Interestingly, the Navy also realized that their maintenance of missiles was less than sufficient for the task at hand in Vietnam. Once they solved those issues they saw dramatic increases in air to air victories.
As someone who's had to take IV antibiotics due to Lyme and is now a human barometer, I'm relieved to hear that it got caught early. It isn't something I would wish on anybody.
@Books Rebound That sounds absolutely horrible. The nurses had many stories of people having it for years without knowing so I wouldn't be surprised if it was indeed the case. I'm up and running living life, only dealing with much more common headaches. Slightly paranoid when I'm in the bush though as we're not immune to any further infections. It's not my face that lets me know when a storm is coming, but, a bad headache.
The other use for TOPGUN, which was not released until the documents became declassified and Freedom of Informationed was for training against the enemy planes. The reason it was based so close to Area 51 was the Airforce based a squadron of captured russian planes at Groom lake and would fly them against the Top gun pilots.
4477th Red Eagles, started up in the early 1980s under the Constant Peg program. Before and after, there were the HAVE programs (each was dedicated to specific aircraft acquired over the years). While Constant Peg ended in 1989, the HAVE programs are likely still going on. I imagine that the goal has shifted from acquiring Russian/Soviet aircraft to Chinese aircraft, though I'm sure Fulcrum and Flanker models are still being used.
@@Tigershark_3082The program likely ended in 2019 after an American pilot flying an Su-27 Flanker died when his ejection seat failed to operate during an emergency.
@@_Zaid I doubt that program ended after that. It happened even more during Constant Peg (at least 2 died due to faults with the aircraft, yet the program still continued on for another few years until there was no longer a need for it).
"Vessels of institutional memories" Great phrase and a tragically underrated concept in so many governments, institutions, corporations and cultures due to the hubris that everything newer is better.
Love the video Phil. Another shining example of how Hollywood can take the most mundane bureaucratic processes and turn it into action gold. Interestingly, the movie also changed the military. The idea of callsigns wasn't a thing in the military. The callsigns and helmets were done as a part of the movie so that the audience would be able to identify the characters. The military jumped on it, and as a result, many pilots now have callsigns.
Do you have a source on this? This sounded interesting, so I looked it up but I couldn't find anything. Most histories of callsigns that I can find point to plane callsigns becoming commonplace in WWII, followed by personal callsigns becoming a thing in the 70s and becoming solidified by the 80s. A 2019 article in the San Diego Union-Tribune interviewed a Topgun inaugural instructor about how he got his callsign during the Vietnam War, so it seems quite clear that pilots (including those at Topgun) did commonly use callsigns before the film.
I loved the Top Gun movies. They brought my dad into the military, which has served him well for many years. On top of which, they are just amazing cinema. The way the production crew was able to actually fit the cameras into the ACTUAL PLANES AS THEY WERE FLYING is truely more phenomenal than any marvel-level cgi. I will say, though: if you were to ever make another graham cracker diorama of anything, governement buildings on a military base would be the way to go. *side note: be curious to know how much if would have cost to print that document in 2020. I bet FedEx, being a shipping company, has had to up there prices due to gas, but I couldn't say.
Why don't you speak about about Top gun movie complete rehabilitation of the military after the Vietnam fiasco? And again with the new movies. Sorry but this is military industrial (political) complex propaganda. Your video, and the movie. Best wishes.
Isn't this explained in the opening text to the first Top Gun movie? I remember watching it as a kid and understanding that a) dogfight expertise had declined since the end of WW2, and b) the Navy wanted to fix this problem: and so, the Top Gun Fighter School came to be. Once I was older, I read about the mistaken belief that highly capable air to air missiles would extended engagement distances so much, that dogfighting would be obsolete.
I don't know about flesh eating diseases but that plant in the background is.. ...no, I'm joking. I don't know how you did it, but you made a PDF really interesting and fun to watch. Cool video.
This honestly kept bothering me throughout the video - a decent laser printer can be had on Amazon for like $100 and could print like ten thousand sheets.
@@PhilEdwardsInc I can assure you and whoever approves your expense reports that *anyone* who has a need to print big reports (prop or not) will be able to do it more cheaply and effectively with a laser printer than by paying FedEx Office.
@@PhilEdwardsInc Definitely easier to notice as a viewer seeing the entirety at once. note- I tried to write this comment using the word 'assonance' 3 times and it just sounds rude in my head even though the term is applicable.
Phil! Boy do I have a rabbit hole for you to enjoy falling down! Channel your inner geek and get ready to enter the world of John Boyd. Boyd had an uneventful combat career during the Korean conflict. But assigned after the war to a training command, “60 second Boyd” along with Thomas Christie, revolutionized air combat. For an analogy, consider that for much of mankind’s time, scientific discoveries were experimentally derived from observations. There was a paradigm shift when theoreticians began postulating first principles which were confirmed by observation. If you listen to modern fighter pilots describing air combat, you’ll likely find it more boring than expected and you’ll quickly become sick of one word: “energy”. Instead of deriving best practices experimentally, Boyd and Christie reduced the challenge of air combat to pure mathematics, and the equations led to certain concepts. Among which is the modern emphasis on “energy management” which states that the pilot who maintains the energy advantage will consistently win. Among other things. As training pilots, Boyd and his disciples infiltrated the Air Force from the bottom up, teaching their ideas to a new generation of pilots. Not exactly popular with the institution and power structure of the day, they even earned a name infamous in the otherwise rigid top down military structure: “The Fighter Mafia”. There was a fundamental shift in thinking, and the Fighter Mafia had a huge impact on the design of the F-15, F-16, and F-18. These may seem like lots of numbers so, how about this: the F-15 is the most successful fighter ever developed, with a kill ratio of over 100 to 1. New examples are still being built today, 5 decades after first introduction. The F-16 and F-18 remain the workhorses of the USAF, USN, and Marines. Designs from the disco age that still provide air dominance today. Because they were derived from the principles and ideas of the Fighter Mafia. Still not enough? Boyd developed the OODA Loop, which among other influences, references Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It’s widely used in business, litigation, and valuable any crisis based decision making. As you might expect, just being brilliant and being correct about many things did not translate well into military career success for Boyd. He retired as a Colonel, without the political or diplomatic skills necessary for General Officership. Boyd is well worthy of some research, and your inner nerd will love the idea of first fundamental principles which are equally applicable in combat and in the boardroom. Enjoy!
Have you seen "Fiskars Original Stainless Steel 8" Orange-Handled Scissors" in the USA, have you thought about the design and how such an old company gained new life. The company and product started in Finland, maybe you need a european road trip and pitch to vox some story ideas (so they pay your expences) and do you vidoes on the side.
It might be worth investigating the The Department of Defense Entertainment Media Unit. They are the ones that are responsible for the (military) help that movie and television production companies get when producing a film. There are TONS of movie they have aided in the production of. Top Gun is probably the most famous.
There are few times in history when history makes a pretty good experiment, but this is one. The air war over North Vietnam was really two wars: 65-68, and then 72 with a break in the middle without any fighting over N Vietnam. During the whole of that war both the Navy and the Air Force primary flew the F-4. During that interregnum the Navy started Top Gun. While the Air Force made a new F-4 to carry a gun. The popular perception of the problem (which you sort of mention) both at the time and today was that ‘the F-4 didn’t have a gun.’ The USAF bought into this, the Navy did not, as they kept using the old gunless F-4. From 65-68 Navy F-4’s got .3 kills per engagement. In 72, flying the same jets, they got 1.04, so every time Navy F-4s saw migs, they were going to shoot one down (on average). But the USAF with their new gun-toting F-4s saw little improvement. In the end the whole war total for Navy F-4s was .58 kills per engagement, and 5.42 kills per loss. USAF only got 0.14 and 3.07 respectively. So you can quantitatively show that it was training and not the guns that caused the underperformance. As an aside, while the F-8 did have a gun, the majority of its kills were with missiles. Furthermore, the best Exchange ratios in whole war was not the Navy F-8s but rather the Navy’s (gunless) F-4s in 72 post Top Gun. Finally the most successful air to air weapon of the was a missile, the AIM-9 Sidewinder. It was successful every 5.5 firings. Gunfire was only successful every 7.5 attempts. So again, it wasn’t because they needed guns, but rather need to learn how to use their missiles WVR and air combat maneuvering. I got a lot of this from On Yankee Station a great book about the air war over N Vietnam, written by the F-8 pilot who got the last gun kill in the Navy’s history. So when that guy says it wasn’t guns, it was a lack of training, and he has got the numbers to back it up. You know he is probably on to something.
If you ever wanted to do a follow-up to this, you should look at how AMRAAM and other beyond-visual-range missile systems again entirely changed air-to-air combat and why the original Top Gun report has been obsolete almost since the first movie came out.
That was a really cool insight, as all your videos are. Also part of me wanted to revert back to 22 years ago and go internet troll with something stupid like "you should have your face checked out" but I just can't be stupid mean any longer when there is so much bad shit (tm) in the world AND that was a genuinely nice thing that happened and maybe an example of why the internet shouldn't just be unilaterally shut down for the betterment of humanity.
Probably just as well you didn't get your visual aid. All that paper has to come from somewhere and you don't want to be doing your own version of agent organging a forest without good reason. :-)
I had to go and look at the Ault report to see how big it was. Almost 500 pages. I guess FedEx wants 15¢ a page? Plus you can’t just staple it together.
@@PhilEdwardsInc I totally understand! I bought myself a comb binding machine last year (school teacher) and I use it for things I really don’t need to.
Oh man, yeah I don't watch a tonnnn of explainery videos or history videos, but I work for Vox, so obviously there! My former colleagues Johnny Harris and Cleo Abram are research machines. I'm friends with a guy, Brendan O'Neill, who makes nice news explainers. There's this channel In Search of Life who does quirky type stuff (he comments on here sometimes). And there's a new one called "Fault Line" that's pretty cool and does Geography-style explainers. Sure there's a ton more!
@@PhilEdwardsInc nice thanks! I’ll check them out. I feel like a lot of the explainers have a leaning one way or another but Johnny Harris and you seem to grasp the Every Person POV. Thanks for sharing.
@@mikemurphy80 Yeah if you like Johnny you might like this new Fault Line guy - seems pretty talented (as is Brendan, though he has an editorial perspective). To be honest, I'm spending most of my YT time geeking out on camera stuff (for better or worse).
I wish it was cheaper to print PDFs too... As I have tons I read on my phone but prefer real paper to write notes in Also great use of the basement, instead of using the middle with wallpaper and plants you added a desk n moved it to the side and now it has a more "professional" feel and look Maybe fake a sky on the white wall to your left(our right/behind you if facing desk) and no one will know it's a basement
@@PhilEdwardsInc do that! And change what goes on in the sky(fighters flying by for this video, a high rise in another etc) just to add some flavor to the background
Hey Phil! Whats your process for cataloguing topics when first reviewing large documents? I see you add summarizing subtitles for the video interview. Im interested in seeing if individuals that may have autism would excel in specific work tasks, including cataloguing/indexing information. Let me know what you think.
Thanks for asking! I am usually just taking screenshots and pasting those pictures into a Google Doc (sometimes I paste the text in, but formatting issues make that tough). It's always tricky to know the best way to do that stuff. For my subtitles, I usually have Google's suggestions and am mainly correcting grammar and a few funny words.
The TOPGUN program (as well as other events/programs that sprouted from it) is such an interesting topic to me. It seems kinda basic on the outside, but when you start looking at the details (doctrine for the Navy/Marines, avionics/weapons systems for Navy/Marine aircraft, training, the weapons and aircraft themselves, etc), it gets waaaay more complicated. You did an absolutely fantastic job of simplifying things down enough to where someone not familiar with this kind of stuff could easily understand, so job well done! Bit of a random question, but do you have a favorite plane at all?
hmm, i don't think i'd have a very satisfying answer. the one plane i probably know the most history about is the concorde (which is, of course, not really the type you're talking about, but i did a video on it back in the day). i will say that i love the chuck yeager sections of "the right stuff" - awesome stories.
Topic suggestion/idea: I noticed that when RU-vid alphabetizes the names of its channels it’s doesn’t do: “Scarlett Letter, The.” It will alphabetize “The” under T. I remember iTunes doing that back when it first came out too. Is that becoming the accepted practice? How will we know when it is? I don’t really notice that our language is changing over my life (I’m 30-ish). Maybe an interesting topic would be exploring the evolution of language this century and how we’ve created a different way of writing without hardly noticing. Essentially the informal internet language and how it’s slowly creeping in to become formal. (Not internet acronyms like TLDR, BRB, because that is tired territory).
The military has tried, with varying levels of success, to create formal processes for this type of analysis to improve it's capabilities. The main concept is called "doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities", abbreviated to the It is the unpronounceable DOTMLPF. Basically, we have a capability shortcoming, we need to analyze all of these factors and potential ways to address it much like Ault did. The training issue Ault identified would today be addressed by a field called human-system integration, that addresses human factors, training, safety, and other factors in the development of weapon systems to ensure they deliver the expected capabilities when fielded.
@@PhilEdwardsInc ahhh apologies good sir! I read this late in the car after a long day at Kings Dominion getting my brain scrambled by wooden coasters. 😆🧠🎢
Thanks a lot! This one I am embarrassed to admit, but it started because I was like, "Why is TOPGUN Navy and not Airforce, even though there's an Airforce commercial in front of it." And from there I got into the history. Military history stuff is weird, cause there's a lot of awesome documents and videos, but they are suuuuuper decentralized and unorganized, so there's a lot of sifting. For this one, I think I found the full report wherever Iinked in the description. Typically I wouldn't make a video about such a non visual topic, but I was kinda like, whatever, I just want to because it's interesting that the Navy had let training lapse.
Preserving institutional knowledge is a huge problem in the field of nuclear data. There were maybe a couple dozen guys in the world who actually understood the equations behind modeling nuclear equations, and they all retired out around 20 years ago. So now a bunch of us grad students are stuck trying to decode all their manuscripts and derivations such that work can continue on model development. If only we had some sort of Top Gun for nuclear energy...
@@PhilEdwardsInc Yeah there's been a fair amount of publications, but mostly it's just been conferences and technical reports. But the problem is so ubiquitous that there's no point in really expending the time and effort trying to quantify how bad it is. Basically if you go to a nuclear/physics conference, there's people under 35 and there's people over 70, with practically nobody in between. If you look at a graph of nuclear engineering degrees awarded per year from 1960-today, nuclear engineering got super uncool in the 90s and 00s, so there were very few degrees handed out for a couple decades, leading to a generational knowledge gap. For the research that I'm doing, my biggest resource is this report called JEFF18, which was this huge international effort to conglomerate all the relevant models into one unified report, where the sole author died shortly after it was published. Not only is the math *extremely* difficult to try to teach yourself (remember, there's no experts on this type of modeling anymore) but the report contradicts itself plenty of times depending on the context of the equations. And you're just supposed to figure out when and where certain assumptions are appropriate or not. So if you just look on Google or OSTI or the IAEA for "nuclear knowledge loss" or something like that you'll find a ton of articles trying to address the problem. The IAEA also has done plenty of research on trying to address the knowledge loss in the nuclear industry as well.
Maybe kinda relevant concerning missiles..? I'd read up on my oldman's wwii battleship bb34 the new york. It was nuked twice at bikini isle test site. Then dragged to hawaii for study to be later taken out for target practice for new jets and new missiles. The rangmaster's report mentions pilots drawing lots to see who went first, certain the first volley was gonna take her down. They all went twice. They thought too much of their new missiles at the time maybe. That ship did have 3 hulls though, unlike the other new york class ships.
Great video. I've probably heard/seen all this on these military specialist youtube channels but not fully comprehended the scope of the events. These channels are good. They are mostly young military historians and animators making military history videos. This, however, is presented like a modern journalism piece and was digestible, fun and more retainable. ALSO... I put this all the way down here because its a stupid comment AND such a stupid thing to fixate on - but I found online printing for this many page report in full at £12 in the UK. 2 day delivery.
my eyes are straining to see your face camera, the focus is a little off and my eyes aren't used to seeing everything so blurry with my glasses on and it makes it hard to watch every part recorded with said camera. great video overall, just find it very straining to watch.
Ha yeah I think it was actually from my lens being left in the basement. I had this dehumidifier container for that, but it didn't seem to work! Anyway, I think it's better now.
The photograph in the front of that 1983 article is outstanding. Top Gear: Maverick struck me as entertaining but painfully pandering and anachronistic. P.S. Reading this comment will cause internet-borne leprosy, because yeah-it’s 2022 and *of course* you can catch leprosy over the internet now. So tell your doctor you need a referral to a leprosarium. P.P.S. Thanks Apple autocorrect for teaching me the term “leprosarium”. 💫 The more you know…
@@PhilEdwardsInc I doubt most modern photographers would willfully dispose of dynamic range to achieve such dramatic and gorgeous contrast. Speaking of soupy nostalgia…
Do you have a lump on the back of your neck area? It’s hard to tell in the video. I’m not a doctor but I’ve watched a lot of tv lol Another great video. I’ve seen just about every video you’ve made. Thank you for making learning extra interesting. Glad the Lyme was caught early. Looking forward to more excellent content. Cheers!
@@PhilEdwardsInc that’s a great idea! Let the whole world examine you for your next video. Personal privacy be damned lol. I’m glad you’re better. We need you around for a long time. You’re one of the best documentarians around. A sincere thank you for everything you do. Thanks for the reply as well. Cheers!
Just so we are clear. The problems identified that lead to topgun specifically with low altitude lock problems and the need for close air dog fighting abilities are now redundant. It was kinda the right idea to kill the school that dealt with that but they were A. Ahead of the time and tech. And B. Didn't recognise the need to have a similar school to handle the newer air combat styles. I'm not sure how the current topgun program works but most air combat happens beyond the visual ranges of the pilots let alone in close quarters.
I never even knew that Top Gun wasn't an original idea until this video! That's really interesting! Always love the topics that Phil chooses to talk about on this channel.
The film literally begins with text explaining how the school was created.... the facts about the ratios of US to enemy planes shot down is literally mentioned in the film.
Phil the Top Gun school was based off of an existing Air Force school they had sent Naval Aviators to. I recommend you check out the book: Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" by Robert Coram. There is so much more to this topic and this book is a window into how our tactics developed, military acquisition issues, and expecting our next war to look like the previous war.
@@PhilEdwardsInc For sure. If you read the PDF you can handle the book. It is very frustrating at times because it shows how politics gets in the way of things it shouldn't. Also, if you read it, maybe you could do a video on the OODA Loop (which John Boyd created).
