Military diving
underwater diving in a military context by members of an armed force
Underwater divers may be employed in any branch of an armed force, including the navy, army, marines, air force and coast guard.
The scope of operations includes: search and recovery, search and rescue, hydrographic survey, explosive ordnance disposal, demolition, underwater engineering, salvage, ships husbandry, reconnaissance, infiltration, sabotage, counterifiltration, underwater combat and security.
History of military diving
Military divers are essential to many missions and campaigns. Combat and demolition work, underwater and coastal reconnaissance, ordnance disposal, search and rescue, salvage operations, construction, ship maintenance and underwater engineering. Every branch of the U.S. military employs divers, and more than 40 nations have military diving units. Military diving is an occupation that has risks and responsibilities beyond those of other professional diving. Research and development in military diving equipment and procedures often eventually contributes to recreational and technical diving practice.
Military diving development was influenced by the development of submarine technology in the early 20th century. There were several serious accidents following the widespread deployment of submarines, and the main application for military diving at that time was salvage and later rescue and recovery operations. Submarine escape equipment development helped with early scuba development.
“Military diving” enters the record as underwater diving in a military context by members of an armed force. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Military, diving and underwater can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60738774. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Military diving” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.