7316 vs SO

You will fly small drones — RQ-20 Pumas, Skydio X2s, and whatever the next platform is. The tech is genuinely cool and the mission is real. But "operator" means you are also the maintainer, the mission planner, the battery manager, and the person explaining to the company commander why the drone can't fly in 30-knot winds for the fifth time this week. You'll spend more time on pre-flight checklists and sensor calibration than actual stick time. The civilian drone market is real but oversaturated — defense contractor SUAS jobs pay well though. Also: you are a lateral move MOS, which means you already did something else first, and your old unit will never forgive you for leaving.

BUD/S has an attrition rate that has historically run between 70 and 80 percent, which means most people who raise their hand for this do not finish. Hell Week — five and a half days of continuous operations on four hours of cumulative sleep — is the filter, not the finish line. The people who make it are not the biggest or the fastest; the research on BUD/S completion is fairly consistent that the distinguishing characteristic is the ability to endure sustained discomfort without quitting, which is a mental trait that cannot be fully trained in and cannot be predicted from physical test scores. If you complete BUD/S, SQT, and earn your Trident, you will be an exceptionally capable person in a small community of exceptionally capable people doing work that genuinely matters at the edge of what is operationally possible. You will also deploy constantly, absorb physical damage that compounds over a career, watch the relationships in your personal life strain under the weight of the operational tempo, and have a very specific answer to the question 'what do you do for work' that you cannot give honestly for most of your career. Post-service, the SEAL community produces entrepreneurs, federal law enforcement officers, writers, and defense contractors. It also produces people who find that the only thing they were ever really good at was the Teams. Know which one you are before you let the identity become the whole thing.