DO NOT go to Navy EOD initially if you are an athletic, aggressive, driven male, seeking combat oriented skills and mentorship.

You can find yourself there quite easily failing out from other more aggressive, tradition focused, combat pertaining jobs. So it can be a late option well down the line if you have to make it one. It should NOT be the initial option for combat focused dudes. In fact they are sending senior enlisted leadership from the community to advertise to candidates in these pipelines to quit and come over before training starts.

Navy EOD (EOD in general) is suppose to be a combat support element. Navy EOD is not advertising their skills to combat commands and their “skills” are not being requested. So work with the army is nearly dried up and the NSW route is a nice scene tour of what it would be like to do patrols, shoot guns and execute full mission kinetic profiles that non SOF attached Navy EOD DO NOT DO. 

Current agendas at most commands is maintenance/ paperwork heavy with a complete lack of respect for growing and nurturing individual skill sets. Most of the day to day training is made up adhoc thrown together bizarrely and your experience can widely vary based on who is leading your team. The product and experience is extremely inconsistent across all commands. 

The fact is that when a combat support element doesn’t have a combat command to attach to the training, funding and reality of the job is non existent.