Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington. (April 19, 2024): They are a fearless bunch of parachutists who perform daring rescues of downed pilots and they help prepare others to survive captivity. In this photo by Senior Airman Nicholas Rupiper, an Airman completes a water relay exercise as part of training to become a survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE) specialist. A SERE specialist is an expert on personal survival and enemy resistance who plans and executes personnel recovery missions and trains “high value” targets to avoid or escape from capture. SERE specialists teach individuals how to resist interrogation and exploitation by the enemy.
Today’s SERE training takes lessons learned from the experiences of former POWs to coach potential targets on what is expected of them to “return with honor.” The Air Force 336th Training Group produces SERE instructors as part of its Special Warfare Operations. The instructors teach survival skills, how to evade capture, the military code of conduct, and techniques to escape from captivity. The training is targeted towards people with a high risk of capture such as pilots, aircrew, special operations, intelligence, and foreign diplomatic personnel.
In World War II, the Navy realized that three quarters of its downed pilots had come down alive but only five percent survived. Air crews either could not swim or did not have the survival skills needed. Later in the Korean War, the enemy routinely violated the terms of the Geneva Conventions by torturing and exploiting U.S. prisoners for intelligence or political reasons. Given this new reality, the military put a greater focus on "resistance training". In "resistance" training, SERE instructors function as captors in life-like simulations where soldier/captives are treated as realistically as possible. Trainees are exposed to the hostile treatment they can expect if captured including close confinement, isolation, mock interrogations, and even simulated torture. While it is ethically impossible to reproduce the actual conditions of being an enemy captive, SERE training has proven extremely effective in helping high value targets know what to expect of their captors, and themselves.
To date, SERE Specialists have coordinated over 1300 recovery operations throughout Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, the Philippines, South and Central America.