Refreshing

 

Captain Dale A. Dye. We mostly know him for his consulting work and appearances in films and television through his company Warriors, Inc., rather than his military record - which is pretty impressive. The man "got around." His Wikipedia page shows his military awards, headlined by a Bronze Star (with V for Valor) and three Purple Hearts among the many others you can see in the picture above.

So, when I start hearing "stars" give their political opinions and such, I'll tend to believe someone like the Captain on military matters far and above someone like Sean Penn or Michael Moore. It just so happens he has a blog at his Warriors, Inc site. Here the Captain expounds on the mission to assassinate Osama Bin Laden:

Its been a while since that infamous scum-sucker Osama Bin Laden assumed room temperature and was consigned to sleep with the fishes. With the exception of repeated self-congratulatory references to it by a certain high-level politician running for reelection, the raid carried out by Navy SEALs and Army SOF aviators on 2 May has slipped below the media radar to be replaced by more pressing stories...like a narcissistic congressman tweeting phone-photos of his man-meat. So maybe enough time has passed for me to weigh in with relative objectivity on a few elements of Operation Neptune Spear that got short-shrift in the hoopla surrounding the long-overdue whacking of the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and the titular head of Al Qaeda worldwide.
Looking back on all the breathless reportage immediately following the raid, what strikes me initially is the wild-eyed hyperbole involved. It's as if all the deadline-frazzled journalists in the world googled "daring, dangerous and audacious" and then shot-gunned every synonym they could find into their copy. It was all designed to make readers and viewers do a pee-pee dance, read more and keep their sweaty hands off the remote. That's the nature of the highly-competitive media beast these days, I guess, but it's also an unfair overstatement of the facts involved in the OBL mission. Neptune Spear was anything but a cobbled-together strike with high-speed, low-drag operators slapping mags into their weapons and launching off into the night with knives between their teeth and devil take the hindmost.

He goes on to say how well planned it really was plus how it was because of failures in the past that this sort of preparation came to breed success. He does not pull punches. Pee-pee dances indeed.

Neptune Spear put all of that into the deep, dark background and that's as it should be. What the media has so far ignored is that this OBL strike mission was definitive proof-of-product for our special operators. Where our operators, door-kickers and shooters of the SOF community have screwed the pooch in past operations, they have learned hard lessons and applied the knowledge to current tactics, techniques and procedures. And chief among those lessons was the extraordinary cooperation demonstrated in the OBL raid between the alphabet-soup intelligence organizations and the active forces that rely on vital, perishable information to carry off a successful clandestine operation. On Neptune Spear all the horses were pulling in the same direction and the internecine, bureaucratic walls that keep information from flowing back and forth to and from the people who need it crumbled. Those things are crucial in understanding how capable we really are in the longest, most difficult war America has ever fought.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't fire a few rounds downrange at the current administration and the voracious media that insisted with high dudgeon that they should be given every specific detail of how the raid was conducted so they could score political points, boost circulation or score audience ratings without the first thought of how all that brag and blather might affect future operations against our nation's avowed enemies. Imagine for a moment that we'd simply acknowledged that a covert operation was conducted and a high-level AQ member was killed; nothing more, and to hell with the screaming minions of the press. We might have had a real, workable chance to exploit and act on the intelligence our operators policed up within OBL's compound. And the AQ network would be sitting out there wondering what we knew and what we didn't rather than presuming that all their secrets were now compromised.
If the administration and the press had been willing to play it closer to the vest, we might have wound up hitting OBL's entire chain-of-command and eliminating much of their infrastructure before they had a chance to react, change codes and implement their own version of Plan B.
Like it or not - depending on your political and patriotic - bent there are things that the public does not need to know. Every time we ignore that or demand full and unfettered access to any and all military information, we tip our hand to the enemy and put the lives of our special operators in jeopardy.
Politicians, pundits and press weenies...how copy my last?

I'm with him here with reservations - sooner or later we the general public should know what happened. Immediately after? Obviously that was a political decision solely to bolster the image of a militarily ineffective Commander in Chief. Damn straight the covert ops could have made some serious hay if the mission wasn't publicized.

Here he takes on the politically correct movement controlling the military:

Somewhere along the twisted, constantly shifting, joint-service route that too many senior officers have had to traverse from bars to stars they've become uniformed politicians who succeed not by charismatic leadership but by going along to get along and allowing their soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen to become lab-rats for advanced social studies. Leaders bred to be Pattons and Halseys have morphed into placid bureaucrats. So where are the fire-breathing rifle company commanders, bone-in-the-teeth destroyermen and hot-stick fighter jocks now that they've gained flag status? Nowhere that I can spot. I'm painting with a broad brush here but the picture is bleak and deserves attention. It seems in order to merit stars and thus a say in our national military policies, senior men and women are required to wash off the war-paint and fall meekly into lock-step with politicians who hold both the defense purse-strings and the rubber-stamp required for promotion.

Those politicians - most of them without a day of military service in their padded resumes - come to the game with varying social agendas and see the military as a captive, easily-manipulated population they can use to work out the bugs before they launch legislation to dump the entire nation into one big Petri dish where they can grow the sort of American culture they desire. There's nothing especially new in all that. It's been going on for years in the guise of bringing the military in line with civilian social standards and practices. What's new is that it's being quietly allowed by senior officers who don't have the guts to fight back and preserve the special elements of military service that has kept America a force to be reckoned with by tin-pot dictators and wannabe world conquerors for decades.
The timing for all this could not be worse. Our military forces are holding a shaky line in Iraq, busting their collective butts in Afghanistan to get something meaningful done before a looming withdrawal deadline, coping with a confused and fumble-footed situation in Libya and watching a growing number of protesting populations in Middle Eastern countries that could easily spill over into more American military commitments. In the face of all this unrest, our military forces are increasingly being employed as a diplomatic arm of the U.S. State Department. No one at the highest command levels seems to be bitching very loudly if at all about that. It would be a dead-certain career-killer to do so. It would also be a display of courageous leadership and loyalty to the troops they command.
I'm confident our men and women up close to the pointy-end of the bayonet can handle those challenges. They've been the capable, guiding hand on a rudderless ship of state plenty of times in the past. What bothers me most are the distractions they are going to have to deal with while they try to keep us all afloat through this current mess. While our military people and their families are coping with a dizzying drumbeat of constant combat deployments and humanitarian missions in disaster-stricken areas like Haiti and Japan, they are also watching the warrior fabric that keeps them motivated being frayed by meddlesome, mandated social change that could easily be left to take a natural course after the operational pressure eases a bit. Need some examples?
How about the recent study ordered by Congress that reports a lack of diversity in our military leadership? It seems the proportion of minorities and women in our uniformed leadership is inadequate and will require immediate " affirmative action." That action will be ordered by politicians who believe only they know what's good for our military and are stone blind to potential consequences. Race, creed, sex or sexual orientation will inevitably become factors in accelerated promotion. The days of selecting the best based on proven performance may well be over in our military and that will lead to a closed loop that includes diverse careerists and excludes the warriors most skilled in the brutal business of killing the enemy and bringing our troops home alive.
Do the generals and admirals have their star-studded skivvies in a knot over this? Not that we are hearing or seeing in testimony before various Congressional committees. It's all good if you believe what you hear and our military will suffer any disruptions in silence as penance for past social sins. Yes, sir or ma'am, diversity and social sensitivity is going to make everything better and if those Neanderthal warriors don't like it, well, they can just take a hike.
The failure to rail against all this reminds me of Army Chief of Staff General George Casey's reaction after that nut-bag Muslim in uniform shot up a bunch of his fellow soldiers down at Ft. Hood and the Army was looking for a scapegoat to blame for the actions of a guy who had clearly telegraphed both jihadist leanings and violent intentions. Fearing knee-jerk reaction in the ranks, General Casey simply said we must be sensitive to diversity. All the soldiers I've asked said the more appropriate response would have been a drumhead court-martial leading to a firing squad.
Now, I'm watching sailors, Marines and airmen putting their lives on the line in yet another commitment of manpower, money and equipment to maintain a no-fly zone in Libya, a mission that is both without clear objective and a political hot-potato for a current administration that can't decide how much we are willing to do and for whom we ought to be doing whatever that turns out to be. While they deal with that turd in a political punchbowl, placid leadership behind the lines is issuing orders for the full and unfettered recognition of homosexuals in the military and preparing for a virtually inevitable mandate to open direct combat assignments to females. That situation will likely sort itself out by natural selection but the timing of such a ground-breaking departure from the warrior ethos is aggravating at a time in which more aggravation is the last thing we need in our military services.
As a guy who spent a large chunk of his adult life in uniform, I'm no stranger to the fact that there have always been homosexuals in the military and most of them have served honorably in both war and peace. I'm also aware that no amount of sensitivity training is going to thoroughly erase prejudices that have been invested and nurtured in the minds of many heterosexuals long before they joined the military. There's going to be divisiveness, unrest and a fairly long period of adjustment before it all sorts out so why force it on an over-stressed military right now? Assuming we survive the worldwide challenges facing us on battlefields around the world where cultures are clashing and our military people are struggling to defend our right of choice, do we really need to burden them with turbulence in the ranks?
Can we catch a break here?

He's not saying anything I haven't heard before, but he's saying it clearly, short, and sweet. The time to force the military to overcome the childhood prejudices of their members is not when they are at war.

He's got several other posts, and if you are interested in a military man's point of view, I highly suggest you check it out. Captain Dye is well spoken as well as provocative. Being politically correct is not in his genes, and I find that refreshing.