BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, stretches across six months of increasingly intense challenges. The program begins with basic conditioning at Coronado, progresses through combat diving instruction, and culminates in land warfare training. Candidates endure 'Hell Week,' five and a half days of continuous physical activity with almost no sleep, when most dropouts occur. Those who survive move on to SEAL Qualification Training, where tactics and advanced skills are developed. The attrition rate is legendary. For every ten candidates who start, only two or three will complete the full course and earn the SEAL Trident. The Center also runs nine-month training for Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen, the SWCC operators who pilot the high-speed boats that insert and extract SEAL teams.

While the Coronado facility captures public imagination, the Naval Special Warfare Center operates training sites across the nation and beyond. Detachments at Naval Air Station Key West and Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam provide warm-water training environments. The Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona offers desert warfare instruction. The Naval Special Warfare Cold Weather Detachment in Kodiak, Alaska, teaches operations in arctic conditions. Panama City, Florida, hosts SEAL Delivery Vehicle training, where operators learn to pilot the miniature submarines that infiltrate hostile shores. The Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi develops boat-handling expertise. Mountain Warfare Training Camp Michael Monsoor rounds out the geographic range, ensuring SEALs can operate in any environment on Earth.

In December 2006, the Naval Special Warfare Advanced Training Command was established at Imperial Beach, just south of Coronado, reflecting the expanding scope of special operations training. This command coordinates more than 30 advanced courses across seven detachments and 15 training sites nationwide. The curriculum has evolved continuously since 2001, adapting to lessons learned from overseas contingency operations. Beyond training American operators, the Advanced Training Command provides instruction to Joint Special Operations personnel and foreign counterpart forces, extending American special warfare expertise to allied nations. More than 200 personnel manage this expanding mission, evidence of how central advanced training has become to the special operations enterprise.

The Center bears the name of Phil Bucklew, a Navy legend known as the 'Father of Naval Special Warfare.' Bucklew served with distinction in World War II, conducting reconnaissance of invasion beaches at Sicily, Salerno, and Normandy, paddling alone in a kayak to scout the shore while German soldiers patrolled above. He earned two Navy Crosses and helped establish the doctrine and traditions that modern SEALs inherit. Naming the training center after Bucklew was no accident. Every candidate who passes through these gates follows in footsteps carved out by warriors who operated behind enemy lines, in small boats, in the darkness. The physical location may be a collection of buildings on a California beach, but what happens here connects directly to that heritage of unconventional warriors.