United States Navy SEALs
The United States Navy's Sea, Air, and Land Teams, commonly known as the U.S. Navy SEALs, are the U.S. Navy's principal special operations force and a part of the Naval Special Warfare Command (NSWC) and SOCOM.
"SEAL" is always capitalized in reference to members of the Naval Special Warfare community. The acronym is derived from their capacity to operate at sea, in the air, and on land. In the War on Terror, SEALs have been utilized almost exclusively for land-based operations, including Direct Action, Hostage Rescue, Counter Terrorism, Special Reconnaissance, Unconventional Warfare, manhunts and Foreign internal defense operations. SEALs are male members of the United States Navy. An exchange program with the Coast Guard, which graduated three Coast Guardsmen as SEALs, was suspended in 2011.
The CIA's highly secretive Special Activities Division (SAD) and more specifically its elite Special Operations Group (SOG) recruits operators from the SEAL Teams. Joint Navy SEALs and CIA operations go back to the famed MACV-SOG during the Vietnam War. This cooperation still exists today and is seen in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
Read more about United States Navy SEALs: Selection and Training, United States Navy Parachute Team "Leap Frogs", National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum and Memorial, Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, navy and/or seals:
“The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity.”
—Grover Cleveland (1837–1908)
“I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“Social and scientific progress are assured, sir, once our great system of postpossession payments is in operation, not the installment plan, no sir, but a system of small postpossession payments that clinch the investment. No possible rational human wish unfulfilled. A man with a salary of fifty dollars a week can start payments on a Rolls-Royce, the Waldorf-Astoria, or a troupe of trained seals if he so desires.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)