The Navy’s new recruiting commercial puts the ‘dirt wars’ in the past

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 Warfare 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