First woman completes training for elite US Navy programme

NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - A woman has joined a United States Navy special warfare unit for the first time, the latest gender barrier to fall in the five years since females became eligible to apply for any combat job in the military.

The service said on Thursday (July 15) that the woman was the first female graduate from a navy special warfare training pipeline that directly supports the Sea, Air, and Land (Seal) teams and other elite commando units.

A navy spokesman said the woman would not be identified, which is a standard policy for members of the special forces.

In a statement, Rear Admiral Hugh Howard III, the commander of the US Naval Special Warfare Command, said the woman's graduation represented "an extraordinary accomplishment".

"Like her fellow operators, she demonstrated the character, cognitive and leadership attributes required to join our force," he said.

The navy said in a news release that the servicewoman was among 17 graduates of a programme to become what it calls special warfare combatant-craft (SWCC) crewmen.

SWCC sailors specialise in what the navy calls "covert insertion and extraction" operations using small, stealthy, heavily armed watercraft capable of high speeds that can operate independently, or be delivered by larger ships and helicopters.

In addition to receiving training in weapons and navigation, SWCC sailors also go through parachute training in order to drop their speedboats into the ocean from cargo planes, such as during the 2009 mission to rescue Americans aboard the hijacked ship Maersk Alabama in the Indian Ocean.

Only about 35 per cent of SWCC candidates graduate, the navy said.

The woman who graduated on Thursday will be among the operators on three special boat teams that transport navy Seals and conduct their own classified missions, the Associated Press reported.

She is one of 18 women who have tried out to be a SWCC or a Seal, the spokesman said. Fourteen of them did not finish the special warfare training. Three other women are currently training to become navy Seals or SWCC operators, the spokesman added.

The share of women in the US military has been inching upward for decades. When the draft ended in 1973, women accounted for 2 per cent of enlisted forces and 8 per cent of the officer corps in the US military, according to an analysis of Defence Department data by the Council on Foreign Relations that did not include statistics from the US Coast Guard. By 2018, those figures had risen to 16 per cent and 19 per cent.

In 2018, two years after the Pentagon opened all combat jobs to women, First Lieutenant Marina Hierl became the first woman in the marine corps to command an infantry platoon.

Chief Master Sergeant JoAnne Bass of the US Air Force became the first woman to serve as the highest ranking non-commissioned member of a US military service.

Last week, Sgt Bass celebrated the legacy of another pioneer, Sgt Esther McGowin Blake, the first woman to enlist in the air force.

And last year, a female national guard soldier became the first to earn the title of Green Beret after graduating from army special forces training.

Forty years earlier, another woman, Ms Kate Wilder, fought for her right to be recognised after she passed the special forces officer course, but was told by the head of the school that she would not be graduating.

In 1981, after an army investigation and about six months after she finished the course, she was assigned the "5 Golf" code for special forces officers and sent a certificate of graduation backdated to Aug 21, 1980.

She retired as a lieutenant-colonel in 2003 after 28 years of service, proudly wearing her special forces tab for the remainder of her career.

But for all the recent advances, even high-ranking female officers still face gender-based discrimination.

In March, President Joe Biden nominated two women - General Jacqueline Van Ovost of the air force and Lieutenant-General Laura Richardson of the army - to lead two of the military's combatant commands.

Their Pentagon bosses had agreed on their promotions before Mr Biden took office, but held them back out of fear that former president Donald Trump would reject the officers because they were women.