The event was a showcase of all things pomp and ceremony, with the main star dominating the proceedings. You may be thinking of the recent Platinum Jubilee concerts that took place over the extended weekend, but you would be wrong. Instead, it was the release of the Top Gun movie sequel. Top Gun: Maverick is as much a statement of soft power as the trooping of the color and ceremonies at St Paul’s Cathedral. Hollywood once again has gone glove in hand with the military-industrial complex, providing a mutually beneficial, but largely inaccurate, portrayal of US military capabilities and the role of the fighter jet in 21st-century warfare (Goldberg, 2019).
The movie raised the question of how different the royal pantomime of the Jubilee really was and whether both were, in their own way, a quest to sell an inaccurate vision of state power. It was Harvard Professor Joseph Hye who famously wrote of the notion of soft power and a state’s ability to persuade others to act through the timeless use of persuasion rather than coercion. The reality is that Great Britain is no longer a leading military superpower, and its GDP is dwarfed by the scale of China or the US. Even in the game of soft power diplomacy, it appears that the Royal Britannia brand is struggling to play to the final whistle (Nye, 2019). The impacts of the Strategic Defence Review 2021, which will see an apparently beneficial reduction in Britain’s military size, has yet to be tested, but the country has begun to become an increasingly junior partner in global international affairs; however, this may not always be noticeable, for example, when witnessing the splendor of the weekend’s recent festivities (Beale, 2021). Thus, as much as Top Gun: Maverick may rely upon a large dose of exaggeration and occasional bending of the facts, the demonstration of US airpower and its ability to play a significant role in the outcomes of recent conflicts is certainly not to be disregarded (Wasser & Zemna, 2019).
The story also asks audiences to question the relevance of fast jets to how conventional warfare is and will be fought in the future. To be accurate to the depiction on screen, the film regularly makes the character of Maverick appear out of touch with the new generation of unmanned or digital technologies, but he also represents how sometimes the old ways can often win in the end (Cohen & Chandler, 2020).
However, global audiences watching Maverick in action may be astonished to learn that the last time the US were successful with an air-to-air kill was an engagement in 2017, when a Syrian SU-22 was destroyed by a US Navy aircraft, and before that incident it had not been since 2009 (Pawlyk, 2017). The shooting down of aircraft in air combat is extremely rare and is becoming more so as states increasingly favor the high tech but light footprint that unmanned aerial vehicles can offer.
The plot takes audiences on a secret mission, involving the aerial bombing of a complex physical target, conjuring images of Luke Skywalker and his successful destruction of the Death Star in 1977. The widespread use of liminal warfare by states to destabilize through cyber-attacks and disinformation suggests that many countries are preferring the mask of anonymity that such approaches can largely ensure (Cohen & Chandler, 2020). Exciting as these operations are to the film audiences, success for a state is often achieved when nations cannot be linked to it, but instead take full advantage of its positive outcomes (Losey, 2017).
So how relevant is Top Gun: Maverick and is its representation of the role of American airpower still credible in a 21st-century context?
In Vicarious Warfare, Thomas Waldman (2012) describes America’s “global shadow wars” as 3-D warfare: delegation (shifting the burden of risk and responsibility on to other proxy actors, local allies, security contractors and irregular militias), danger-proofing (applying force, while minimizing physical harm to American personnel, through the use of drones), and darkness (covert action and special forces operations, but also offensive cyber warfare). Such wars involve low-level, persistent, remote, and evasive modes of fighting.
In 2014, under Obama’s presidency, the drone-killing program was stepped up and targeted killing was normalized in “no-boots battlefields”. Predator sensor operator, Staff Sgt. Nicolette Sebastian, explains that a drone “operation is a lot like PlayStation”: “a gamer’s delight”. The drone console becomes interchangeable with that of a computer game, as drone pilots upload their own civilian computer games into the same system. A continuum between civilian gaming technologies and lethal military systems is thereby established that signals the increasing gamification of war: “the flight controls for drones over the years have come to resemble video-game controllers, which the military has done to make them more intuitive for a generation of young soldiers raised on games like Gears of War and Killzone” (Pugliese, 2017).
In drone warfare and within the context of America’s War on Terror, killing becomes an unfeeling, amoral exercise of power conducted from a distance, by drone operators morally and emotionally distanced from their targets. Moreover, the video-game-like nature of drone operations leads operators to treat them like a game, in which the observing of people through the cameras of a drone further dehumanizes those observed. And while a soldier or fighter might experience emotional trauma after seeing their fellow fighters killed beside them, or another might experience a moral injury from killing a civilian, in remote killing even those emotional responses are taken away. Remote warfare results in cold-blooded and completely unheroic killings: virtual war desensitizes the perpetrators of violence and lowers the moral and psychological barriers to killing. Killing becomes an invisible, mechanized practice (Jones, 2020).
So much of what is presented in Top Gun: Maverick does not match the realities of contemporary combat. Moreover, as we have seen with such horror in Ukraine, but also Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, airpower is habitually used to bombard targets into submission, to target individuals remotely and nearly always at terrible human cost on the ground, while missing what 19th-century military theorist Clausewitz called “the human element” in the air. Rather than dog fights in biplanes over the trenches of Flanders in 1916, pilots unleash ordnances of huge cost and equal destructive capability for those on the ground. However, the need to dominate the bird’s-eye view of the battlefield is as old as combat itself and nations will always continue to seek to gain air superiority, leading to the usual continuous arms races for the latest aerial designs (Beale, 2020).
The portrayal of aerial combat that is depicted in Top Gun: Maverick is indeed glamorous and ideal for cinematic adventure. Characters such as those played by Tom Cruise appear to show a style of combat which is almost a chivalrous form of fighting. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is described as “a courageous test pilot” who “must confront the ghosts of his past and his deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who choose to fly it”. But there is nothing heroic or self-sacrificial in the new ways America is fighting its wars; its dark, delegated and danger-proofing methods allow for war to be conducted at a safe distance from physical threat and with impunity. Drones, proxy fighters, and cyber weapons dominate America’s war tactics. When watching movies like Top Gun: Maverick, audiences must remember that what they offer is illusions of courage, state power and grandeur, and a sleight of hand such as that offered by the Royal Jubilee, with its own less-than-accurate narratives of state and power.