Leadership, Diversity & the Day I Should Have Died—a Fighter Pilot’s Perspective

Few movies characterize American pop culture to a generation of millennials like Top Gun, the 1986 original about a fighter pilot and his experience at the U.S. Naval Weapons School. What that movie and its 2022 sequel do not show is that Weapons School is actually a leadership course disguised as a school for aviation tactics. How do the services leverage such training to produce leaders like General ‘CQ’ Brown, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? When seconds matter, as they do in aerial combat, how can a leader integrate diverse perspectives to accomplish a mission? How should a leader respond after an error that is nearly fatal? Join Lt Col Brandon ‘Hassle’ Roth, one of our National Security Fellows, for an insightful discussion about his time as a commander in combat, as an instructor at the Air Force Weapons School, and as a fighter pilot whose mistake in December 2018 nearly cost him his life.