Although the first Navy SEAL teams were formed in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, very few people outside of the military community knew of their existence and the types of operations they carried out. Such anonymity was a benefit for the SEALs given the covert nature of many of their operations, and the elite nature of the units meant there was no serious need to embark on a public relations campaign to boost their ranks. Indeed, even today there is still a bit of confusion about SEALs, namely that their rating is actually called Special Warfare Operator and that SEa, Air, and Land is the job title within that rating.
That’s not to say that Navy SEALs were a complete unknown to the American public, however, and the 1990 action flick of the same name made people even more of the general concept of the units and the sort of missions to which they might be assigned. Former professional wrestler and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, a Vietnam War veteran who was a member of one of the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams with which the SEALs are so closely associated, repeatedly claimed to be a former SEAL. And with the launching of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, the public became even more familiar with Navy SEALs while still not knowing the full extent of the types of missions they carried out.
But with the 2011 killing of Osama Bin Laden by a team of Navy SEALs, the public was introduced to a twist on the SEAL moniker that almost none of them had ever heard before: SEAL Team Six. Just why the U.S. government decided to publicize the existence of this highly trained, elite unit as much as it did is up for debate. But even now there are many that do not understand precisely what SEAL Team Six really is.
Ironically, the name “SEAL Team Six” is itself a bit of disinformation, specifically aimed at our Cold-War nemesis the USSR. Its real name is the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, which in Navy acronym-speak is “DEVGRU” and which is best summed up as the “elite of the elite”—only the most experienced and trusted members of existing SEAL teams are chosen for the unit. In this respect it is highly similar to the U.S. Army’s Delta Force, which also takes only the very finest soldiers from its various Special Operations units to create a “Tier One” unit that is under the operational command of the Joint Special Operations Command. According to Richard Marcinko, the commander of SEAL Team Six, the name was chosen to make the Soviets think the U.S. had more than one of these powerful commando units.
The SEAL Team Six concept and unit was born in the aftermath of the failed Iranian hostage rescue of 1980. Although the original was disbanded and a newly formed SEAL Team 8 was created to take its place in 1987, the SEAL Team Six name stuck—and with the mission that took out Osama Bin Laden, it’s unlikely that the Naval Special Warfare Development Group will ever be known by any other moniker.
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