can we get a whole analysis of top gun? like a couple paragraphs at least. i watched half of it based on that one post abt how the navy wanted a movie but tony scott just wanted to shoot sunsets and val kilmer was butthurt and this portrayed a homosexual but this seems like a kinda weak take to me because i feel like masc gays are like... plausibly PART of the navy image that they are selling
Okay so by the Vietnam war, American fighters were specialized for intercepting bomber waves at long range, high altitude, and high speed, for use in a direct nuclear confrontation with the USSR. This left them less optimized for the sort of low-altitude air superiority missions called for in the Indochinese theatre, and K/D ratios were far below the Korean War blowouts hoped for. Beyond the planes themselves, contemporary doctrine focused on air-to-air missiles, so pilots were ill-trained in dogfighting and some fighters lacked guns entirely.
Like a lot about the Vietnam War, the war-winning solution was ready by the late 70s: the \u201cteen series\u201d fighters \u2013 F-14, F-15, F-16 and F-18 \u2013 and dissimilar air combat training \u2013 dogfight skirmishing against different airframes, to learn to exploit the qualities of each \u2013 prominently through the Navy\u2019s TOPGUN training program.
The movie, much like the invasion of Grenada and Southern American \u201cdrug interdiction\u201d missions, was largely an excuse to show off this new post-Vietnam capacity, remoralize and revalorize the military, without actually engaging in theatres presenting a risk of escalation
"}