When Influential People Personally Know . . .

. . . someone wearing the uniform at a lower level [i.e., they don't have to depend, exclusively, on official sources of information, including the media], America can do great things.

Money quote from an otherwise off-topic Washington Post article, Top Secret America: Joint Special Operations Command:

When Obama came into office, he cottoned to the organization immediately. (It didn’t hurt that his CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, has a son who, as a naval reservist, had deployed with JSOC.) Soon Obama was using JSOC even more than his predecessor. In 2010, for example, he secretly directed JSOC troops to Yemen to kill the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.