—SEAL motto, quoted in Richard Schoenberg, The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday SEAL platoons operate on a twenty-four-month cycle. Of those twenty-four months, eighteen consist of training work-up followed by a six-month deployment overseas in an operational status. The type of training work-up is dictated by three major factors: advanced individual and platoon-level skills that will be necessary for the conduct of all special operations, the anticipated methods of delivery (insertion) and extraction most likely to be used while on deployment, and the geographical area of operations. The West Coast (odd-numbered) teams are primarily responsible for the Pacific Rim, the Far East, Africa and the Middle East, and eastern bloc regions; the East Coast (even-numbered) teams are responsible for South and Central America, the Mediterranean and Caribbean areas, Europe, and Russia. Even though the teams have primary areas of responsibility, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) dictates that each team be utilized to maximum efficiency, thereby necessitating an overlapping of geographic regions of responsibility.
