Флот; ВВС; Локальные конфликты; Искусство и творчество;
Да, вот еще
>>А с чем это было связано и как обстоят дела сейчас?
Вот, узнал - оказывается межвидовой перевод в САСШ был возможен до 1991 только через резервы видов: ты выходишь в резерв одного и можешь быть переведен в резерв другого, но это может занять несколько лет и перерыв в лётной работе тоже будет длинным. Так поступали иногда офицеры с амбициями в науке или промышленности (океанограф Роберт Баллард, например), но пилоты - редко. ТОно того не стоило ни по опыту, ни по деньгам. Кстати, о деньгах - в 1966 пилот А-6 за год получал 1400 - 1850 долларов. Пилот гражданского MD9 PanAm - от 9 до 12 тысяч. Т.к. во времена Вьетнама от 43% (1964) до 71% (1970) пилотов в морской авиации были выпускниками AOCS (90-дневный курс) и в ходе образования в колледжах и универах никак не общались с миром военных (то есть мировоззрение большинства было чисто либеральным и на службу шли по двум причинам - получить бесплатно востребованную профессию и оплатить College Debt), массовый исход в авиакомпании по истечении обязательных 8 лет службы бы, так сказать, "немного предсказуем". Top Gun - фильм уже для следующего поколения, которое из-за пузырей Рэйгана уже не видело в военной службе такого социального лифта, и которому надо было дать другую морковку в виде красивой жизни наполненной волейболом, тёлками, реальными мужскими тёрками в воздухе и на земле, и пр. И главное, что сказал фильм - по мнению Эндрю Басевича, в его книге New American Militarism - что реальная война для палубного лётчика - это тоже что-то насчет having fun. И это и есть основное влияние фильма не мозги молодежи, далеко не только пиндосской.
А, ладно - цитата из этой книги про Топ Ган. Она не просто представляет из себя пример типичного для Америки публицистического анализа культурного ивента - она ценна тем, что это пишет отставной армейский танковый полковник (крайняя должность Басевича в линии - командир батальона "абрамсов"), и когда он пишет про другой вид ВС - это всегда имеет привкус Interservice Rivalry с точки зрения восприятия real war. Ок, куотинг:
Top Gun may have been a poster, but the impact of that poster was profoundly subversive, undermining reigning conceptions of war and military service. Top Gun was the poster of Ronald Reagan’s dreams, its alluring images and pounding sound track made to order to affirm an emerging consensus about the importance and purposes of American military power.
As narrative, Top Gun reprises a host of hoary movie clichés. The story of Maverick’s trials, tribulations, and ultimate triumph is of little enduring interest. The same cannot be said, however, about the context in which his story unfolds—the technologically sophisticated, intensely competitive, and exotic world of U.S. Navy carrier aviation. In this particular poster it is the backdrop rather than the action in the foreground that matters.
Specifically, Top Gun—a film made with the Navy’s enthusiastic cooperation— challenged at least three then-prevailing “truths.” In each instance, it substituted a new “truth” that others in the worlds of politics, journalism, and entertainment subsequently refined and repackaged, so that by the beginning of the twenty-first century all three had taken root in the American imagination and together had created a new set of expectations about war and military service.
The first of these images, strangely enough, relates to hygiene. From time immemorial, the battlefield had been a filthy, stinking place. Combat had obliged soldiers to exist in the damp and the mud, at times amidst blood and decay, with lice and flies and rats as their frequent companions. Preparing soldiers to encounter this environment had traditionally involved an emphasis on stress and deprivation. Whether in war or in peace, soldiering had been a dirty, exhausting business, in which rest, clean clothes, decent food, and bathing tended to figure as something of an afterthought.
Now, Top Gun suggested, all of that was beginning to change. Order, crispness, and a palpably cool sensibility characterized the world of the modern warrior, it appeared. Warm California sunshine, hot motorcycles and classic cars, leather jackets festooned with military patches and worn as fashion accessories, sleek-bodied aircraft flown by sleek-bodied men, a plentitude of beautiful women: these defined the universe of the naval aviator. Maverick and his comrades never missed a meal and got sweaty only when they felt like it.
Along with offering military service as an attractive lifestyle choice, Maverick’s adventures as an F-14 pilot conveyed a second “truth,” one that pointed to the emergence of a new and distinctive American way of war. As depicted in Top Gun, the hallmark of this novel approach to warfare—the element that set it apart—was a heightened emphasis on technology.
By no means did the movie intimate that the warrior himself was becoming ancillary to combat. Indeed, as rendered in Top Gun, modern war resembled nothing so much as a throwback to the days of knighthood—brief, violent clashes producing unequivocal results and followed immediately by festive ceremonies honoring the victor. But human strength, bravery, and resourcefulness alone no longer sufficed to win these duels.
Victory derived from providing the highly skilled warrior with the latest in weaponry, together producing a quantum leap in speed, agility, and lethality. Top Gun made it abundantly clear that here lay America’s decisive edge—not only in having at hand the very latest gee-whiz gadgetry but also in possessing a peculiar talent for organizing technology so as to exploit its potential.
Finally, the movie offered its own take on politics. Unlike An Officer and a Gentleman, which had ignored politics altogether, and unlike First Blood Part II, which had displayed its political cynicism as a sort of badge of honor, Top Gun promulgated a conception of politics congenial to this newly reconfigured formulation of U.S. military power.
Maverick and his comrades inhabited a world that permitted little room for uncertainty. Neither history nor any appreciation for interests or motivation figured appreciably in explaining how that world worked. Indeed, since dwelling on such concerns might compromise a pilot’s ability to make instantaneous life-or-death decisions, it made sense to exclude them from the cockpit. From a fighter pilot’s perspective, it sufficed to know that there were good guys and bad guys, the latter in Top Gun anonymous but readily identifiable thanks to their black aircraft, black helmets, and opaque visors. In the end, all that really mattered was that the good guys should prevail. By definition, Americans were good guys, and in Top Gun, needless to say, they did prevail.
