by Rorke Denver
As a SEAL, that’s something you get to take with you down the road forever. It’s the feeling that danger, adrenaline, and success always bring, a feeling you never lose.
* * *
If 2,500 SEALs can achieve this much, imagine what 5,000 SEALs could do. Or 50,000. Or 500,000. The way some people have been talking lately, they’re ready to turn the whole U.S. military into one super-sized SEAL platoon and tell the Army, Big Navy, Air Force, and Marines to call it a day.
Good luck.
That talk is flattering to the SEALs, I guess, even in its less exaggerated versions. If our missions kept failing, no one would want more of them or more of us. With all our high-profile triumphs since 9/11, politicians, pundits, and the public all keep asking for more. More SEALs. More missions. More whatever-it-is-the-SEALs-bring-to-the-battle-space.
But more isn’t always better. These calls for dramatic expansion are often misguided in a couple of fundamental ways: They ignore how much we depend on other parts of the U.S. military, and they misunderstand what makes our special operators so special in the first place. It would be a hugely damaging miscalculation if we got more—but worse and less effective—SEALs.
The debate has been raging inside the White House, at the highest levels of the Pentagon, and across the SEAL community. And every time the arguments have erupted, I have been an active participant—often a vocal and passionate one. Running basic and advanced training, I had to be.
I found myself navigating between two powerful constituencies. On one side was the top SEAL leadership, who were under intense pressure to expand the head count. On the other were the frontline SEAL instructors, who viewed themselves as defenders of our standards and quality but, frankly, sometimes do go a little too far.
We have to get this complicated balance right. I don’t believe we always have. We can’t expand in ways that lower our standards or let the wrong people in. At the same time, we shouldn’t be driving potentially great SEALs away in some misguided attempt to prove how tough we are. How this debate is resolved—how we strike the right balance between exclusivity and size—will have a major impact on the future of the SEALs and other special-operations forces. And it will also go a long way in determining how the U.S. military meets its fundamental responsibility—keeping America safe in the years to come.
To understand what’s at stake and where this inside fight is heading, you really need a little history first. Some of it predates the start of my SEAL career, although all of it affects my generation and the ones to come. For the SEALs, the glow of Vietnam lasted a good long while. That’s where the early SEALs made their name. Those guys were legendary, and still are, for using the guerrillas’ own techniques against them.
But as the 1980s arrived and then the 1990s, some of that special-operations mystique had definitely begun to fade—and not just for the SEALs. The Vietnam guys were getting older. The public had lost its taste for almost anything connected to Vietnam. Like a yellowing Marcinko paperback, those early swashbuckling exploits and jungle derring-do were slipping further into the past. Some people around the Pentagon were even beginning to wonder if the U.S. military needed these quasi-independent special operators anymore.
The Army’s 1980 hostage-rescue fiasco on the way to the U.S. embassy in Iran came to symbolize America’s ill-equipped and dispirited special operators. Those clumsy SEAL missions in Panama and Grenada didn’t help, either. And it wasn’t just the SEALs whose prestige was getting battered. All the special-operations forces got lumped together in this period of poorly conceived and executed missions. I’d argue we maintained our standards and esprit de corps better than most of our fellow special operators. The SEALs were training and staying fit, remaining ready for whatever might come next. But not much did. And in the eyes of Washington and the world, despite our own bravado, some of that legendary edge and focus, made famous in Vietnam, was undeniably gone. In the committees of Congress, even among the top Pentagon brass, special operations was increasingly seen as an unruly backwater of the U.S. military—a mishmash of disconnected units, spread among the various branches with an ill-defined role and uncertain competence. In those dreary days, hardly anyone was demanding more SEALs.
Two things changed that, one of them gradually, one like a slap in the face.
The U.S. Special Operations Command was established in 1987 by President Reagan. Headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, SOCOM was designed to improve coordination among the various special-operations forces and to get them more money, better equipment, and whatever else they needed to do their jobs. Special operators are by nature fiercely independent. All the units were instinctively suspicious of coordination efforts from above. But gradually, this plan worked. The SEALs, the Rangers, and the others maintained their unique identities. We weren’t all mushed together into one big “Special Operations Branch.” And over the next few years, SOCOM really did help to improve special-ops focus and readiness.
Then 9/11 came, and the real action began.
Suddenly the world was looking a whole lot more dangerous and complicated than it had before. Suddenly what America needed most was what we did best.
Special-operations forces led the invasion of Afghanistan, with SEALs and Green Berets at the front of the pack. The same was true in Iraq, in fact, even more so. The special operators finally got the chance to show what they could do. We were fighting in multiple theaters in different countries against different types of enemies. Pretty soon we were getting far more than our share of the action.
So much about these wars was going wrong—the fruitless hunt for the weapons of mass destruction, the dwindling public appetite for drawn-out conflicts. What we were doing was going right. Battlefield commanders and Pentagon planners seemed to agree, and the public understood: The best return on the battlefield was coming from the special-ops guys, very much including the SEALs.
I don’t believe the Army saw this coming. I think the Army figured they would own the top tier of the operational battle space forever. But post-9/11, the special-operations forces truly achieved the premier spot in the stack of U.S. military. Bang for the buck, we were the best use of the taxpayer money around. And once Osama bin Laden was added to the mix, there was no stopping us. From civilian and military leaders, from Democrats and Republicans, the call was the same:
Get more special operators.
Lots more.
Now.
Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s secretary of defense from 2001 to 2006, was among the first to sound the expansion call, as he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to envision a U.S. military better suited to the twenty-first-century War on Terror.
“The global nature of the war, the nature of the enemy and the need for fast, efficient operations in hunting down and rooting out terrorist networks around the world have all contributed to the need for an expanded role for the special operations forces,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing in early 2003 as he began pushing to expand our numbers and our budgets, the true sign of Washington love. That push continued through the Bush administration, and President Obama has been just as staunch a supporter of special ops, especially the SEALs. Those around the president say his confidence was built by the Somali-pirate mission and then sealed by the bin Laden raid.
“So much of what you do will never be known by the citizens we serve,” Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, told an International Special Operations Forces Week conference in Tampa in 2012. “But I know what you do and so do others, who marvel and appreciate what it means for you to serve.” Then, as the latest round of troop reductions and bud get cuts became a pressing reality across the Pentagon, the Special Operations Forces were mostly spared.
“There are no sacred cows,” Admiral William McRaven, commander of U.S. Special Operations, said as the budget fights heated up. That being said, he added, the Special Operations Command “is in a particularly good position as our collective capabilities offer the nation comparative advantages aga
inst many of today’s threats and those that may potentially emerge.”
That was Washington-speak for “Don’t worry, you’ll get what you need.”
In an unclassified blueprint he circulated at the Pentagon, McRaven laid out the special-ops logic quite forcefully. “We are in a generational struggle,” he wrote. “For the foreseeable future, the United States will have to deal with various manifestations of inflamed violent extremism. In order to conduct sustained operations around the globe, our special operations forces must adapt.”
Special-operations forces “are an exceedingly cost-effective and combat-effective investment,” McRaven said.
While all this was playing out above, those of us in the SEAL community were so busy we could barely stop to think. Afghanistan was roaring. Iraq was in flames. Things rarely got quiet in the post-9/11 world. In our entire SEAL history, we’d never been this busy before. But our future was also on the line. It was that question from high school algebra all over again. If x was good, wouldn’t 2x be better? And what about 10x?
To many in Washington, the answer was obvious: make more SEALs.
It wasn’t exactly an order, the way it came down from the Joint Chiefs of Staff through the Special Operations Command to the senior SEAL leadership to those of us in command positions on the ground. It wasn’t “Hey, get this done, consequences be damned.” It was more along the lines of “We need to increase the head count. Tell us what your requirements are. We’ll get you the clearance or the funding or the facilities or whatever it is you need.”
By the barked-order standard of the U.S. military, the tone of the directive was downright polite. And it wasn’t aimed only at the SEALs. All Special Operations Forces were urged to beef up. The message as it was delivered from General Bryan “Doug” Brown, SOCOM’s commander, was simple: “You guys need to make ’em grow.”
Then an interesting thing happened.
The special-operations forces of the Army, Air Force, and Marines each produced projections of how their units could expand. Those units all expanded as promised. Class sizes were increased at Ranger School, at the Special Forces Qualification Course, and at the other special-operator selection programs. They all put out more graduates. And the flow of new operators promptly increased, enhancing the numbers all around.
There was one notable exception: the SEAL teams.
For almost a year, the SEALs acted as if nothing at all had changed. We went along pretty much as we always had. New classes arrived for BUD/S, same as always. These classes were filled with eager recruits, the vast majority of whom DOR’d before or during Hell Week. And the numbers of newly minted SEALs hardly changed at all. It was up a few, down a few, about like it always was.
It didn’t take long, less than a year, for a fresh directive to find its way to the junior and senior SEAL leadership, this one considerably firmer in tone.
“That wasn’t a suggestion,” was the way we heard it on the ground. “We want more SEALs. You will get us more SEALs.” There was also an addendum to that, unstated but still perfectly clear: “And if you won’t, we will find new leaders who will.”
That spurred one of the greatest silent and under-the-radar wars in our community’s history. On one side were the senior commanders who were charged with creating more SEALs. Their superiors wanted it. So did the politicians in Washington. On the other side was, basically, the rest of the force junior to them. Without question, all the instructors were dead set against lowering the standards in any way that would get more guys to graduate.
Their attitude: “You can send as many people as you want to. If they don’t meet our standards, they aren’t getting through. We are the guardians of the SEAL community.”
It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the idea of having more SEALs. We’d have no trouble finding operations to send them on. I for one just believed that bigger wasn’t necessarily better and that being small, creative, and nimble was what got the SEALs this far.
When we discussed the issue among ourselves, we all agreed the way to create more SEALs was not to ease the entry requirements, not to change BUD/S, not to lower the training demands, not to reduce the talent pool in any way that could have serious ramifications for what happened on the battlefield. The solution, we believed, was to attract an even higher quality of candidate—and not just from the usual places SEALs have always come. The initial concept was sound. If we could get a better product in the front door, maybe a higher percentage would make it through.
That’s the right way to make more SEALs.
But making that happen was far more difficult than it sounded. The whole idea of active recruiting was brand-new territory to the SEALs. We didn’t go looking for people. They found us. To men who thought they might have what it takes to be SEALs, we provided an opportunity to see if they did. That was our idea of recruiting.
What I believed and what a lot of the operators believed is that there just aren’t that many people in the world who are built to succeed in our training regime and as part of our tactical units. If that assumption was correct, it would be almost impossible to find many more of them and bring them in.
I was sitting at a senior meeting one day in Coronado. The topic of “targeted recruiting” came up, how we could expand our numbers by convincing guys from a variety of different backgrounds to come join us. A lot of very smart men, senior leaders, were giving their opinions and arguing back and forth. The discussion grew tense at times. In two and a half hours, no one left the room. I didn’t say anything until right near the end, when the officer running the meeting said: “In one sentence, I want one idea from everyone on where we stand on this whole recruiting issue.”
The captains and commanders weighed in first. “Send SEAL recruiters to college wrestling tournaments,” one of the officers said. “Reach out to rookies who are cut from the NFL,” said another. Then it was my turn. I was a lieutenant at the time, but not a shy one. “With a show of hands,” I asked, “who in this room was recruited?”
Not a single hand went up.
“Nor was I,” I said. “I read Winston Churchill, and here I am. I’m sure every one of you has some story about how you became aware of the SEAL teams or some moment that convinced you that this was the right place for you. In every single case, I bet, the SEALs did not find you. You found the SEALs. You found a place you truly wanted to be. You laid it on the line. You gave your best to this community, and here you are.”
In addition to trying to increase the number of people who applied, the senior leaders became increasingly focused on trying to predict in advance who would make it through BUD/S. They held more meetings. They hired outside consultants. You’ve never seen more mechanics under the hood of a car that was running perfectly well. These learned outsiders were all brought in to come up with the absolute, definitive answer to what it is that gets someone through this course of instruction. The old business of predicting wasn’t proving any easier this time.
The best attempt, as often happens, came from inside the brotherhood. Credit Commander Eric Potterat, the first active-duty psychologist at the Naval Special Warfare Center, a rare non-SEAL who is held in the highest regard by senior leaders and junior operators alike. He and three colleagues devised a one-hour Computerized Special Operations Resilience Test, which measures attributes like goal-setting, stress tolerance, emotional control, vigilance, self-talk, and leadership orientation. The test doesn’t predict BUD/S success. Nothing seems to do that. But when coupled with the candidates’ physical performance scores, it can say with 97 percent accuracy who is certain to DOR by Hell Week.
Three years in, that resilience test is still proving valuable. Right at the start, we can identify the bottom quadrant of applicants, the ones who have absolutely no chance of making it, and quit wasting our time and theirs. But still, no one has figured out the reverse. No one can say in advance: “These are the precise qualities that get someone through.”
Suddenly the instructors were
being asked to make extra efforts—what felt like extra allowances—to help the struggling candidates get through. There was undeniable pressure from above. I felt it. No one in senior leadership ever said explicitly to me: “You will do this. You are gonna graduate more guys.” Everyone always said, “We’re not asking you to compromise on quality.” But there was definitely trickle-down guidance from above that added up to much the same thing: “Figure out how to take more risk and get more guys to graduation day.”
You can imagine how well that went over with the suspicious instructor corps.
Everyone on the ground kept resisting the ease-up.
But top leaders kept intervening, greasing the path to graduation. An awful lot of do-overs became routine. When I went through SEAL training, you got four chances to pass drown-proofing, the fifty-meter underwater swim and the pool competency test. After a couple of tries, they might roll you back to another class for remedial help. But when I was running the Academic Review Boards and I was reviewing students’ performance, some of them were getting ten, eleven, and twelve opportunities to pass their tests.
In the past, when the cadre would recommend up the chain of command that a candidate be dropped, nearly 100 percent of the time that person would be dropped. That changed, too. A disturbing number of times, students would be reinstated and sent back into the pipeline for another opportunity. This started to undermine the instructors’ authority—and their ability to make the students believe that failing the next knot-tying exercise really matters. And if one class of recruits was feeling that, the impression would trickle into the next class as well.
It became a divisive and toxic time in our history. The SEAL instructors could barely contain themselves. Some threatened to quit. They said some questionable students were getting chance after chance to get through.
The instructors kept none of this to themselves. Very quickly, they shared their complaints with their operator buddies at the SEAL teams. These guys were all close. They were either just leaving tactical units to be instructors or going the other way. There aren’t too many secrets inside the SEAL community.