The Navy just dropped a new series of recruiting ads for its special operations jobs, and there are a few things you won’t see in them.
Sand. Uniforms in desert camo. Mountains. Trucks. Trees.
On the surface, the ads invite a certain kind of young person to consider life as a special operator — a girl who saves a drowning child at a lake, a boy that makes the big play in a football game — but the real message is in the visual language used in the spots which suggests that the future sailors of Naval special operators will not be spending any of their time or missions on dry land.
That’s a message that would come as a surprise to the generation of Navy special operators from the post-9/11 wars, but it’s at the heart of a major overhaul from the Navy’s previous special ops recruiting drives.
Recruiting for Naval special operations now covers six rates within its ranks — SEALs, aviation rescue swimmers, explosive ordnance disposal technicians (or EOD), hospital corpsmen, divers, and special warfare combat crewmen.
The “Spotlight” campaign (the name feels perhaps a bit off-key for sailors who call themselves “quiet professionals,” but we’ll leave that to the copywriters) features plenty of special ops-style action, but delivers a clear underlying message: expect to get wet.
“We are decisively moving away from a focus on dirt wars and are prioritizing our maritime mission,” said Capt. Jodie Cornell, a Naval Special Warfare spokesperson, told Task & Purpose.
There’s a helicopter hovering over water as a rescue swimmer drops in, wearing a full wetsuit and fins. There are EOD techs swimming amid undersea mines and divers welding on the drive shaft of a ship. There’s a few shots of combat crewmen ripping over waves and there are Navy SEALs, in dramatic slow-motion, poking their heads and rifles up from beneath gloomy waters before moving through a village under the cover of darkness. The SEALs are the only sailors in the ad who set as much as a toe on dry land, raiding a building only after swimming ashore.
It’s a major break from the Navy’s previous special ops recruiting campaign, which debuted in 2019 as “Warrior Challenge.” That campaign arrived in an era when SEALS and EOD techs were coming up on the 20-year mark at the center of combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other landlocked battlefields — and the visuals matched that record.
In that campaign’s opening ad, EOD techs disarm IEDs buried on roads on a desert range. SEALs parachute into an urban compound. Even the combat crewmen manning the Navy’s specialized assault boats are shown laying down fire on riverbanks rather than zooming across the open ocean.
Those settings are gone in “Spotlight.”
At the heart of the shift is the Navy’s refocus on the Indo-Pacific, where a future conflict would likely feature some version of U.S. forces fighting their way onto land from the sea — or just a whole lot of sustained naval combat.
It’s a major change from the Global War on Terrorism era, in which Navy SEALs and EOD techs spent entire careers in combat zones with no maritime ops. Of the five best-known battles involving SEALs from the 20 years of war — four gunfights in which SEALs were awarded Medals of Honor, and the raid by SEAL Team 6 that killed Osama Bin Laden — four were at least 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Another SEAL, Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor, was awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in Ramadi, Iraq — about 500 miles from open water.
In other words, quick flights or convoys that begin and end in a FOB are gone.
Though far from the headlines, Navy special ops returned to significant maritime operations in recent years. SEALs, delivered by combat crewmen, have been boarding and seizing ships operated by pirates and smugglers in the Red Sea as part of the Navy’s ongoing campaign to beat back threats to commercial shipping from Houthi rebels.
The message is the latest rebrand effort in military recruiting ads. The Army has been quietly pushing out online video shorts featuring infantry and special ops soldiers with far edgier messages than wide-scale ads of the last few years. A recent video for the 75th Ranger Regiment is labeled “Embrace the struggle. Embrace the pain.” A video of basic training that has the urgency and dark music of Sicario.
Last year, the Marines dropped a new series of commercials, swapped weapon and tech-heavy visuals for a greater focus on the kind of person who might want to join the service.
Now that Navy special operations has joined the other services in their post-GWOT recruiting rebrand, their message can probably be summed up as: Get out of the dirt and back in the water.
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