SEALS in Congress
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No, not the animals. LOL
Interesting article.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/10/navy-seals-congress-trump-00212473When the 119th Congress was gaveled into session in January, Zinke counted six former SEALs as his colleagues, the most ever: Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona, Morgan Luttrell and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, John McGuire of Virginia and freshman Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana. All are Republicans who have aligned themselves, in varying fashions, with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
It’s a small number overall, but — with ex-SEALs making up over 1 percent of Congress — markedly disproportionate to the SEAL population at large. And the consequences of the growing numbers of SEALs-turned-lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been quiet but significant. According to interviews with five of the current ex-SEALs in Congress, the swelling in their ranks has coincided with — and, in many respects, aided — a marked shift in the style of Republican politics on Capitol Hill.
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I bet there’s just a little bit of grumbling amongst seals about how many of their rank capitalize on the mystique after they retire.
I guess it would be “capitolizing” for senators though amirite.
@Horace said in SEALS in Congress:
I bet there’s just a little bit of grumbling amongst seals about how many of their rank capitalize on the mystique after they retire.
Yup, From the article:
In 2015, a SEAL lieutenant commander named Forrest Crowell published a master’s thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School decrying the “emergence of a SEAL counterculture characterized by an increasingly commodified and public persona.” He specifically called out former SEALs like Zinke for trading on their association with the force for partisan political purposes: “It is difficult to find a picture of him in which there is not a Trident pinned somewhere to his suit,” Crowell wrote of Zinke. The dual commodification and politicization of the SEALs, Crowell concluded, had done serious harm to the force’s integrity, having “eroded organizational effectiveness, damaged national security, and undermined healthy civil-military relations.”
The paper landed like a bombshell within the ex-SEAL community. For the group at large, it prompted what many saw as an overdue debate about the organization’s trajectory in a post-war on terror world. (In 2020, Crowell was hired as a top aide to the SEALs’ new commander as part of a broader overhaul of the organization. He did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) For the emerging generation of ex-SEAL lawmakers, meanwhile, it has continued to raise questions about the proper way to balance obligations to the SEAL community against the requirements of serving as an elected official.
