For a “secret” unit that doesn’t officially exist, Navy SEAL Team 6 is getting a lot of attention. The New York Times, citing a former SEAL, calls them the SEALs’ All-Star Team:
Inside the Navy, there are regular unclassified Seal members, organized into Teams 1 to 5 and 7 to 10. Then there is Seal Team 6, the elite of the elite, or, as Mr. Roberti put it, “the all-star team.”
The Navy SEALs — SEa Air Land forces — formally began in the Vietnam era, but they can trace their origins back to WWII, when the Navy realized it needed specialists to reconnoiter landing beaches, note any obstacles or defenses, and then guide landing forces in.
These proto-SEALs came from multiple branches and trained at the Amphibious Scout and Raider School. After the disastrous Tarawa landing in 1943, the Navy created its Underwater Demolition Teams. Early teams paddled into shallow water — wearing fatigues, boots, and helmets — where they did surprisingly little swimming. Soon though they evolved into “naked warriors” — wearing trunks, fins, and masks — and combat-swimming became their primary skill.
After the war, the UDT swimmers evolved into frog men, using SCUBA gear and rebreathers, and they started experimenting with other exotic forms of insertion and extraction: jumping from a helicopter into water, rappelling down, and getting picked up via Skyhook.
In Korea, they performed traditional UDT roles — preparing for the landing at Inchon, clearing mines, etc. — and less-traditional covert roles — escorting South Korean commando raids, helping spies across the lines, etc.
In 1961, when President Kennedy announced the plan to put a man on the moon, he also pledged to spend $100 million on unconventional special forces, like the Army’s Green Berets. Naturally, the Navy wanted a piece of the action, and the UDTs became SEALs, with a new emphasis on covert operations. They saw plenty of action in Vietnam.
(You may be thinking, “An elite group of commandos trained to attack from the sea… Aren’t those Marines?” Apparently the Marines’ Force Recon units weren’t deemed elite enough, and they resisted creating a separate sub-group of even more elite Marines, MARSOC, until 2006.)
When Operation Eagle Claw, the Iranian hostage-rescue, failed, the Navy decided it needed a dedicated counter-terrorist team. It added a third SEAL team, consisting of hand-picked men — which its commanding officer dubbed SEAL Team 6, to confuse Soviet intelligence.
That unit has since been renamed the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DevGru. You can see why the old name stuck. The group supposedly has an even newer name, but it’s classified.
(Delta Force, the other Tier One special forces unit, associated with the Army, is supposedly now ACE, the Army Compartment Elements.)
DevGru is jokingly known as an old man’s club, because the operators, with all their specialized training and experience, are closer to 30 years old, not 20.
As you may have noticed, their maritime focus has blurred, with the extended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.