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What Navy SEAL Trevor Thompson Thinks of Women Entering the Program

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A former SEAL lays out, in blunt physical terms, why the Trident is the hardest pass/fail test in the U.S. military.

Trevor Thompson spent years in the SEAL teams before sitting down with Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience episode #1434, where JRE Clips later isolated his answer on female candidates attempting Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. Thompson didn’t dodge the question or hide behind talking points. He said flatly that he “feels for” any woman who tries BUD/S, then spent the rest of the clip explaining exactly why the pipeline breaks so many men before it ever gets to the question of sex differences.

• Thompson said he sympathizes with and supports women who attempt BUD/S, while stressing the standards themselves can’t be lowered.
• He pointed to structural, load-bearing evolutions — log PT, IBS surf passage, heavy ruck marches — as the specific demands that expose gaps in bone density, connective tissue, and muscle mass.
• BUD/S washes out roughly 70 to 80 percent of candidates, graduating only about 200 to 250 of the roughly 1,000 men who start the pipeline each year.

Thompson Clarifies Previous Public Remarks

Thompson’s framing wasn’t political — it was mechanical. He described BUD/S as a test built around brute structural capacity: hauling logs as a boat crew, muscling an inflatable boat through surf, humping a heavy ruck for miles with no relief. Those evolutions don’t just wear candidates out, according to Thompson — they break them, producing the stress fractures and overuse injuries that are already common among male candidates who go through Hell Week and First Phase.

That’s the baseline Thompson used to explain his sympathy. If men with the anatomical advantages of bone density and muscle mass are getting fractured and washed out at those rates, he argued, the same load-bearing tasks present an even steeper climb for female candidates working against the same clock and the same standard.

He “feels for” the women who try — but the standard doesn’t move for anybody.

Standards Since 2016

Thompson’s comments landed against a policy backdrop that’s been in place for several years. The Department of Defense formally opened all combat positions, including Naval Special Warfare pipelines, to women in 2016, meaning any qualified female candidate has had the legal right to attempt BUD/S and the SEAL pipeline since that decision. Thompson didn’t dispute that right. His argument was narrower: the gender-neutral physical benchmarks that already filter out the vast majority of male applicants have to stay exactly where they are, because in his view those benchmarks are what keep the teams combat-effective downrange.

That distinction — support for the opportunity, opposition to any softening of the bar — is the through-line of the clip. It’s the same logic that shows up across other special-operations selection pipelines, where washout numbers stay brutal by design rather than by accident. Anyone who’s watched someone attempt the Air Force Special Warfare PAST test without training beforehand has seen a smaller-scale version of the same math Thompson is describing.

The Numbers Behind the Attrition

The attrition rate is the part of Thompson’s argument that does the heaviest lifting. Roughly 1,000 men enter BUD/S in a given year, and only 200 to 250 make it to graduation — a 70-to-80-percent washout rate that has nothing to do with intelligence or effort and everything to do with the body’s ability to absorb repeated structural stress. Thompson’s point was that this attrition curve is already unforgiving for men with the physiological edge in bone density and connective tissue; asking the pipeline to bend for anyone, male or female, would undercut the entire selection model.

It’s the same selection philosophy that runs through other units built around this kind of grinding, physical-standard-first entry test — the same reason outfits like the ones profiled in Why You Never Mess With Elite Special Forces keep their qualification courses as brutal as they are. The standard isn’t the obstacle to be managed around. The standard is the point.

Thompson’s bottom line was simple: women have every right to walk into BUD/S and try, and he respects the ones who do. What he won’t sign off on is any version of the pipeline that changes the log PT, the surf passage, or the ruck standard to get more of them through. That’s the same 70-to-80-percent washout rate every class has faced for decades, and in his telling, that’s exactly how it has to stay.