Elite SEAL Team Six Seeks $11 Million for a New Fitness Center

The elite Navy SEAL team may have killed Osama Bin Laden and inspired Hollywood, but it could use an extra $11.1 million for a “Human Performance Center.”

The request is among $400 million in unfunded priorities that the U.S. Special Operations Command submitted to Congress on April 1 as part of a $36 billion wish list from the military services and combat commands.

Admiral William McRaven, who directed the May 2011 Bin Laden raid in Pakistan and now heads the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida, wrote that the new facility would be built at Dam Neck, Virginia, where the elite unit formally known as Devgru, or the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, is based.

If Congress coughs up the extra money, it would provide the secretive unit, also called SEAL Team Six, “with a space to implement a comprehensive Human Performance Center that emphasizes strength conditioning, nutrition rehabilitation, injury prevention, testing, evaluation research and development,” McRaven’s list said.

The wish list “addresses the most pressing readiness and infrastructure requirements not contained in the fiscal 2015” budget, McRaven wrote, without defining “nutrition rehabilitation” or explaining why the team’s current conditioning facility is no longer adequate.

It was generated at the request of House Armed Services Committee Chairman California Republican Howard McKeon, and may influence which requests make it into Congress’s next defense authorization. The committee plans to start work on that legislation by April 30.

The biggest request in that document, known as the Unfunded Requirements List, comes from the Army. That service told lawmakers it needs $10.6 billion more than President Barack Obama’s administration sought for the next fiscal year.