Talk:Sheep dip (disambiguation)

Military term roots

The roots of 'sheep dipping' in the military to back to long before Oxcart. I recall reading a book by one of Chennault's Flying Tigers, ca. 1940, which talked about AVG members being 'sheep-dipped' prior to leaving to fly for China. Noel (talk) 04:14, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Sheep-dipping is a means of "plausible deniability" that involves metaphorically cleansing to remove all indications of true military (or governmental) affiliation. Usually includes civilian documents, civilian clothing, modified grooming standards and, where applicable, "sanitized" weapons (meaning untraceable to the controlling nation, as in western operatives exclusively using Warsaw-pact weapons). All the members of the AVG were formally discharged from the US Army prior to joining the Chinese Air Force but still got their marching orders from the US. There was a similar large-scale operation in Vietnam knowns as Project Steve Canyon in which the pilots, known as Ravens, were sheep-dipped before moving to Laos and flying as forward air controllers in unmarked aircraft for the benefit of the US forces (albeit with a Laotian aerial observer on board). Ravens had the highest casualty rate of any group involved in the war, and by a large margin.24.158.168.185 (talk) 22:47, 9 December 2017 (UTC)