He named the new unit SEAL Team Six, even though the US only had two other SEAL teams at that time.

As the war expanded they also deployed to North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.įollowing the failure of Operation Eagle Claw – the attempt to release US hostages taken prisoner during the 1979 Iranian Revolution – the Navy decided they needed a full-time dedicated counter-terrorism special ops team and tasked Richard Marcinko – an experienced SEAL who’d been in Vietnam – with creating it. They even smuggled a CIA officer onto the island so he could take pictures of Soviet nukes being unloaded at the docks, in the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis.Īs Vietnam got going SEALs were sent into the country to train the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, and were soon being used by the CIA as part of the Phoenix Program. Though JFK is sometimes credited with announcing the creation of the SEALs in 1961, in the same speech where he set the target of landing men on the moon, this was merely a public acknowledgement of developments that had been going on for years.Īmong the newly-created SEAL units’ first missions were intelligence operations against Castro’s Cuba, as they did recon on beaches as part of plans to invade Cuba after the failure at the Bay of Pigs.

Just like in the UK, this led to the formation of Naval Special Warfare units.ĭuring the Korean war priorities shifted, as the Pentagon realised they needed specially-trained unconventional warfare and counter-guerrilla units to fight against the Communist and other insurgencies in South-East Asia. In order to land large numbers of troops in enemy-held ports and the like, they needed the ability to spy on the landing sites ahead of time and counter the mines, nets and other seaborne obstacles used by their opponents.

The origins of the SEALs go back to WW2, when the US Navy realised that they needed specialist reconnaissance and underwater demolition teams.

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