Alright, we’ve waited long enough for all of you to go see Top Gun: Maverick. If you haven’t, stop reading here (major spoiler alert!). The truth is, after watching the movie several times, I’ve found that the real hero of the film isn’t Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise), but the character portrayed by actor Ed Harris: Rear Admiral Chester “Hammer” Cain.
The Cain character appears early in the movie and attempts to shut down the top-secret spy plane program for which the movie’s ostensible hero, “Maverick,” is serving as the test pilot. “Hammer” tells “Maverick that he’s a dinosaur and that the days of manned aircraft are over. Mitchell says, “Maybe, but not today,” and heads off to train a topnotch team of Navy FA-18E/F Super Hornet attack pilots to launch from an aircraft carrier in a permissive environment to hit a nuclear-weapons development site located at the end of a long canyon and mountain valley. This target is guarded not only by advanced surface-to-air missiles but also by advanced fifth-generation fighters. The site is so difficult to reach that only the best of the best (or Luke Skywalker) can reach it, and then hit it with precision-guided weapons. The problem with that scenario, both in the movie and in real life, is that there was another, safer, more-effective option.
Rear Admiral “Hammer” Cain in the movie represents champions of the Navy’s Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV). In the early 2000s, two prototype UCAVs were funded and built. These aircraft, named the X-47Bs, were all-aspect stealth, penetrating strike bombers that could carry several-thousand pounds of bombs internally, fly 1,500 miles, hit targets, and then return to their carriers without being detected by enemy radars. They could have easily been programed to follow the dangerous route portrayed in the movie, using sensors to fly up the canyon, making speed, flight-path, and altitude adjustments in pico-second intervals — not the thousandth of a second required by man — while possessing the ability to meet and exceed the ten-G maneuvers that limited the pilots portrayed in the movie.
These aircraft were real. They landed and took off from the Navy aircraft carriers George H. W Bush and Theodore Roosevelt (the latter being the same carrier seen in the movie) in 2013 and 2014. The unmanned prototypes even conducted air-to-air refueling with a tanker aircraft in 2015, but then the Navy cancelled the UCAV program and proceeded first with a carrier based unmanned-intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance design before settling on an unmanned carrier-based tanker, the MQ-25 Stingray, which it is currently developing.
The reasons that naval aviation chose to walk away from the X-47B, which could have easily evolved into a slightly enlarged AQ-47C (attack drone), possessing a 2,000-mile combat radius while carrying 4,000 lbs of ordnance internally, are not known. But the results of that decision are clear. Today, the nation’s eleven super carriers lack aircraft that can span the standoff distances imposed by Chinese and Russian investments in anti-access/area-denial weapons. The DF-21 “carrier killer” missile can target U.S. Navy flattops 900 miles away, while the carrier’s FA-18E/F Super Hornets and F-35C Lighting II aircraft have combat ranges of only 500 to 650 miles. Even with the new MQ-25 unmanned tanker extending their ranges, the carrier’s 65-aircraft air wing (down from the traditional 85-aircraft air wings of just thirty years ago) will be able to extend four to six aircraft to reach enemy targets, endangering the lives of the pilots and naval flight officers crewing them.
The Navy’s decision to not pursue the path proposed by the Hammer Cain unmanned proponents within the service has rendered the nation’s massive investments (~$13 billion for each new Ford-class super carrier) in its super carriers practically moot.
Top Gun: Maverick is a great movie about an aging pilot learning how to let go of the past and move on to his future. As a man who watched the original movie as a midshipman in college, and then enjoyed a long career as a naval-flight officer, albeit in land-based patrol aircraft, I can sympathize with its plot. I will go see it yet again and cheer for the hero. But the irony of the story in the face of the current strategic environment is simply nothing less than tragic. The Navy doesn’t need yet another investment in fighter pilots and the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter. It needs a long-range penetrating attack aircraft that is difficult to detect, able to make decisions in infinitesimal fractions of a second, and that can endure maneuvers humans simply cannot survive. Ed Harris’s character, Rear Admiral Chester “Hammer” Cain is the real hero of the movie, because he’s the only one who truly understands the future and is not caught up in service-nostalgia for the past. We need to let go of the past and move on. Hammer Cain can be my wingman anytime.
