USAF broadens SERE training

WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 (UPI) -- The U.S. Air Force chief of staff has announced a broadened focus of survival training.

In an Aug. 10 meeting at the Pentagon with several Air Force leaders, Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley discussed broadening the scope of the survival, evasion, resistance and escape training for all airmen due to the rising threat in the war on terrorism of isolation and capture.

"As we've seen recently, the capture of military personnel has the potential of exploding into a larger strategic event with global impacts," Moseley said in a statement. "Today's battlefields are non-linear and non-contiguous; their shape and venue change constantly. I worry we've not prepared our Airmen for the world we're operating in."

The three levels of SERE training is an effort to teach airmen techniques and principles to survive in any environment, avoid capture, resist and escape if captured while supporting an ever increasing non-traditional environment.

Col. Bill Andrews, a guest speaker at the summit, was an F-16 Fighting Falcon pilot flying his 35th mission in the final stages of Operation Desert Storm when he was shot down, captured and spent time as a POW.

"An Airman captured faces grave moral and physical challenges," said Colonel Bill Andrews, a guest speaker at the Pentagon meeting and F-16 Fighting Falcon pilot, in a statement. "My training gave me a gut understanding that I was still at war and not in a time-out. My SERE training at the Air Force Academy, 14 years earlier, was clear as a bell, giving me the confidence to not break in the face of the enemy."

SERE training is also provided to battlefield airmen, those with the responsibility for combat control, pararescue, tactical air control and combat weather.