First Woman Completes Training for Elite U.S. Navy Program

U.S.|First Woman Completes Training for Elite U.S. Navy Program

A pistillate has joined a United States Navy peculiar warfare portion for the archetypal time, the latest sex obstruction to autumn successful the 5 years since women became eligible to use for immoderate combat occupation successful the military.

The Navy connected Thursday said the pistillate was the archetypal pistillate postgraduate from a peculiar warfare grooming pipeline that feeds the Navy SEALs and different elite commando units. A Navy spokesperson told The Associated Press that the pistillate would not beryllium identified, a modular argumentation for members of the peculiar forces.

In a statement, Rear Adm. Hugh W. Howard III, the commandant of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command, said the woman’s graduation represented “an bonzer accomplishment.”

“Like her chap operators, she demonstrated the character, cognitive and enactment attributes required to articulation our force,” helium said.

The Navy said successful a news release that the servicewoman was among 17 graduates of a programme to go what it calls peculiar warfare combatant-craft crewmen. She volition beryllium portion of a squad of unit that trains astatine the Naval Special Warfare Center successful Coronado, Calif.

S.W.C.C. unit specialize successful what the Navy calls “covert insertion and extraction” operations that necessitate expertise not lone successful weapons and navigation, but besides engineering and parachuting. Only astir 35 percent of S.W.C.C. candidates graduate, the Navy said.

The pistillate who graduated connected Thursday volition beryllium among the operators connected 3 peculiar vessel teams that transport Navy SEALs and behaviour their ain classified missions, The A.P. reported.

She is 1 of 18 women who person tried retired to beryllium a S.W.C.C. oregon a SEAL, according to a CNN report; 14 of them did not decorativeness the 37-week peculiar warfare training. Three different women are presently grooming to go Navy SEALs oregon S.W.C.C. operators, CNN said, citing a Navy spokesperson.

Navy officials successful the United States could not instantly beryllium reached for remark aboriginal Friday.

The stock of women successful the U.S. subject has been inching upward for decades. When the draught ended successful 1973, women accounted for 2 percent of enlisted forces and 8 percent of the serviceman corps successful the U.S. military, according to an analysis of Defense Department data by the Council connected Foreign Relations that did not see statistic from the U.S. Coast Guard. By 2018, those figures had risen to 16 percent and 19 percent.