45 Million.

There were originally supposed to be both a fighter version and a ground attack version of this aircraft, dubbed the F-18 and A-18, but the navy smushed them together into the "F/A-18" to make the program harder to kill. A slash as part of a system designation was explicitly outlawed under DoD regulations, and it still is, but everyone gives the F-18 a free pass (in effect proving that the DoD cherry-picks the rules they themselves impose after the fact; and consequently, that they have no integrity). The designation is also invalid in that the DoD's own dictionary specifically defines fighters as intrinsically having a secondary air-to-ground combat capability.

The F-18 has no legs [range], and the same mission profile that had the preceding A-7 Corsair II (Now retired in favor of F-18s for everything--you can see them on deck in Top Gun having no active movie role) fly 2000 miles with 4 Mk.82 500lb bombs had an F-18 flying just 500 miles with 2 bombs. The prevailing motto of the F-18 community in the 1980s was "One plane, one bomb, one way".

The F-18's payload fell and fell over the years since the days of the F-17, but the Navy brushed this issue aside, claiming that the use of PGMs on the F-18 would it enable to hit just as many targets as previous warplanes, while carrying less ordnance. The F-18's results in DESERT STORM proved otherwise.

Part of the F-18 PGM narrative (lie-story) was that they could use laser-guided bombs to got more targets with less ordnance. However, the F-18 lacked an integral laser designator, and the laser targeting pods widely-touted in MDD's advertisement campaign for the F-18 since the early 1980s weren't available for it in an operational capacity until 1993.

In ODS, most of the laser-guided bombs were delivered by USAF F-111E and F-111F Aardvarks. Most of the Coalition laser-guided bombs delivered by the U.S. Navy were dropped from A-6 Intruders (now retired in favor of F-18s for everything).

The lion's share of CAS missions flown in DESERT STORM were carried-out by the A-10 Warthog, which flew 30% of all sorties (8500 sorties) were munitions were delivered. USMC AV-8B Harrier IIs flew some 3,000 sorties (most of them CAS), and were cited by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf as being a vital factor to winning the war. F-16s and F-15Es flew thousands of CAS missions as well. F-111s and F-117s both made a good accounting for themselves in CAS missions, despite not being designed for them, nor initially planned for use in CAS. You hardly ever hear anything about what F-18s were doing while all of this was taking place. However, Top Gun 2 will feature them.

Also important is that while the party line on the F-18 was that it was a PGM aircraft, the armored A-10 was supposedly not. Yet, 5,000 AGM-65 Maverick missiles, over 90% launched in ODS, were delivered by A-10s. It was hand-picked especially for this role even before the shooting started, simply because the Coalition leadership deemed the armored A-10 more likely to be able to engage enemies with the Maverick and survive than un-armored F-18s; due to all of the protection features the Warthogs have. Only 7 A-10s were lost in combat after over 8000 combat missions, despite some 70 of the 144x A-10s taking hits, contrary to the pre-war dogma which held that 7x A-10s would be lost EVERY SINGLE DAY in a war as large as ODS. I can't find any data on how many Mavericks were launched by F-18s, so suffice to say, it can't be many.

The only Mavericks compatible with F-18s in ODS were the laser-guided models. to reiterate, the F-18 couldn't paint it's own targets with coded laser beams.

Because the trans-sonic, F-18 couldn't paint it's own targets for attacks with laser-guided ordnance, another U.S. Navy aircraft had to accompany them. F-14s were used mainly for fleet defense and recon missions, with the occasional iron bomb sortie; so that meant that the only other Navy aircraft that could accompany the F-18s were subsonic A-6s or A-7s --- defeating the whole purpose to sending F-18s on precision attack missions, as older and slower aircraft had to overfly the target anyway!

Of the 84, 000 tons of ordnance dropped in ODS by the entire Coalition, less than 740 tons were guided munitions used by the U.S. Navy and marines. Two notable munitions compatible with the F-18 during were the AGM-62 Walleye guided bomb and the AGM-84E SLAM. Only 3 SLAMs were used in combat, and they were delivered only by A-6 Intruders. Only 131 Walleyes were used in ODS, and all were delivered only by A-7 Corsair IIs.

The fact that half the tons of ordnance delivered in DESERT STORM were iron bombs dropped by USAF B-52s further discredits the Navy's PGM excuses. When the war started, the B-52 was the only U.S.-operated warplane still compatible with the M117, and there were 44,600 in the U.S. inventory at that time; at the end of the war, there were exactly zero M117s remaining in the U.S. inventory.

Two more B-52 facts from ODS that discredit the F-18 PGM lie-narrative are that they also delivered AGM-86C CALCM cruise missiles, and over 100 of them; but only in a single launch event at the very start of the war. The USAF also went to great lengths to buy hundreds of Israeli-designed Popeye missiles (designated as the AGM-142 Have Nap in U.S. service) for use  by the B-52; most of which were in the U.S. inventory at the start of ODS; but not a single one of them was ever launched in anger; and all were removed from service without replacement and disposed of by demolition only a decade after the USAF bought them.

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BlacktailFA thinks offering unmanned drones as an enticement to get the USN off-its-ass by removing TOP GUN pilot egotism will not work and dismisses the TIN CAN surface Navy being unsurvivable in the face of attack submarines and all sorts of ASMs.

Showing the flag and then being sunk in flames and tossed into the water to be eaten by sharks and die of exposure isn't going to get oil tankers and containerships through. 

TOP GUN 3: The Reality OUTCOME Needed

Every U.S. Navy TIN CAN surface ship frigate, destroyer, cruiser must have its own AIR COVER provided by a QF-35B lightly air-to-air armed for VTOL operations from the existing stern flight deck. Where is this TERN drone for 24/7 continuous surveillance? WE NEED A DRONE-IN-A-BOX N-O-W. If pilot egos cannot be managed fly this defacto SEAPLANE FIGHTER remotely with an enlisted remote pilot Naval Maritime Defense Force (NMDF) exploiting the current generation's mom's basement flight simulator operations skills. The USN should have never stopped operating seaplane fighters. Eat this crow and STFU. ASAP a naval seaplane fighter like the Convair SeaDart should be fielded to launch from turn-table stern catapults and sealand to be crane recovered. However, we don't have 10x years and a $1B to wait for this "perfect" solution so we must go with "good enough" QF-35Bs playing VTOL jump jet. 

www.combatreform.org/seaplanefighters.htm

No more USS Starks and Vincennes blasting innocent civilians in airliners or themselves being blasted because they are in complicated civil-military air spaces and unable to get into the air and VERIFY what's going on. 

Every "Super Carrier" at sea needs a squadron of 12x QF-15Ns so it can actually do something of military significance outside of land-based ASM ranges and keep out air-launched ASM platforms.  

QF-15N "Stealth Sea Eagles" with VTC will be Super Maneuverable to win Air Combat Maneuver (ACM) battles against highly maneuverable Russian/Chinese-made Su-30-type fighters after the "merge"--unlike the current inferiorly-maneuverable Super Hornets and Lightning IIs compromised by excessive black boxes or radar evasive structures. If this is not fixed, the USN is about to re-live the Brewster Buffalo vs. Zero disaster again. 

Looking Beyond Fighter Combat...

What military significant tasks MUST the USN do other than competing with the USAF for Douhet geostrategic land bombardment futility bragging rights?

Father Mahan would remind us that maritime trade is the importance of naval power--container ships and oil tankers will not set sail if its not safe. Will Amerika starve without a steady stream of clever Chinese gadgets flowing into WalMarts?

The NMDF should also develop KITS to arm container ships and oil tankers with anti-torpedo torpedoes, some kind of torpedo thwarting nets and flight decks for a pair of QF-35Bs--the WW2 Hurricats reborne to get the necessary maritime convoys through the awaiting swarms of enemy attack aircraft and submarines.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/YFpUQABlpb3r/

Go to H.I. Sutton's web pages and videos to soak in the sharks awaiting all vulnerable surface ships.

The NMDF should militarize a Sea State 4 capable seaplane like the SeaWolf Amphibian (SWA) with folding wings and actively pinging sonar to flush-out and destroy enemy attack subs before they get into torpedo range. SWAs can be remotely operated if its not enough "fighter" for pilot egos. 

John 3:16

Semper Airborne!

James Bond is REAL.