Top Gun was the story of carrier fighter pilots going through the Navy’s fighter tactics school in southern California, and it included a mini-air war with an unnamed Middle Eastern dictatorship, an interesting preview of real-life things to come. It was one of Tom Cruise’s earliest hits and helped him on his way to stardom. In addition to the torrid plot and incredible aerial photography, the movie also produced several memorable popular songs, including “Take My Breath Away.”
Top Gun was the number-one box office moneymaker in 1986, and the film’s impact on the public was remarkable. Following the movie’s release, the interest in Navy flight training virtually exploded. Applications from fully qualified candidates exceeded the available training quotas by 300 percent. SecNav John Lehman was able to get DoD authority to “bank” these applications and spread the input out over the next three years to assure a full input of top quality aviation candidates well into the future. My reward was a full-screen credit as “Technical Advisor” at the film’s end.
In addition to this semiglamorous side of the Association of Naval Aviation, the organization was very effective in generating congressional action in 1980 to overturn President Carter’s veto of the defense authorization bill, an action Carter had taken because it contained a Nimitz-class nuclear carrier. Congress overturned the veto, added a Nimitz-class carrier in their version of the authorization bill, and enacted that legislation over President Carter’s objections. The Navy Office of Legislative Affairs largely credited that favorable congressional action to the briefings and written justifications prepared by the Association of Naval Aviation and distributed throughout the Congress to the members and their staffs.
THE DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD ON V/STOL AIRCRAFT
In November 1979 Eugene Fubini, the chairman of the Defense Science Board, at the request of Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, established a task force to look into the potential for V/STOL aircraft in each of the military services. Of the twelve members on the task force, I was the only military officer, active or retired, in the group. This was obviously because of my interest in V/STOL demonstrated during the last two years of my active duty as CNO and several editorials on the subject that I had written in the Naval Institute Proceedings and other aerospace journals after retirement.
The final V/STOL task force report included only three significant conclusions. First, the services should continue with their ongoing helicopter development programs, which were providing state-of-the-art operational aircraft for the Army and Marine ground support missions and naval ASW platforms. Second, tilt-rotor technology for high-speed assault troop transport and search and rescue should be vigorously pursued. Third, the Marines should continue to develop a follow-on V/STOL tactical fighter to the Harrier. The report further suggested that V/STOL not be prosecuted on a broader, all-inclusive front to conserve resources and avoid the high-risk, low-payoff systems.
I was quite satisfied with these conclusions, because they would serve to dampen what I had considered, when I was CNO, the misguided enthusiasm in the Navy secretariat to promote V/STOL to replace all conventional aviation in the Navy. I believed the task force conclusions, which would restore the proper balance between naval requirements and the technological facts of life, were the best outcome that the Navy could hope for.
One remarkable comment was made in a minority view by one of our most distinguished task force members from academia. “The Navy,” he said, “is putting the burden of safe landings on a pitching deck of a ship at sea on the aeronautical engineers by demanding the most delicate aeronautical responsiveness on the part of the airplane and engine at the most difficult part of the plane’s flight regime — when it is slowed almost to the stall point. I recommend that the burden should be shifted to the ship designers and have a movable landing platform on the ship, that compensates for the motion of the sea!”
THE IRANIAN HOSTAGE RESCUE OPERATION
On the morning of 24 April 1980, Americans collectively picked up their morning newspapers to see a shocking headline: A U.S. military operation to free the diplomatic hostages confined in the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Iran, had collapsed in a fiery debacle in the remote deserts of Southwest Asia. The news was especially stunning because only a handful of people, Iranian as well as American, were aware that such an operation had even been planned. I, for one, certainly did not, yet within weeks I would be recalled to active duty and report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to conduct the investigation of the failed operation for the Department of Defense.
The U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Iran, had been seized on 4 November 1979. The JCS immediately started work on contingency planning to rescue the hostages. There was no readily apparent solution other then declaring war and launching a major military operation that could penetrate to the heart of Iran, rescue the hostages, and then try to get out. The chances of the hostages still being alive when — and if — we found them, were minuscule.
A total of fifty-three Americans were incarcerated in the embassy, and three, including the U.S. chargé d’affaires, were being held in the Iranian Ministry. It was not until March 1980 that a feasible plan with some reasonable chance of success was put together. The plan was based on the use of a dedicated aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz. Eight CH-53 helicopters would launch from the Navy carrier in the Indian Ocean at night in radio silence. With no lights, they could fly below Iranian radar to a remote spot in the Iranian desert south of Teheran, about six hundred miles away. At the same time, six C-130s would fly from Masirah Island off Oman to this desert rendezvous spot designated Desert One.
Three C-130s would carry the 130 members of the ground force, about 90 Delta Force (specialized operations troops) and about 40 support personnel. The other three C-130s would carry fuel for the CH-53 helicopters. During the hours of darkness on 24 April, the C-130s would refuel the helicopters and the Delta Force would embark in them. Eight helicopters were prepositioned aboard the carrier Nimitz (a minimum of six were required to accomplish the mission). After refueling and loading the troops, the helicopter contingent would proceed north to a “Hide Site” near Garmsar, about sixty-five miles southeast of Teheran, where the troops would be landed. The helicopters would then move on to a second hiding place nearby. The helicopters and the ground forces would remain hidden during the day of the twenty-fifth, and the C-130s would fly from Desert One back to Masirah that night.
During the predawn and morning of the twenty-sixth, the Delta Force would be picked up at the Hide Site and transported in closed trucks chartered by secret agents in Teheran and driven to the vicinity of the embassy compound. There the Delta Force would assault the compound, rescue the hostages, and move on foot to a nearby soccer field. Then the CH-53 helicopters, flying from the Hide Site, would pick up the Delta Force and freed hostages and take them to Manyariyeh, an abandoned Iranian airstrip to the west of Tehran. Meanwhile, a force of U.S. Army Rangers, transported in C-141 aircraft, would have seized the abandoned airstrip. The Delta Force and hostages would transfer to the C-141s and be evacuated with the Rangers. The CH-53 helicopters would be abandoned and destroyed.