MARK FELTON: Iran’s Top Guns — The Last F-14 Tomcat Squadrons. In his 2022 review of Top Gun: Maverick, John Podhoretz wrote:
[W]hile Top Gun was basically a school movie—Maverick and Ice and the others are all training to be pilots at the Navy Fighter Weapons School and they compete like they are trying to make the crew team—this new one is an out-and-out war movie. Maverick returns to Top Gun as an instructor, only this time the 12 people he’s teaching are all top naval pilots and weapons officers who have long since graduated from Top Gun. The deadly serious mission is to destroy a uranium enrichment facility in an “enemy” country (though at one point I thought I heard someone say “Iran”) protected by surface-to-air missiles and better fighter jets than America possesses.
I didn’t catch any references to Iran when I saw Top Gun: Maverick, but as Mark Felton notes in his latest video, Iran’s Air Force is flying the last iterations of Maverick’s favorite plane, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, on the planet:
Near the end of his video, Felton speculates why the Iranians keep flying this 50-year old aircraft:
The real reason why Iran still clings to its antiquated Tomcats may be something completely different from air-to-air combat. F-14s have immensely powerful radar systems, and some analysts suspect that the Iranians use their F-14s as a kind of stop gap airborne early warning platform; Iran lacking any dedicated AWACS aircraft in its fleet. The Tomcat’s ability to fly quite high and fast makes it a good reconnaissance platform. There is nothing the Russians and Chinese currently make that would match these abilities, so that may be the reason Iran keeps a handful of old F-14s flying.
But now, the Iranians have a much more powerful, albeit not very sophisticated long range detection system: President Biden Assures Iranian Air Defense: ‘Nothing Going to Happen Today.’
Iran is an American enemy. Iranian-backed militaants have killed and wounded American military personnel. Iran supported terrorists and insurgents in Iraq that killed Americans in uniform.
You would think that an American president would not merely be cheering on Israeli actions that eliminate Iranian-backed terrorist threats, he would be lending all possible aid. Instead, the Biden administration is emphasizing that it offered no assistance and played no role in the strike that killed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
And now the president apparently thinks it’s a good idea to blurt out what he’s heard about Israeli response plans.
Q Would you support Israel striking Iran’s oil facilities, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: We’re in discussion of that. I think — I think that would be a little — anyway.
Biden got a question about Jack Smith, and then:
Q (Inaudible) response to the retaliation? Will you let Israel retaliate? What are the plans to allow Israel to strike back against Iran?
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, we don’t allow Israel. We advise Israel. And there’s nothing going to happen today. We’ll talk about that later.
This is how President Biden helps, by announcing to the world that Israeli retaliatory strikes aren’t coming today.
Who needs AWACS, or even F-14s, when you have the patented Trunalimunumaprzure early warning system?
UPDATE: “Ayatollah Frantically Googles ‘How To Build Iron Dome Thingy FAST,’” America’s Newspaper of Record reports.