Still Top Gun? What Tom Cruise’s new movie tells us about American power

Elbridge Colby worked in the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defence, helping to write the influential 2018 National Defense Strategy, which shifted US strategy away from a focus on terrorism and towards a new era of great-power competition. “We should welcome the return of Top Gun, because it is a vision of what we actually need in US defence,” he explains. “War movies in the 2010s were all set on Afghan hilltops or the streets of Baghdad. But we are now in an era where the US must invest in new technology, but where we also need to be sending more aircraft carriers and planes to the Indo-Pacific to help deter a rising China.”

Financial Times