DEVGRU

Origins

The failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran in April 1980, showed that the United States needed more and better counterterrorist forces. The Army already had Delta Force. The Navy asked Commander Richard Marcinko, a decorated Vietnam veteran of the US Navy SEALs, to build a unit able to take back ships, oil platforms and other targets at sea or on the coast. He commissioned SEAL Team Six in late 1980. At the time the Navy had only two SEAL teams, and the number six is usually said to have been chosen to make Soviet intelligence think there were more. The unit was based at Dam Neck, near Virginia Beach. After Marcinko left command, the Navy reorganized it in 1987 under the bland name of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, officially responsible for testing tactics and equipment. It is usually known as DEVGRU.

Organization & Training

DEVGRU serves under the Joint Special Operations Command, set up after Eagle Claw to command the military's top special operations units. It is organized in squadrons that are reported to be named by color: several assault squadrons, a reconnaissance and surveillance squadron, and a squadron that runs its boats and other mobility. The Navy says little about its size or structure. Its operators are not recruited straight from training. They are experienced SEALs, usually with several years in the regular teams, who volunteer for a demanding selection and a long operator training course in close-quarter battle, shooting, breaching, parachuting and maritime assault. Many who start do not finish.

Weapons & Equipment

Like Delta, DEVGRU chooses and modifies its own weapons. For many years its operators carried the HK MP5 submachine gun for close-quarter work. In the 2000s the unit adopted the HK416, a piston-driven carbine, as its main weapon, together with the compact HK MP7. The Sig Sauer P226, in the Navy's Mk 25 form, was its long-serving sidearm. Its equipment for night raids, including night-vision goggles, suppressors, lasers and breaching explosives, matters as much as the rifles, and the unit also uses boats, submersibles and parachutes to reach a target.

Notable Actions

SEAL Team Six's first combat was the invasion of Grenada in 1983, where its men rescued the island's governor-general, and four of its members drowned during a night parachute drop into the sea. It was deployed during the Achille Lauro hijacking in 1985 and in Panama in 1989, and some of its operators fought in Mogadishu in 1993. After 2001 it fought throughout the Global War on Terror, above all in Afghanistan and Iraq. In March 2002 Petty Officer Neil Roberts was killed on the mountain of Takur Ghar in Afghanistan, and the fight to recover him became one of the war's best-known battles. In April 2009 DEVGRU snipers shot three Somali pirates holding Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama in a lifeboat, and he was freed unhurt. On 2 May 2011 operators of Red Squadron carried out Operation Neptune Spear, the raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden. Three months later, in August 2011, a Chinook helicopter shot down in Afghanistan's Tangi Valley killed thirty Americans, among them seventeen Navy SEALs, most of them from DEVGRU. It was the unit's worst loss.

Legacy

Until 2011 DEVGRU was almost unknown to the public. The bin Laden raid made "SEAL Team Six" one of the most famous names in the American military, and books by former members and films such as Zero Dark Thirty followed. The publicity brought difficulties for a unit that depends on secrecy, including a legal dispute over one memoir, and later press investigations raised questions about the pace of its deployments and about its conduct on some raids. DEVGRU and Delta remain the two main ground units of the Joint Special Operations Command, trained for the same missions, and the unit still describes itself officially only as a development group.

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