With books like No Easy Day, movies like Act of Valor and otherwise, and media coverage, I’m starting to wonder if the Navy SEALs are, in terms of image, becoming the opposite of what military special forces ideally ought to be: Covert, seldom-mentioned, and little known about.
The SEALs have long been glamorized by Hollywood, but the attention has seemingly spiked ever since that 2011 mission that killed bin Laden.
For the most part, of course, the hype that surrounds the SEALs isn’t their fault; Hollywood and popular culture will glamorize what Hollywood and popular culture wants to glamorize. But are the SEALs getting more attention than they should, and does the fact that many other military special-ops forces still do remain reasonable low-key and low-profile make the SEALs’ glamor that much more incongruous?
they have allways been glamorized by hollywood
Warriors have always been idealized and glamorized in the society they fight for. This trend goes back millennia at least to ancient Greece and Rome and quite possibly to the dawn of civilization. I’m not sure that its worth any effort trying to fight it. If the SEALs become inundated with media attention and decline in quality, one of the US’s many other special forces groups will replace them as the top choice. That’s just the way of things.
Special Forces had some of that going on coming out of Vietnam. There was no shortage of books by and about them. Any opponent worth a damn already knows they exist and general capabilities. That much was already out of the bag. Whether there’s no movies or books or one a month that piece doesn’t really change. Any given team can still operate covertly even at the same time the next big blockbuster is opening.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seemed that in the 70s and 80s Hollywood glamorized “the Green Berets” vastly more than Navy SEALs.
It seemed that shows like whenever they chose a unit for some character to be in an action movie or TV series, he was always an “ex-Green Beret”.
I.E. The A-Team, Rambo, Lethal Weapon, and probably about a billion other movies.
For the SEALs, the closest I can think of was Magnum P.I. where in flashbacks, he as the SEAL trident on his uniform, but is merely referred to as being “in the Navy” or “Naval intelligence”.
SF were far more publicly visible and more closely identified with Vietnam service in the popular culture, and there was quite a bit of mythologized propaganda about them during the build-up to the war (JFK himself talked up their image… and their song charted #1 for 5 weeks on the radio in 1966). So in the 70s and early 80s that was your go-to descriptor to say you were talking about a VietVet badass even though there were other less known special/dark ops units from other services and the Army itself involved as well.
Couple of generations later I suppose the current publicity aligns more with the distribution of labor in modern SOCOM – SF in reality mostly do not do the kind of raiding that SEALs do and that the public likes to hear about. Smashing into the compound under cover of dark and slaying the Big Bads is sexier than surviving months in the boonies building up tribal allies and gathering intelligence.
That pretty much tallies with the SAS over here. (UK)
And like the SEALs, they are a favourite for the fantasists who, for various reasons, claim to belong to the regiment.
Read about their training regimen and then tell me it looks glamorous.
Delta Force looked poised to take the pop culture mantle but that fizzled out. Plus is it the SEALS as a whole or DEVGRU aka Seal Team Six that informs the pop culture? And nobody likes the Ramgers…
Go tell it to the spartans
Yeah, its been a while since we have heard word about the green beanies. Ever since Afganistan, its been strictly generic SF, except when the SEALS have been around, must be in the union contract cause they always get mentioned.
Declan
Its actually Rangers, when you need to take a battalion of buddies into indian country to take an airfield, and hold it for a couple of hours, while delta or like unit brings out the hostages, then Rangers are one of your goto options, Marines being the other.
Declan
The Delta Force has always been the elite of the Special Forces, ever since the unit was formed. They just haven’t gotten nearly the publicity.
But in an interesting coincidence. . . .
Indeed. I was interested to learn that among the Air Force’s SF units are meteorologists and air traffic controllers. These guys are for-real special forces badasses, but I doubt that Hollywood will ever make a movie about a bunch of SF soldiers going into enemy territory to report on the weather or make sure airplanes don’t run into each other. I bet the USAF air crews are damn glad they’re there, though.
We have some weird blind spots when it comes to those who serve the nation. I’ll bet that not one American in ten can, without Googling it, name all seven of the uniformed services.
They’re not even that good are they; there’s a joke about being kidnapped and releasing a video demanding they don’t attempt a rescue. They just keep killing hostages.
NB: “Officially,” meaning by the terms that nobody except the military uses, Special Forces = Green Berets only. The vaguer military term for Green Berets/SEALS/Delta Force/Rangers/AFSOC/MARSOC is “Special Operations Forces.”
I initially misread this as saying that the USAF only has these “joke” units. But they do have some serious firepower forces. I kinda hope that some movie will happen. Maybe the NOAA discovers R’lyeh?
Right, but most people hang up on the last two and can name the other 5 (or maybe they forget USCG). The other two of them aren’t exactly military though, as much as I’d like to see C. Everett Koop storm beaches in the name of spreading the word of moustacheless beards.
maybe I’m missing a meme?
No, a common perception is they’re laughably amateur, often killing the people they’re supposed to save: Special forces yes, US special forces no.
Being trigger happy is a common American military stereotype, dating back to WW2 at least. What was that joke? “When the British shoot, the Germans duck. When the Americans shoot, *everyone *ducks.” I don’t know how much it applies today, either to the U.S military in general, or to the SEALS in particular.
It’s not a meme, it’s not a joke - lack of joined up thinking, too gungho/unprofessional; generally, you’d want to be rescued by any other special forces. Example:
Why a duck?
Say the secret special forces and win a hundred dollars.
You couldn’t remember a Navy SEAL movie called*Navy Seals*? It wasn’t obscure. It was Charlie Sheen at the height of his movie career and Michael Biehn right after Aliens and The Abyss.
The purpose of an army is not just to fight wars but to prevent wars by making other people afraid to attack you or your allies. The more fierce the SEALs reputation is the better they are at the latter part of their mission. So it is a good thing for the SEALs to be glamorized and thought of as supermen.