Originally Posted by telegraph article
When British pilots arrived at Miramar airbase in California in the early 1960s the Americans were losing a large number of dogfights in their multi-million Phantom fighters to the enemy's relatively "cheap" MiG 21s.
FAA pilots didn't go to the F-4 RAG at Miramar until 1967/68, hardly "early 1960s." That was about the time that that USN was running the Ault study and starting up Top Gun.
The fact that Lt Commander Dick Lord contributed to that effort has never been in doubt -- he's quoted in the F-4 Tactics Manual, for crying out loud.
As for the quotes suggesting that the US military needed "experienced" British pilots to teach them -- where did that experience come from? It's not like the RAF or FAA had more air combat experience than the US forces by this point.
Different point-of-view? yes.
Different training procedures & combat tactics? Most probably.
But how many jet-jet combats did the FAA get into in the Confrontation/Malaysian insurgency?