Two female candidates advanced into the third week of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training at Coronado, the deepest any woman has gone in the pipeline, multiple sources told CBS News.
Zoom in: The officer was rolled back to the next class and asked to be dropped before Hell Week. The enlisted sailor was medically pulled during Hell Week, CBS News reported.
By the numbers: About 45% of all candidates are removed or rolled back in the three weeks before Hell Week, and 68% wash out somewhere in the pipeline, per Navy data from 1998 to 2023 released under the Freedom of Information Act.
- Roughly 21% leave during Hell Week itself, so about four out of five candidates who start it finish it.
The backstory: Hell Week is a 5 1/2 day endurance test that begins in the middle of the night. Candidates get about four hours of sleep over five days while carrying logs, launching boats into crashing waves, lying in cold ocean water and running around 200 miles.
The big picture: The Pentagon opened all combat positions to women in 2016, after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta rescinded the 1994 ground combat exclusion. Thousands have since joined infantry, armor and artillery units, and a handful have finished elite selection courses.
What they're saying: Naval Special Warfare Command said it declines to discuss the details of any individual selection or non-selection status, or where a candidate sits in the training pipeline, to protect course integrity and candidate privacy.
- CBS News withheld the candidates' names for security and privacy reasons. In 2021 a sailor became the first woman to qualify as a Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman.
Why it matters: Ten years after the policy changed, whether a woman can finish BUD/S has moved from theory to margins, and the pipeline's own numbers say the hardest filter sits in the weeks before Hell Week even starts.
