Regardless of the actual merits of whether dogfights are a thing any more, I feel like "because Top Gun" is not exactly a sound argument.
https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Air-to-Air-Report-....
It's not a cloaking device, it's a <1 multiplier on the effectiveness of enemy radar. Both sides will still have radar, and detection range for a good stealth fighter with modern radar against itself is going to be higher than visual range. What stealth does do is it reduces detection range to well below the employment range of good missiles, which means that the first one to get a radar lock will either end the fight then and there, or at least be able to manouver into a very favorable position while the enemy has to evade a missile. This is why fights with stealth aircraft in simulation and training are so very technical and one-sided.
I did not pick up there is an argument about whether or not dog fighting still was needed.
The only "argument" I recall was the recap of how pilot deaths increased after training stopped, and decreased after training started. But it was a one off history lesson as part of the Top Gun school intro.
But the rest or the movie seemed very clearly - yes, the US needs dog fighting to defend its interests across the globe. There seemed to be absolutely no challenging of that idea within Top Gun.
Maybe I'm completely wrong (I'm not a pilot and have no military knowledge), but I feel like things have moved on since then in terms of both the technology and the types of wars fought.
Maybe someone more knowledgable than me can answer... when was the last time a US combat aircraft engaged in a real dogfight?
This isn’t to say there wasn’t propaganda, just that the propaganda was pointed in a different direction: for example a young idealistic police officer working with an veteran of the force to tenaciously investigate an elusive criminal gang for the glory of the Soviet Union. The focus was to make Soviet patriotism an attractive quality, regardless of being young or old. It was a lot more focused internally. In the meantime, a movie like Die Hard has none of that: German thieves that pretend to be terrorists are the bad guys, an all American hero is a good guy. American movies rarely have a true patriotic streak, as in “and this, son, is why we must work to better our union.” In fact, the idea of glorifying labor was so prevalent in the Soviet movies and so absent in American ones that this might be the biggest contrast. It shows a different face of patriotism and could easily explain the divide: some think patriotism is exercising your rights while others see it as holding back on exercising your rights. “It’s my right not to wear a mask” is a clear example of that.
Interesting, the closest Western execution of this Soviet theme, albeit much more cynically, might be "Child 44", which was banned in much of the FSU and bombed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_44_(film)
Personally I enjoyed it.
>>>American movies rarely have a true patriotic streak, as in “and this, son, is why we must work to better our union.”
"The Siege" might be one of the best for sticking to American values and trying to curb xenophobia. A big part of the plot is the importance of holding other Americans accountable for violations of our laws and our values, even when fighting against "foreign" enemies.
"You don't become a good communist by going to meetings. Or memorizing the manifesto. You do it with your fist."
Comrade Detective: "You're telling me the purpose of the [Monopoly] game is to drive your fellow citizens into poverty, so you can get rich? It's diabolical."
American subversive: "It's just a game. Nowadays the West finds it as a useful tool to indoctrinate young children into the capitalist system."
Not 80s, but Wolf Warrior is China vs. evil American mercenaries.
Many dozens of times over multiple decades in multiple theaters against multiple opponents, the vast majority of stereotypical NFZ engagements have ended in "two american planes primary and wingman have a brief dogfight against enemy aircraft to obtain ideal firing positions, involving visual identification, then end the fight with short range IR guided sidewinder missiles". There are, of course, occasional exceptions but the VAST majority of NFZ aerial combat stories look like this.
Its interesting that for 30 years NFZ ROE documents have been classified and are generally still classified and only rarely can you find an ROE illegally posted on wikileaks. HOWEVER the secret squirrel types seem to have ignored the internet and OSINT in general. So you can't legally find a piece of paper titled RoE describing how visual ID was necessary and BVR generally prohibited for all practical purposes, however, its trivial to read on wikipedia the stories of about a hundred NFZ engagements and then reverse engineer the classified ROE to match the large number of mostly identical individual engagements.
Or to summarize the above, the RoE for NFZ operations for the last 30 years remain classified, although the results of seemingly all air to air engagements have been publicly released, and traditional OSINT techniques applied to hundreds of "isolated" public anecdotes can easily reverse engineer the contents of those classified RoE documents, and the reverse engineered RoE documents pretty much mirror the fight scene at the end of the Top Gun movie; get close, dogfight into missile launch position while performing visual ID, end fight by launching short range IR missiles.