When audiences first met Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in 1986’s Top Gun, he was a lieutenant at the Navy’s elite school for fighter pilots. The movie doesn’t give his age, but that would probably have put Maverick, as he teamed up with his buddy Goose in the skies over California and the glistening volleyball pits by the sea, in his mid-to-late 20s. When Top Gun: Maverick was released, 36 years later, Mav was still flying. With his aviators and winsome smile, he looked great for a man in his 60s.
But Maverick was still only a captain. Captain is a senior Navy rank, equivalent to full-bird colonel in the Army, but Maverick’s contemporary Iceman, in contrast, had progressed to four-star admiral and the head of Pacific Fleet, one of the Navy’s biggest jobs. Most important, Maverick is more stuck in his captain’s mentality than he should be for his age and experience. Maverick’s dogged, iconoclastic love of flying, career consequences be damned, is a theme throughout the movie. “You can’t get a promotion, you won’t retire,” an exasperated admiral, played by Ed Harris, says after reading through Maverick’s file, “and despite your best efforts, you refuse to die.”
Top Gun: Maverick is a solid action flick. You could spend a lot of time on the military forums of Reddit, though, reading about why its premise and plot are ridiculous. Beyond the details of military life, consider Maverick’s love interest, played by Jennifer Connelly. She is a dive-bar owner and single mom who somehow has a fancy sailboat and a vintage Porsche that a browse online tells me is worth $200,000.
But one aspect of the film has proved implausibly accurate. Maverick is a seasoned military man who resolutely refuses to grow up. He remains stuck in the same rank he has occupied for years, attached to the same mentality, concerns, and priorities. Although three decades have passed, he hasn’t progressed, instead spending his time on rebellious flying, seaside sports, and drinking in dive bars. His is an arrested development. The most unrealistic aspect of this portrayal is that, in 2026, that profile would make Mav not a superannuated flight instructor, but secretary of defense.
At 46 years old, Pete Hegseth is considerably younger than Maverick. Yet since he became Pentagon chief 18 months ago, I’ve repeatedly heard from military officials that Hegseth appears frozen in the mindset of a person in a much more junior station than he now occupies.
Hegseth joined the Army National Guard after college. Had he starred in a National Guard equivalent of Top Gun, we might have met him when he led a platoon in Iraq in 2005 or trained local forces in Afghanistan in 2011. We know from his book that he was preoccupied with battlefield-level concerns: no letup in pounding the enemy, no second-guessing frontline troops and their actions, no concessions to nitpicky “jagoffs,” his derisive term for military lawyers.
By 2021, he had reached the rank of major in the Guard. But he resigned in anger after being sidelined from the protection of Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration because of an internal complaint that one of his tattoos might be a sign of white nationalism (a claim he denies). By then he had detoured into the media, becoming a Fox News host. Four years later, he got his own sequel, as President Trump’s unlikely pick for secretary of defense.
[From the July 2026 issue: Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s military]
But since taking the Pentagon’s top job, in January 2025, Hegseth has acted more like a company commander than a member of the Cabinet. He has shown an intense, animating interest in matters that typically would preoccupy a junior officer rather than the civilian head of the world’s most powerful military, someone who leads almost 3 million personnel in a world replete with danger.
When Hegseth summoned hundreds of generals and admirals to the Pentagon last fall, for example, he chided them for being fat and sloppy. He has also shown an unusual focus on physical fitness. His workouts, jaw-clenching pull-ups and all, regularly appear on social media. (Sorry, sir, but the 64-year-old Cruise has you there.) If he detests anything more than fat generals, it’s facial hair—no more “beardos,” he has said. And last week, he released a video announcing that the military would start testing the testosterone levels of troops older than 30 to help achieve a “High-T Department of War.”
You can debate the merits of those policies, but the United States is currently engaged in a war with Iran, staring down the prospect of a much larger conflict with China over Taiwan, and facing a revolution in warfare technology. (Hegseth also is overseeing attempts to reform the Pentagon acquisition process and to adopt AI.)
One former Army officer told me Hegseth reminded him of what he and buddies were like as senior lieutenants or captains. “He’s not so junior that everything is still new and exciting,” the officer told me. “He’s been around long enough to see some warts—generals gaining weight, too many waivers for beards—but not long enough to have any perspective.” When I asked the Pentagon about this and other observations, the spokesperson Joel Valdez, in a statement, called them “unjust partisan critiques.” He added: “Meanwhile, the rest of real America applauds the generational changes and disruption to the status quo that Secretary Hegseth has achieved at the Department of War,” Hegseth’s preferred name for the Defense Department.
The plot of Top Gun: Maverick is built around Maverick’s appointment as the leader of a high-risk mission against an unnamed enemy country that bears an uncanny resemblance to Iran. Maverick and his fellow pilots must fly deep into enemy territory to blow up an underground uranium-enrichment site that is protected by surface-to-air missiles and advanced enemy aircraft. (Another head-scratcher for the Reddit crowd is why, in the movie, the Navy forgoes its own fifth-generation fighter, the F-35, and dispatches Mav and his team in older F/A-18 Super Hornets.)
The Hollywood sequence shows off spectacular air maneuvers. But the premise has distinct echoes in the Trump administration’s own war with Iran. Last June, the U.S. and Israel, to use Trump’s word, “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program by air, in what no doubt would also have made for exciting viewing. But Hollywood is not real life, and air strikes alone seldom secure strategic objectives.
The U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran in late February. The Pentagon’s campaign of air strikes on Iranian targets, which is expanding again after weeks of a shaky cease-fire, has not put an end to Iran’s nuclear stockpiles or know-how, and has probably hardened its leaders’ resolve to attain a bomb. Neither has it stopped Iran from striking Gulf neighbors, recently killing two U.S. service members in Jordan. Rather, the war has given Iran a new confidence that it can withstand a U.S. assault and assert control over the Strait of Hormuz. From the start of the war, Hegseth has been a strong proponent of unshackled force against Iran in ways that sounded as if he were speaking from down in the ranks and thought he was unlikely to be overheard. (His braggadocio included a vow to give adversaries no quarter, in defiance of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.) But unlike Maverick, who makes a triumphant return to his carrier in a stolen Iranian F-14, Hegseth doesn’t look headed for a Hollywood ending.
[Read: The Pete Hegseth exception]
That brings us to flyovers. Like Maverick, whose penchant for buzzing control towers at top speed has made him the bane of Navy brass since Ronald Reagan was president, Hegseth often sees military rules less as ironclad laws than as guidelines to be broken because breaking them is cool. Hegseth gained prominence on Fox by advocating for reprieves for troops charged with war crimes, a stance that forged his bond with Trump. Since taking office, he has shown a habitual disregard for rules, in both their purpose and their application. (After The Atlantic embarrassingly revealed that he had shared classified information on the commercial messaging app Signal, Hegseth argued the information was unclassified because he had, without taking any action, deemed it so.) And, like Maverick, Hegseth disdains rules against showy flyovers.
Last week, an F/A-18 Super Hornet from the Blue Angels, the Navy’s flight-demonstration team, zoomed dangerously low along the Florida coast, stirring up sand and umbrellas, startling some beachgoers—and, it must be said, delighting many others. The Blue Angels launched a probe into the incident. The unit’s commander, Captain Adam Bryan, suggested on social media that the low altitude of the flyover was unintentional and said the squadron was undertaking a “heavy review” to ensure future safety. But all that didn’t sit right with Hegseth. The next morning, he posted sarcastically on social media that “the flyovers will continue until morale improves.” Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, whom Hegseth installed after firing Cao’s predecessor, then weighed in with a Hollywood scriptwriter’s cheesy panache to say the incident debrief was complete. “No reprimands. No firings. No problem,” he wrote above a video of the jet screaming along the beach. “That’s the sound of Freedom!”
One former Navy officer familiar with the Blue Angels told me the flyby was “clearly out of the parameters” of what the unit would normally perform; typically pilots maintain a standoff distance and altitude from spectators to ensure the crowd remains safe. This is, after all, a demonstration unit whose whole purpose is to wow the public and showcase what military pilots can do. Several officials I talked with brought up a 1994 incident in which an Air Force pilot with a record of safety violations stalled and crashed his B-52 during an air-show rehearsal, killing all on board. In 2002, an air-show calamity in Ukraine killed 77 spectators.
What if the Blue Angel Super Hornet had hit the beach? The fact that it didn’t shouldn’t negate a thorough inquiry. “The Navy’s instincts were 100 percent right,” the former officer said of the Navy review. It was the second time this month that Hegseth intervened in a flyover, boasting he would “fix” the suspension of National Guard helicopter pilots who flew very low over Myrtle Beach. “Carry on, Patriots,” Hegseth wrote. And in March, he publicly overruled the Army’s suspension of Apache pilots who flew by the house of the MAGA-friendly musician Kid Rock. Hegseth even made a show of taking Kid Rock on an Apache flight afterward.
The military system is premised on rule-following, hierarchy, and discipline; it’s how you get troops to do the onerous and sometimes dangerous things they’re asked to do in service of their country. Hegseth has already challenged that premise in ways both meaningful and petty, by circumventing the normal promotion process to push out officers far below him or to stall their advancements, and by firing senior officers set for even higher rank. His showy action on the flyovers undermines that culture, too.
Guy Snodgrass, a former pilot and Top Gun instructor who served in the Pentagon during Trump’s first term, told me that Hegseth likes to talk about good order and discipline. “But a central part of that is letting the chain of command work,” he said. “If you cut their legs out from underneath them and send a message that anything goes, you risk losing a central element of military professionalism.” Many of the troops who will heed Hegseth’s signals are young, less than 20 years old, with the prospect of a long military career ahead of them. They may not have the training or worldliness of more experienced Blue Angels pilots. What message does Hegseth’s intervention send them? The former Army officer told me the danger is that commanders will begin looking the other way when violations occur. “That is the beginning of the end,” he said. “That’s when discipline begins to crumble.”
At the end of Top Gun: Maverick, Maverick flies off into the sunset with his gal in an antique P-51. He just led a legendary mission, so maybe Navy leaders would get over his chronic insubordination and give him a worthy new job. But I’m guessing the Navy doesn’t promote him, either. Mav may be an icon of the air, but they know he’s not good for the force.
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