The 60 Minutes interview with an F-15 Weapons Systems Officer (WSO), DUDE 44 Bravo, shows incredible professionalism throughout the United States armed forces.
The recent 60 Minutes interview of the downed airman retrieved from Iran shows that Bari Weiss’ efforts at CBS are at a halfway point. On the one hand, the interview itself showed incredible professionalism from the Air Force colonel up to Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth. On the other hand, the interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, had to start the segment by describing the war as “long and unpopular”. Excuse me, with whom is it “unpopular”? With her lefty friends and colleagues? Most Americans don’t buy into the Tucker Carlson Israel made him do it garbage. Normal Americans remember the hostages held and humiliated until Ronald Reagan came to office. We are happy to see Iran lose its nuclear and conventional capabilities. We are pleased to see it lose its grip over the Strait of Hormuz, and we are rooting for the collapse of the Mullocracy soon and a return to a normal Iran that is at peace with the United States.
Anyway, back to the interview. All of those involved — the downed WSO, CENTCOM chief Admiral Brad Cooper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Daniel Caine, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth — sounded incredibly professional. The colonel described a set of events that would have made Kafka shake his head in disbelief: a hit from a shoulder-fired missile, damage to his ejection seat mechanism, experiencing a near free-fall, hitting the ground at over 70 mph, and traveling with broken bones and without food or much water up 7,000 feet to a mountain ridge during difficult weather. Yet, our man in the back seat did all of the above, and he expressed his thanks to God, his deep training, and the professionalism of his business. On the other side of the events, the top US brass moved massive resources to recover him and his comrade, who was picked up relatively quickly. Over 90 American special forces operators were on the ground, hundreds were in the air, and thousands were involved in all aspects of the events surrounding the recovery of a single downed airman. And that screams of seriousness and professionalism.
Let’s imagine the scenario unfolding under former President Joe Biden and whoever was really running the White House while he was unconscious. “We would be fools to send in dozens of people to pull out one guy. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe they’ve already got him. Let’s just do nothing.” It would be like the scene in Rambo 2 where the helicopter almost picks him up but is ordered home not to return with Vietnam POWs. And then let’s look at the endgame. When the C-130s got stuck in the mud, the Air Force brought in even more assets to get the nearly 100 folks out of the country. Then the order came down to blow up the planes left behind. Under Biden, they would have been left to the Iranians as war treasures and future assets in their ever-shrinking Air Force. “Why blow them up? Let’s just leave them there as we did in Afghanistan.”
People who hate Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth will gurgle on about the war being a failure and the 60 Minutes piece being a “PR disaster”. Normal Americans who love their country will be amazed at the sheer will of the brave colonel, his outstanding training, and the commitment of the entire US armed forces to get him out. Those fateful days were not ones in which to be an Iranian anywhere near the location of the missing airman. The US relaxed engagement rules and blew up or shot anything close to the position of the injured American. Add the CIA using its resources to confuse the Iranians about the location of the WSO and to positively identify his location, and you finally see something that looks like a functional government in Washington.
President Donald Trump does not micromanage. He chooses strong lieutenants and then gives them their marching orders. Then he takes care of the big picture. One can see the professionalism of Cooper and Caine in running the operation to get their man out. They did not panic, but they also did not take a laissez-faire approach. They got assets into position and made sure that their guy had the highest likelihood of survival. His first communication was sent when he felt that he was not overly exposed: Hurt. Moving. God is Good. Someone get me a Miller beer. It doesn’t get any better than this.
One point that has been attributed to Elon Musk and Steve Jobs is that they demanded that the components of their products not seen by customers be of equal quality as the visible parts. Chinese electric cars look great from the outside, but at least in Israel some have found rust when they looked a bit inward (independent of the spying by China via the cars themselves). The amazing performance of the weapons system officer and those tasked with finding him speaks volumes of the quality and intensity of their training. Every pilot knows that he may go down, but I imagine that the number of pilots who have had to bail out of damaged aircraft is well less than one percent of all military pilots. And the Pararescue guys — how often do they have to ply their trade of saving downed pilots behind enemy lines? In Vietnam they were busy, and there is a demonstration of their activities in a movie (30-minute mark) on Red Flag training at Nellis AFB in Nevada. But when a pilot finds himself hurt and in enemy territory, all of his training clicks in. Same for those tasked with finding him and those flying assets to keep all of the Americans on the ground safe. This was an incredible tour de force, and I don’t know if there is another country in the world that could have pulled it off. Israel has a dedicated unit, 669, for such purposes, but again the logistics here were just to the right of insane. There were reports at the time that Israel was also involved with the rescue.
A long time ago, Democrats would have cheered the successful rescue and repatriation of an American warrior. Now it is like matter and antimatter: Trump and anti-Trump. If the successful mission was run by Donald Trump and his people, then let’s focus on the millions in lost equipment left behind. If Dan Caine and Brad Cooper were behind the action, then we are not so much in favor. It’s pathetic. American fighters work to keep everybody back home safe. One should be happy that our armed forces showed incredible bravery and professionalism. But like everything such as COVID and BLM, one can only clap if his team wins. Anything associated with Trump is automatically not on his side. As the lady said to open the interview, it’s an unpopular war in her world. Most Americans are glad that the Iranian centrifuges are not spinning and that the theocracy may be facing its end. One can play dumb and say that they’re way over there. Bin Laden was also way over there, until 3,000 fellow Americans were dead because of what he was doing in his Afghan cave.
I stand somewhat amazed that the professionalism and warrior ethos of those involved in the rescue survived minimally the Biden years and also those of Barack Obama. Away from the limelight, American fighters keep on training and pushing the envelope of the possible. The WSO should not have survived without a full parachute, and the rescue squad should not have gotten to him first. But he did, and they did as well. Bravo, and thanks to God.