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:
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Why doesn’t the United States take over the monarchy and unite with England? England does have important assets. Naturally the longer you wait, the more they will dwindle. At least you could use it for a summer resort instead of Maine.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“I think those Southern writers [William Faulkner, Carson McCullers] have analyzed very carefully the buildup in the South of a special consciousness brought about by the self- condemnation resulting from slavery, the humiliation following the War Between the States and the hope, sometimes expressed timidly, for redemption.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Give me the eye to see a navy in an acorn. What is there of the divine in a load of bricks? What of the divine in a barber’s shop or a privy? Much, all.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)