Propaganda with a Budget

Propaganda with a Budget

War Plans Laid Out In Plain Sight

Back in 2022, everyone in movie theaters was busy cheering on Tom Cruise doing barrel rolls in his fighter jet, and probably didn’t notice that Top Gun: Maverick might as well have been a Pentagon press release.

The film seemed like a nostalgic military action flick, but actually was a not-so-subtle preview of what just went down in the real world: the U.S. using stealth bombers and bunker busters to target Iranian nuclear facilities.

The climactic mission in Top Gun: Maverick has the elite pilots flying F/A-18s through a narrow valley at low altitude to bomb a heavily fortified, underground uranium enrichment site.

Last week, the U.S. actually carried out that exact mission when a B-2 stealth bomber, accompanied by support aircraft, struck three suspected nuclear sites in Iran, reportedly using bunker-busting ordnance

The “unnamed rogue state” in the film is clearly Iran. The landscape in the final bombing run is mountainous, snow-capped, and eerily similar to Iran’s Zagros region. The enemy’s nuclear ambitions are front and center in the plot. The mission objective of flying low to avoid radar to hit an underground reactor before it goes online, then escaping before enemy air defenses light up the aircraft, is essentially a perfect copy of what the U.S. just did.

When the film released, most people assumed it was just some generic bad guy in the film. You have to take into consideration, though, that when a Hollywood blockbuster is co-produced with the U.S. Department of Defense, you have to remember that every line of dialogue, every visual, every mission detail goes through military approval. They don’t just let filmmakers guess; they feed them what they want to show the public.