 I'm Command Master Chief Steph Bass. I would like to discuss how the Naval Special Warfare Center trains future seals in and around the water. Water competency is a core skill for Navy SEALs, and in this video you'll see some examples of our training curriculum. It does not matter what your swimming proficiency is when you get here, whether you've never seen the ocean or you're an Olympic swimmer. You need to be prepared to execute some of the world's most dangerous missions in unforgiving environments against hostile forces. Keep in mind that if you are someone who wants to be a Navy SEAL today, your training will be different. You should be training for the physical screening test, not for basic underwater demolition SEAL training. Take it one step at a time. What I'm about to show you is part of a training process that we teach step by step to new students. You can find out more about the physical screening test and how to train for it on our public website SEALSWIC.com. Let me begin by explaining how and why we conduct this training. Outline our approach to safety and professional standards. There are three main points I want you to remember from this video. We take a progressive approach to water competency. We build up the student confidence and comfort in the water as training increases in complexity. It's a carefully planned crawl, walk, run, curriculum. Every evolution features safety protocols, including experience supervision, medical response, and an appropriate instructor-to-student ratio. If you want to be a SEAL someday, you should not be conducting any risky training on your own. All of our aquatic skills are ultimately put to the test in real-world scenarios. There isn't a water competency evolution in our curriculum that does not contribute to skills used in feet wet missions. This is where all of our training is critical to mission success and the safe return of our team. The training begins after a prospective SEAL student leaves recruit training. The recruit will attend Naval Special Warfare Preparatory School for two months of basic swimming in a pool to work with fins and build up endurance until they pass the water competency exit standard, which is a 1,000 meter swim with fins in 20 minutes or less. When they arrive here at the center for orientation, they continue to work in the pool but also swim in the ocean. Examples of this include conditioning swims up to two miles in San Diego Bay and just past the surf line right off our beach here at Buds. All of this is to build them up for first phase, where they will conduct pool evolutions like knot time, a 50 meter underwater swim, and drown proofing. Here is one of our Buds instructors to explain more about drown proofing. Drown proofing, like many of our evolutions, has a crawl-walk-run progression to it. First we'll tie their feet, then we tie their hands, then we tie both feet and hands and ask them to perform a series of tasks in the water such as bobbing, floating, traveling, mask retrieval, and flips. In the drown proofing evolution, there are several layers of safety. First, in the water we have one to five instructor to student ratio. Each instructor is observing five students to make sure that they are confident and competent in the water. Above the water we have safety observers. We have a dive medical officer, corpsman equipped with life-saving equipment, and an emergency vehicle ready to take a student in distress to the nearest medical facility. Evolutions such as drown proofing have very real-world applications in many levels. The most obvious is if you find yourself in a real-world mission and you're tied up in line, bound up in equipment or kelp, it gives you the confidence to know that you've been in a situation like that before and you can resolve it and come home alive. Our training methods are developed over decades of lessons learned and best practices. Operational risk management procedures are briefed and practiced. Students are empowered to call for a training timeout if needed to address any safety concerns. Safety is number one. So once again, if you want to be a seal someday, you should not conduct risky evolutions. Just focus on passing the physical screening test. No one expects you to swim 50 meters underwater as soon as you arrive. And we certainly do not want you to conduct drown proofing on your own. Every evolution that we conduct in the water at Buds can be applied to a real-world mission. Those progressive long-distance swims give us the endurance to swim to an objective from the sea, carrying a 60-pound ruck in weapons through harsh surf riptides over the beach into enemy territory. Whether it's parachuting into rough seas in the middle of the night or climbing into a helicopter from a boat in unsteady conditions, every seal has the confidence and skill of having trained at Buds to respond to adverse sea conditions underwater or over the water while achieving the mission objective. Basic through advanced aquatic skills learned at the Naval Special Warfare Center form the heart of our Sea Warrior skill set. Our supreme competency in the water is what distinguishes us from other special operations forces as the maritime component of the United States Special Operations Command.