An American Story

By Dan Pedersen

When the enemy scored, the families were devastated. You seldom see that written about. But we’ve all come home to tell widows and fatherless kids how sorry we were. We gave them what peace we could. The truth is, that loss never goes away. It warps the rest of their lives as they wrestle with the pain. That old adage ”Time heals all wounds“? Bull. Fifty years on, I’ve seen those families still break down in tears as they talk of their fallen aviator.

You don’t get over that kind of pain. You just learn to live around it. It becomes part of who you are, and for us out on Yankee Station, that grief motivated us to sacrifice for each other.

(Pedersen 2019, 4)

Worse, we were losing the larger war. Destroying the targets given to us by the Pentagon seemed to make no difference in the war to the south. The losses mounted, and the MiGs started seeking us out. The North Vietnamese possessed a small but well–trained air force , proxied by their Chinese and Soviet allies. As good as it was, they were not in the same league as the Soviet Air Force, so it sent shock waves through the Navy when North Vietnamese pilots started shooting us down. During the Korean War , the North Korean Air Force was virtually wiped out in the opening months. A decade later, the Vietnamese MiGs gave us a real fight. They shot down one of ours for every two MiGs that we claimed. We considered the loss rate intolerable, given our long history of deeply one–sided kill ratios. In World War II, U.S. naval aviators crushed the Japanese in the central Pacific on the way to Tokyo, with Hellcat pilots, who scored three–fourths of the Navy’s air–to–air victories, posting a kill ratio on the order of nineteen to one. In Vietnam, we simply were not allowed to win, so the Navy bureaucracy did what bureaucracies do best: It continued on course. Micromanaged from Washington, D.C., we made the same mistakes month after month. It nearly crippled U.S. naval aviation.

In January 1969, a plain–spoken carrier skipper named Frank Ault wrote a report to the chief of naval operations detailing deadly flaws in our fighter tactics and weapons systems. His list of complaints was a long one, and the Navy decided to act. Unfortunately, many in senior commands worried more about their careers than about fixing the problem. By approving the creation of an air combat postgraduate school – which we quickly named Topgun – they gave the appearance of doing something to change things. Under President Johnson’s and Secretary McNamara’s leadership , the Navy bureaucracy seemed more interested in appearing to solve problems than risking failure by actually trying to solve them. They gave the leadership of Topgun to a relatively junior officer – me.

(Pedersen 2019, 5-6)

Those rules of engagement negated the way we had trained to fight in the air. The value of our F–4 Phantoms was their ability to destroy enemy planes from beyond visual range. The AIM–7 Sparrow was the ultimate expression of that new way of fighting. Track and lock with the radar system, loose the missile from ten miles out, and say goodbye to a MiG. This is how the Navy trained us to fight. We abandoned dogfight training because of the Navy’s faith in missile technology. Most of our aircrews didn’t know how to fight any other way. Yet our own rules of engagement kept us from using what we were taught.

(Pedersen 2019, 73)

At the end of March, in a speech declaring that he would not run for reelection in November, Lyndon Johnson changed the entire dynamic of the air war. He announced an immediate suspension of all bombing attacks north of the 20th parallel. Just like that, Rolling Thunder was over, neutralized by a lame–duck president.

Up until then, the MiGs had been forced to operate from China, reducing their effectiveness. When LBJ told the world where we would not be bombing anymore, he essentially told the North Vietnamese we were giving their fighter regiments a safe space again. At the same time, the new restrictions greatly reduced the Air Force’s role in the air war over North Vietnam. The onus to continue it fell on the Navy.

(Pedersen 2019, 90-91)

Topgun was best understood as a graduate school. It functioned essentially like a teachers’ college for fighter pilots. Our job was not just to teach pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky. It was to teach pilots to teach other pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky. Our first class of students, handpicked by their squadron commanders to join us at Miramar in sixty short days, would spend about five weeks with us and then return to their units to spread to their peers what we had taught them. In this way the Navy hoped to leverage a multiplier effect, seeding new ideas in a geometric progression as a class of eight went out to teach eight times sixteen more.

The way to true mastery of anything is to learn it to the point that you can teach it to someone else.

(Pedersen 2019, 105-106)

The problem with any theory is the baggage of its assumptions. We thought Major Boyd was making some rather large ones and considered his analysis suspect as a result. In the base auditorium at Tyndall that day, Ski poked Mel in the ribs.

”Why don’t you say something , Rattler.”

Mel stood up and proposed to the Air Force officer that he was underrating a few things. Namely people. Mel said that while weapons might have parameters and airplanes theoretical values, no algorithm could predict much if it excluded the most important factor of all: the skill, heart, and drive of the pilot in the cockpit. The moment of truth was the Merge. It was then that you had your chance to take the measure of a man.

”Sir,” Mel said, ”I just don’t think you can know anything about another pilot before the first turn. And if you don’t know that, then “you can’t say that a MiG–17 will win every time.”

(Pedersen 2019, 145)

Steve Smith was in charge of our BQM–34 Firebee drone live–fire exercises, generously provided to us by Jim Foster’s squadron up the road at Point Mugu. These remote–controlled jet–powered gunnery targets, built by the Ryan Aeronautical Company, had been around since the 1950s. Unlike towed targets and the more common drones, which did not maneuver, the BQM–34s were flown by an operator on the ground. They were capable of more than six hundred knots and could fly up to sixty thousand feet. In the hands of a Phantom instructor like Steve–O, well, that twenty–two–foot–long target had a fair chance of giving even a good pilot fits. While it didn’t have the power to soar vertically, it was plenty maneuverable, capable of sharp twists and break turns. Though we were a little worried about the possibility of accidents flying such a hot rod from the ground in a live–fire exercise, we figured the risk was worth it. Topgun’s students needed this experience against a thinking opponent before we sent them back to war. At the Pacific Air Missile Test Range, some of our young guys were so good that they destroyed the wildly evading drones, then shot some more missiles to pick off the falling parts.

(Pedersen 2019, 148)

By mid–June, the Navy’s kill ratio during Linebacker stood at almost twelve to one, a 600 percent increase over what we had managed during Rolling Thunder. The Navy’s high command was ecstatic; the North Vietnamese Air Force clearly was demoralized. That spring, a MiG–17 pilot encountered a Navy F–4 and ejected on the spot before he even came under fire. They had no answer for our new tactics and teamwork. By the summer of 1972, the MiGs focused on attacking the Air Force while avoiding U.S. flights originating from Yankee Station. Our MiG–hungry Topgun grads didn’t like it, but the tactical switch provided stark testimony as to which service they thought they could score against. Sadly, the Air Force fought the 1972 air campaign essentially as it had Rolling Thunder. Adherence to the Fluid Four formation cost them aircrews. Of the fifty–one aircraft the Air Force lost during Operation Linebacker, twenty–two went down to the guns and missiles of the North Vietnamese MiGs. During the same time, the Navy lost just four birds to MiGs. The Marines lost an F–4 to a MiG and scored one in return. From the start date of the Topgun program to the end of the war, the Navy’s overall kill ratio was twenty–four to one. Its ratio for the entire war, beginning to end, would stand at twelve to one.

(Pedersen 2019, 173)

One of my few regrets is that I never had the pleasure of being part of the Tomcat tribe. When I had the chance, I would log some time just sitting in that Grumman–built bird, daydreaming about the things I could have done with someone like J.C. Smith or Hawkeye Laing in my rear seat.

Of course, the F–14 Tomcat almost never made it into the world, thanks to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who loved to think he knew people’s business better than they did. In 1968, he tried to force the Navy to adopt the hulking F–111 fighter–bomber for use on aircraft carriers.

Imagine SecDef’s chagrin when a mere three–star admiral , the head of naval aviation at the Pentagon, decided to stand in his way. That truth–telling sailor Tom Connolly, testified to Congress, ”There isn’t enough thrust in Christendom to make that airplane into a fighter.” And he won. The Navy avoided being saddled with the ”Flying Edsel,” so named by its unhappy Air Force pilots because its chief advocate, Secretary McNamara, had been president of Ford Motor Company. McNamara took his revenge, denying Vice Admiral Connolly a deserved promotion to a fourth star. But the last word belonged to the Navy. It paid tribute to a great man by naming its new world–beating fighter aircraft after him. The legendary Tomcat was born. Though it fell right in line with other Grumman felines in history – Wildcat, Hellcat, Bearcat, Tigercat – the name was the artful final act in a Pentagon dogfight.

(Pedersen 2019, 221)

Several Topgun instructors got camera time in the publicity campaign. Asked about Maverick’s cocky character, one of them said, ”Well, he has the right stuff, but with that attitude we wouldn’t let him in the back door.” That’s how we felt about egos in my day. It makes for good entertainment but isn’t what you want in your ready room. The loner glory seeker – the maverick – doesn’t last. He kills himself trying to impress people. Topgun wants solid, mature professionals, maybe touched by a divine spark of inspiration, but intelligent warriors who fight with the head, heart, and hands.

(Pedersen 2019, 262)

There’s nothing new about an old guy with all the answers. So, at the risk of playing to type, please allow this former aircraft engine mechanic to complain that our country has been put at risk by the Pentagon’s fascination with stealth technology. We’ve lost the lessons we learned painfully in the 1960s. We worship at high technology’s altar and are on the verge of selling our souls. Stealth is like a zombie – a very expensive zombie. It’s coming back to life to haunt us.

The new aircraft that is supposed to replace the F/A–18 someday is Lockheed Martin’s F–35 Lightning II. The stealth–equipped ”multi–purpose aircraft” is designed to do all things. Three different models of this ”fifth–generation” plane are in development to meet the needs of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. We ought to have learned a lesson from the failure of Robert McNamara’s F–111 ”Flying Edsel,” which was supposed to serve both the Air Force and Navy. But we did not. So now comes the F–35 in three flavors: the Air Force A model, the Marine Corps B model (a short takeoff / vertical landing model that will replace the AV–8 Harrier jump jet), and the Navy F–35C .

(Pedersen 2019, 277)

The late, great John Nash used to say that modern aircraft components are designed to fail. Defense contractors have done a good job ensuring the profit margin in line – replaceable units, as they call spare parts today. In total, over the life of the program, the parts will cost more than the aircraft do. Think of the inkjet printer you bought at the office warehouse for $75. The ink cartridges will set you back half again that amount every six months. That’s basically true in the high–performance aircraft business, too.

The F–35 is so expensive I fear we’ll end up with a fleet full of beautiful new nuclear–powered supercarriers with partially empty flight decks. There’s simply no way the U.S. Treasury can afford to buy the numbers we’ll need to fill out the air wings.

The F–35’s problems are many, from the tail hook, which basically just didn’t work, to the oxygen system for the pilot, to the super–sophisticated helmet, built with advanced sensors, an information–packed visor display, and the ability to aim weapons by line of sight, based on the pilot’s head movements. The unit price for that fancy dome was $400,000, but who knows what it really costs? The total program cost of this aircraft continues to rocket skyward like an F–4 Phantom heading to the top of the Egg. Meanwhile, the nickname for the F–35 among pilots who have lost confidence in it is ”the penguin.” It flies like one.

(Pedersen 2019, 278-279)

Twenty–seven years. That’s more than a generation. Compare that to the development timeline of the F–14 Tomcat. The elapsed time from the Navy’s first request for proposals to the deployment of the F–14 in the fleet was four years. Yes, four years. With the F–18 Hornet, it was nine years.

Now twenty–seven?

Something is rotten in Washington, and one day, sadly, we will lose a war because of it. Maybe that tragic result will serve to wake up our political and defense establishments and give them the courage to begin removing the rot.

(Pedersen 2019, 281)

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References

Pedersen, Dan. 2019. Topgun: An American Story. N.p.: Hachette Books.

ISBN 978-0-316-41626-9