Guy M Snodgrass - Topguns Top 10: Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit

TOPGUNs precepts have served me well in and out of uniform, especially during the most challenging times and particularly when the path forward was uncertain.

O NE OF TODAYS most recognizable elite military institutions was born from the crucible of the Vietnam War, when American aviators quickly realized the advantages theyd enjoyed during World War II and the Korean War no longer applied. Worse, during the early days of the Vietnam War, hundreds of American airmen, like U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. John S. McCain and Cmdr. James Stockdale, had been shot down by enemy MiG fighter jets, surface-to-air missiles, or ground artillery fire. Because they went on to return home, they were the relatively lucky ones; many others were killed immediately or died in captivity. U.S. Navy pilots, who had grown accustomed to owning the skies during World War II and the Korean War, found themselves at a significant disadvantage this time around.

Something was wrong. Based on their performance during prior conflicts, Navy pilots should have excelled in air-to-air battles. World War II had seen kill ratios of ten to one: ten enemy planes shot down for every American plane. The Korean War demonstrated similar levels of success.

In Vietnam, this number had dropped to less than two to one. Compounding the problem was the Navys prioritization of newly developed air-to-air missiles and their use with its latest fighter jets, primarily F-4 Phantoms. From June 1965 to September 1968, American pilots fired nearly six hundred missiles at enemy aircraft, with only sixty or so finding their way to the target, a paltry success rate. Aviators worried that an insufficient amount of aircrew training, repeated missile failures, and the Phantoms lack of a machine gunomitted because the U.S. Navy was convinced dogfighting was a thing of the pastexplained why the kill ratio had plummeted.

How many more Americans might suffer the same fate as John McCain and the hundreds of other airmen who had fallen from the sky? To help reverse this tragic turn of events, the Navy turned to Capt. Frank W. Ault, a senior officer in the Pentagon tasked with holistically reviewing what was broken with dogfighting in Vietnamand, more importantly, devising a plan to fix it. For five months, he and other naval professionals pored over reports to determine how best to restore the U.S. Navys anemic kill ratio. In January 1969, Captain Ault and his team published the 480-page Air-to-Air Missile System Capability Review, later popularly and more succinctly known as the Ault Report.

The report dissected every aspect of the problem and offered concrete solutions for Navy brass to consider. One recommendation stood out: the proposal to create an advanced fighter weapons school at then Naval Air Station Miramar, in San Diego, California, designed to teach aircrew how to not just survive in dogfightingbut to win.

Usually, governments and big institutions move like glaciers, but just two months later, on March 3, 1969, the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School opened its doors. You may know the school by a shorter name, correctly written in capitals and all one word: TOPGUN.

Originally operating out of a ramshackle trailer, instructors begged, borrowed, and stole what they needed to get the school up and running. Short on funds and equipment, they had no other choice but that first cadre made it work. It didnt take long to achieve results.

A TOPGUN-trained aircrew notched its first kill a little over a year later when, on March 28, 1970, Lt. Jerome Beaulier and Lt. (junior grade) Stephen Barkley, flying a U.S. Navy F-4 fighter jet, pumped a missile into a North Vietnamese MiG-21s tailpipe.

Then, in April 1972, North Vietnamese tanks and artillery boldly smashed across the demilitarized zone into South Vietnam. Aiming to disrupt Hanois supply lines, the United States responded with Operation Linebacker. In that operation, the U.S. Air Force compiled a meager 1.78-to-1 kill ratio. But aviators from the Navys Seventh Fleet recorded a thirteen-to-one kill ratio, shooting down twenty-six planes and losing only two.

TOPGUN worked.

But the TOPGUN story didnt end with the pullout of U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1973that was only the beginning. The school grew in stature with each passing decade. The remainder of the 1970s validated the schools impact, and students and instructors began to train against more capable adversary aircraft, including enemy MiGs brought to America from overseas.

The school went relatively unnoticed by the American public until 1986, when Tom Cruise starred in the original Top Gun movie. (He also stars in the 2020 sequel,