Air Force News, news from Iraq - Air Force Times

Airmen on the ground to get SERE training

Air Education and Training Command is introducing a new course this summer that will teach airmen deploying in high-risk assignments how to avoid being captured by the enemy and how to handle the situation if they are taken captive.

The four-day course — called Evasion and Conduct After Capture, or ECAC — will be offered to Security Forces, transition training teams, airmen serving in convoy roles and others who are likely to go outside the wire in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Lt. Col. Michael Poole, deputy commander of the 336th Training Group, which is developing the course.

Those airmen do not get the more extensive survival, evasion, resistance and escape — or SERE — training provided to aircrews, but they increasingly find themselves at risk of being captured.

“AETC is looking at how to expand the program to more of the folks that are becoming high-risk in today’s Air Force,” Poole said. “It’s a shorter class [than for aircrews], but it’s a big change in how we do things — teaching them parts of the resistance training, giving them academics and a little bit of lab and role-play work.”

The class initially will be taught at Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash. — home of the SERE school — but will be expanded to the Air Force Academy, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., and possibly other locations.

Maj. Gen. Mark Zamzow, AETC’s director of operations, said in August that the new four-day course was being developed for airmen deploying on assignments that will routinely take them outside the wire. Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley also said that the service will ramp up the amount of SERE training provided to all airmen.