In one early scene in the newly released Top Gun: Maverick, the camera pans over Point Loma in San Diego, in all its sun-drenched glory, and onto Naval Air Station North Island. As a former San Diego–based naval officer, the moment filled me with such Navy pride that I may have uttered a faint “hooyah” in the theater.
The sequel to the 1980s classic Top Gun oozes with the same high-octane, pro-military fervor as its predecessor. Its protagonist, Captain Pete Mitchell, now a test pilot and passed over for promotion to admiral, is ordered to train the Navy’s top F-18 pilots to carry out an impossibly dangerous mission inside a rogue state’s heavily defended territory. It’s a formulaic summer flick to be sure, but it’s also solidly crafted and really damn fun. But underneath that nostalgia, could Top Gun: Maverick actually have something meaningful to say to the Navy’s sailors?
I served as a surface warfare officer for five years, and during that time the Navy never ceased to bombard me with one infamous mantra: Do what the book says. The phrase is etched in stone somewhere as a U.S. Navy commandment. Many a sailor, myself included, has had to face some kind of reckoning from a chief or superior officer for failing to live up to this creed.
There is a moment in Top Gun: Maverick in which Maverick, with his young lieutenant aviators gathered before him for the first time, drops the F-18 NATOPS manual in the trash. I like to think the Navy’s top brass shifted uneasily in their seats during this scene and that a wry smile appeared on every junior sailor’s face. Captain Mitchell, however, is not undermining military discipline or the Navy’s stringent insistence on following regulations. There is a reason why the Navy has so many manuals and instructions: its ships and aircrafts are operated by very young, usually inexperienced, men and women, and without “the book,” people get hurt, or worse.
Maverick is not suggesting sailors not read the book. Instead, he insists that reading the book is not enough. Their enemy, he reminds his students, knows the book, too. Throughout the film, he urges his aviators not to “think,” but to “do.” Thinking, in Maverick’s estimation, is only doing what the book says. “You think up there, you’re dead,” he tells the son of his former radar intercept officer Goose.
But Maverick is speaking not just to his hotshot aviators, but to all sailors, and particularly to the senior enlisted and junior officers who form the backbone of Navy leadership. Their duty, just like Maverick’s young trainees, is not just to memorize regulations, but to act in wartime, to act amid chaos. Today, it seems they are more focused on overseeing the military’s unwieldy bureaucracy.
Sailors are ultimately trained to do a job, namely to fight the nation’s wars. To do that, they must think beyond rules on a page. They must know how to handle an F-18 in a dogfight, how to navigate their ship under EMCON, or how to patch radio circuits and fix a gas turbine when everything around them is on fire.
Maverick, in that symbolic gesture, takes aim at the Navy’s current climate of institutional thinking, a sentiment that is widely shared among its sailors. The U.S. Naval Institute’s publications alone are replete with advocates for a less micromanaging and bureaucratic style of leadership in the Navy, be it pushing young leaders to think for themselves or for the Navy to tone down its crushing administrative requirements.
Throughout the film, Maverick is a particularly brazen example of what it means to be a Navy leader, albeit an unrealistic one. He is, admittedly, too insubordinate for his own good (I would not recommend any sailor to disobey Navy regulations or their commanding officer’s lawful orders), but he shows us that questioning the people who lead the Navy is not the same as questioning the Navy itself. Maverick is fiercely loyal to the Navy and to the mission, whatever that may be.
Instead, he chooses to hold the Navy’s admirals, the individuals who make the rules, accountable for their many mantras. For all its over-the-top 1980s energy, Top Gun: Maverick reminds us that being a leader in the Navy is not just about doing what the book says.
