Airmen recently spent three days on the streets of San Francisco practicing how to avoid being captured as part of “Exercise Sourdough,” the Defense Department’s largest urban evasion training event, Air Force officials said.
Held from Dec. 8 to 11, the exercise encompassed more than 49 square miles and involved the Coast Guard, San Francisco Sheriff’s Office and SWAT teams from other law enforcement agencies, an Air Force news release says.
The most recent training event was planned and led by the 571st Mobility Support Advisory Squadron from Travis Air Force Base, California.
The exercise is designed to improve airmen’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) skills in a “realistic and high stress urban environment,” said Lt. Col. Mary Lea Bordelon, commander of the squadron.
After undergoing some initial training at Travis Air Force Base, a total of 11 teams of airmen and a SERE specialist were dropped off in downtown San Francisco and they were told to evade the enemy, who were played by San Francisco sheriff’s deputies, Bordelon told Task & Purpose.
The teams then received communications about where they needed to go and which areas were not safe and needed to be avoided.
“This is kind of mimicking if they are in an urban environment in a foreign country and the American forces need to devise a plan to extract them, so they need to survive,” Bordelon said. “If they are caught, then they are taken to the sheriff’s office, [and] they are interrogated. So, there is some high stress that goes along with that over the thought of being caught.”
Pictures released by the Air Force include one that shows several airmen in civilian clothes being “arrested” by a sheriff’s deputy and another in which an airman crosses out pictures of participants who have been “captured.”
“I think five of the 11 teams were caught,” Bordelon said. “It gives some realism, for sure, also to the sheriff’s office because they want to catch every single team — and they did not. So, that was good news for our folks.”
The exercise involved teams who were captured being taken to an old prison cell, where they were rescued by SWAT teams, Bordelon said. Two of the pictures released by the Air Force show an Explosive Ordnance Disposal airman setting a tripwire for the event.
The hostage rescue exercise was conducted by the Sheriff’s Office Special Response Team, or SRT, said Tara Moriarty, Director of Communications for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office.
“This provided critical, realistic training for our SRT while supporting the Air Force’s readiness objectives,” Moriarty said in a statement to Task & Purpose.
Following the release of all captured airmen, the participants were given specific instructions on where to find “minimal supplies” so they could spend the night outdoors, Bordelon said.
“For example: Go to this location; there will be a black vehicle in this spot with maybe this license plate; and approach the vehicle; you will get one flash of the headlights; approach from the rear; open the trunk; take out your overnight bag and depart, and don’t talk to anybody,” Bordelon said.
Later, the airmen had to find secluded areas to bed down for the night, said Bordelon, who noted that the temperatures were in the 30s at the time.
Eventually, all the teams were given instructions about how they were going to be extracted, and they were picked up by helicopters and boats from the Coast Guard and the California Fire Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Bordelon said.
The airmen ended up at Moffett Federal Airfield, from where they were on a C-5M Super Galaxy transport aircraft with the 22nd Airlift Squadron to Travis Air Force Base, representing the “full circle” of the SERE process, Bordelon said.
