A Slight Correction...

In my Top Gun: Maverick video, I made the point that in the film, they chose “the girl,” but in Operation Midnight Hammer, they chose the best. This was a defense of Pete Hegseth, who referred to the crew as the “boys in the bombers.”

I have since read and heard that a female pilot was on the mission in the B-2 or one of the other jets. If so, I think that’s great. But I would have to conclude that the women deserved to be on the mission instead of being chosen for DEI reasons, which is how it seemed in Top Gun: Maverick. At least it did to me.

Monica Barbaro’s character in Top Gun: Maverick was all things at once to the movie: the hot girl, the “woman of color,” and the female pilot. Hollywood hadn’t yet gone over the edge with “woke” stuff in 2019 when Top Gun: Maverick was made, but still, there’s no question that to fulfill requirements in post-Me Too America, there had to be a woman pilot.

The difference is the level of difficulty of the mission. The flight mission in Top Gun: Maverick, as illustrated in the movie, looks harder to the naked eye. It has to be something only a very few pilots could manage. As it is, even the male pilots have difficulty with it.

By the way, I still can’t find any stories on this, so I asked Grok:

There is no definitive information from official sources, such as the Pentagon or the U.S. Department of Defense, specifying the exact number of female pilots involved in Operation Midnight Hammer. However, posts on X mention at least one female pilot among the B-2 stealth bomber crew for the mission, which involved seven B-2 Spirit bombers, each with a two-person crew (14 total crew members). These claims are unverified and inconclusive without official confirmation.

Given the lack of concrete data, it’s reasonable to estimate that at least one female pilot may have participated, based on the sentiment in these posts, but the exact number remains unknown. The U.S. Air Force does not typically disclose individual pilot demographics for specific missions, especially highly classified ones like Operation Midnight Hammer. For context, women make up about 5-10% of U.S. Air Force pilots, so female participation is plausible but not guaranteed in such a small, elite group.

It seems plausible that at least one female was on this particular flight, but again, flying fighter jets requires skill, but not the kind of skill required to fly those fighter jets in that mission in Top Gun: Maverick.

Joe Biden was the kind of leader who wanted people to see he was promoting women, as he did with Rebecca Lobach, who flew the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed with the pilot of the doomed flight 5342, killing her, her crew, and all 62 people on board the plane. I’m not saying she wasn’t ready in those extreme circumstances, or that male pilots don’t crash Black Hawk helicopters — they do.

It’s just that it seemed a little odd that Joe Biden trotted her out as proof of his support of female pilots. It made me feel a little nervous overall about DEI. Are they pushing people too fast, too far, and too soon for cosmetic reasons?

I feel sure that Operation Midnight Hammer chose the best people because no one felt the need to virtue signal about it. I have to assume a woman was there because she deserved to be there. And that’s what real achievement looks like.