Unless you do a TRACOM tour, breaking 3k gets hard unless you found the magic path and did nothing but fly.

13 years, never out of the cockpit, 1880 Navy hours.

On O-4 retired pay, you could probably survive on regional pay, but not have much spare. I know when I did the math for drilling my ass off as a O-3 it was barely scraping by on regional pay, and even now as an O-4, it's not much better.

I'm going the contract turboprop route.