Stop that.
I'm here to present the thrilling prequel: TOPGUN: a long and meticulous report on naval aviation.
So TOPGUN: Maverick has become a huge hit, and I know i'm a couple weeks late to this. But
that Maverick subtitle makes me think that they're gonna make like 50 more TOPGUN movies.
Why is TOPGUN a thing? TOPGUN the movie makes TOPGUN the school seem
like the all-star edition of some reality tv show. "I gotta send somebody from this squadron to
Miramar. I gotta give you your dream shot. I'm gonna send you up against the best.
You two characters are going to TOPGUN." This is a real Navy program, established in 1969,
so i want to dive into the history of how the program started for the type of person me who
is less interested in planes and more interested in really big pdf files. I am not this guy in the
movie, I'm not this guy, I'm this guy. I think looking at the key report that started it all,
the Ault report, says something that explains TOPGUN the program better than TOPGUN the movie.
So I want to kind of underline what i'm seeking to do here. This is about how one Navy report changed
Naval aviation. The scope is pretty narrow because, honestly, when I started researching
this, the only thing I thought of when I heard F4 and F8 were the function keys on my keyboard!
Nerds, right? In addition to the Ault report and some books,
I learned a lot from this interview with Captain Rick Ludwig, who has flown...every plane?
"The F4 phantom, the T2 charlie, TH-4j, flew f4 ands we have F14s
and at TOPGUN I flew the f5 and the a4. The f5e tiger ii. A4 echoes. VF-31. The F-16n."
"What was the best airplane you ever flew?" "Right, well, I haven't finished."
"Oh, I'm sorry." Um that full interview is linked below.
I want to tell you why the Ault report happened, what it said, and what it meant
i was going to print out this as a visual aid but Fedex Office wanted 75 dollars to do it.
So we're going to be using the digital version today. Yeah.
In 1968, Captain Frank Ault was tasked with finding out why Navy aviators
were doing so poorly. TOPGUN is part of the legacy of the Vietnam war.
The report explicitly states the problem. I'm going to actually read from the report:
"combat kills per number of missiles expended remain below expected or desired levels."
So let's chart this out: Navy pilots are flying these great planes,
mostly the f4 phantom 2 and F8 Crusader. The North Vietnamese are in a range of MIG planes.
That matters, because the kill ratio in Vietnam was averaged out two and a half to one, so
there were two and a half MIGS down for every Phantom or Crusader that went down.
That was really bad. In World War II that balance was 14-1,
in the Korean War it was 12-1. So Ault is saying what went
wrong. This is not just a problem because of the casualties. Let me cut to what Rick Ludwig says.
"With only 12 to 24 fighters on an aircraft carrier you're going
to rapidly deplete them if you continue that." The Ault report says "the need for new approaches
and innovations appeared self-evident considering the continuing inability to
achieve desired results through the attempted implementation of recurring recommendations."
Let's translate that to English — basically, we've got to switch it up because we can't
just improve on this, we've got to reinvent the wheel. Something is really really wrong. They
are starting from scratch here. They don't know that they're going to come up with TOPGUN school,
so they're trying everything. They've got five organizing objectives that I'm gonna
roughly translate into human speak. One: are the planes and missiles good?
Two: are people helping the pilots do a good job? Three: is everything ready to go?
Four: Do the pilots know what they're doing? And five: are we fixing broken stuff?
And it's that fourth one that matters for this video, because that answer was no.
This is the problem and solution in the Ault report.
"Despite a renewed emphasis on air combat maneuvering training since the commencement of
hostilities in southeast Asia much of this effort has been wasted because it did not stress one of
the key elements of the problem: missile envelope recognition identification at low altitude."
So the reality of this situation is different than the way that they planned it.
Also, I don't know why i said altitude "awllllllltitude" — just
classed myself up a bit there. "Since the missile control system computers
are not properly mechanized for a low altitude" — I did it again! Awllltitude. What am I?
"For a low altitude maneuvering target firing envelope recognition
is largely by eyeball and intuition." F4s at that time did not dog fight.
"There was no formal syllabus for air combat maneuvering or one the number one
v1 maneuvering and it was done on the side." This is why the training was necessary, and
it's not because the Navy was always bad at dog fights, it was because their training had lapsed.
Let me give you a capsule here: um, airplane nerds, I'm asking for your patience.
I know that I'm oversimplifying. I'm imagining rick right now,
just looking at me skeptically, hating me. On the one side that said um the f4 for
example it started out just shooting missiles. Okay it didn't have guns on it.
That means that in close combat it's basically useless.
That was the only reason that the F8 did slightly better than the F4
because it was equipped with guns, it could handle really close combat with enemy fighters.
Back to the report: "Since decommissioning of the Fleet Air Gunnery Unit (FAGU) in 1960,
there's been a gradual loss of expertise and continuity in the field of fighter weaponry."
So the Navy had a program in 1960, Fleet Air Gunnery Unit, but they closed it down.
That meant that basically nobody was training people well and consistently on how to fight.
"You need a cadre of individuals and a school that are well versed in fighter tactics,
threat tactics, the weapons systems and that will stay abreast of that
and that can train the people or train the fleet to increase their proficiency level."
Appendix 4 recommends a postgraduate fighter's weapons school.
They lay out the syllabus, the parameters, and the theory that TOPGUN graduates can go back and teach
everybody to fight like that. The movie makes it seem like American Idol for pilots, but TOPGUN was
really about fixing a training problem. It is a movie about HR.
"TOPGUN: a way to distribute institutional knowledge efficiently."
The United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Program, the thing that we call TOPGUN,
it seemed to work. Now let's not overrate it — one more Ault report quote. He says, "the road
to improvement lay through a virtual jungle of problems, some readily and easily solvable, others
requiring more funds, more time, greater effort, and sustained perseverance and follow-through."
But TOPGUN did something and it's still around today. In May, 1983 Ehud Yonay
profiled the program for California magazine, it got adapted into a movie, and the rest is history.
So why of all things TOPGUN did i choose the report, the least visual element? I think the
Ault report gives you some fascinating big picture stuff, like the hubris behind entering Vietnam,
the idea that this conflict would be one with big campaigns and not a bunch of dog fights.
But the Ault report specifically shows how TOPGUN: Maverick, the ultimate cinematic experience,
is the result of a careful case study that was about solving problems. And how in reality,
people like Maverick aren't hotshots, but vessels for institutional memory,
serving the Navy's larger training mission. TOPGUN is planes and crashes and volleyball, but
to make that happen you need a PDF so big that it costs 75 dollars to print.
"TOPGUN: Fed Ex please find a way to make document reproduction slightly more affordable."
Okay, that's it, thank you for watching this video. I was intrigued by the history of the
TOPGUN program and reading the Ault report was really fascinating, so i've linked that in the
description below, along with some of the other resources. Uh I just want to thank you
for watching, this is a personal and history channel where i cover that kind of stuff and
I feel really lucky to have some of you watching. Um, in my last video I had a spot, this spot here,
a big rash on my arm, and a couple you were really nice and you were like, "hey man you
should check out that rash on your arm." And the doctor diagnosed it as a tick bite and I took some
medication for it, so how kind of like crazy and cool is that, that I got a uh commenter diagnosis?
Anyway, I'm really grateful for that and the spirit in which those recommendations were given,
it was like a nice thing, you know, it wasn't mocking me for being a tick boy or something.
So, yeah, I really appreciate it and uh if you can subscribe it helps out the channel
or comment if you see any other flesh eating diseases I might have. Uh please let me know.
Until then, I will see you in the next one. Alright bye.