This is how Navy SEALs board an enemy submarine

By Dean Murray via SWNS

This is how America's crack special ops troops would board an enemy submarine.

Hair-raising scenes show elite Navy SEALs dropping onto a nuclear-powered guided missile sub from an aircraft.

The team is seen deploying by rope from a CV-22 Osprey onto the USS Florida in the Mediterranean Sea as tensions in Europe continue following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The newly declassified images show SEALs kitted out with night-vision goggles and rifles for the Feb. 26 exercise.

A Navy submarine at sea. (Photo by TSgt Westin Warburton/USAF via SWNS)

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With faces blurred to protect identities, they have camera-phone-like image recording devices strapped to their chests.

A U.S. military statement explains: "These operations demonstrate U.S. European Command’s ability to rapidly deploy Special Operations Forces throughout the theater at a time and place of our choosing, and the U.S. commitment to train with Allies and partners to deploy and fight as multinational forces and SOF to meet today’s challenges."

In its recruitment literature, to be a SEAL, the U.S. Navy says: "By the time you find out a SEAL team has hit you, they’re already gone.

"It takes a special kind of person to qualify for this role, and if you do, you’d better be ready to prove it with your smarts, strength and willingness to march head-on into impossible situations.

"One day you’ll be swimming out of a torpedo tube, and the next day you could be dropping into enemy territory out of a helicopter."

In May 2011 a SEAL team undertook the covert operation, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, that killed Osama bin Laden.

Also in 2011, USS Florida launched 93 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Libyan air defense targets.

The strikes allowed British, French, and allied warplanes to begin enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya, preventing Muammar Gaddafi from using his air force to attack rebels in his country.