Always Ready – Behind Enemy Lines: Part III
This is Part III of the Behind Enemy Lines series. Start with Part I and Part II.
Assessment and Selection
Not everyone who volunteers to become a SERE specialist makes it into the training pipeline.
The Air Force invests significant time and resources into developing SERE instructors because the stakes are unusually high. A future SERE specialist may one day train a fighter pilot, special operations airman, or aircrew member whose survival depends upon the quality of that instruction. As a result, the Air Force begins by carefully screening candidates before they ever attend formal training.
The process starts with physical fitness.
Candidates must demonstrate the strength, endurance, and water confidence necessary to operate in demanding environments. SERE specialists routinely carry heavy loads, move through difficult terrain, and spend extended periods outdoors under adverse conditions. Physical fitness alone will not guarantee success, but a lack of it will quickly end a candidate's journey.
Selection evaluates far more than physical performance.
Candidates are also assessed on leadership, communication skills, adaptability, problem solving, and their ability to remain composed under pressure. Survival situations are unpredictable. Equipment breaks. Plans fail. Weather changes. The Air Force is looking for individuals capable of adapting to uncertainty while continuing to make sound decisions.
Those who successfully complete the initial screening earn the opportunity to attend the first course in the training pipeline.
SERE Specialist Training Orientation Course (SST-OC)
Conducted at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, SST-OC serves as the first major gate in the pipeline. Over approximately two weeks, candidates undergo additional evaluation designed to determine whether they possess the attributes necessary to continue training. Candidates must pass the Physical Aptitude Stamina Test (PAST) and a timed 4-mile ruck march carrying 65 lbs in under an hour.
Physical fitness remains important, but instructors are equally interested in how candidates perform when tired, stressed, and faced with unfamiliar challenges.
The course is designed to identify potential rather than expertise. Most candidates arrive without extensive survival experience. What instructors are looking for is the ability to learn, adapt, communicate, and function effectively as part of a team.
Those who successfully complete orientation move on to the heart of the pipeline.
The Apprentice Course
The SERE Specialist Training Apprentice Course (SST-AC), conducted at Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington, transforms selected candidates into professional survival instructors.
The course lasts several months and combines classroom instruction with extensive field training. Students learn emergency medicine, personnel recovery doctrine, land navigation, risk management, and the principles of survival, evasion, resistance, and escape.
As training progresses, students begin applying those lessons in the field.
Different environments create different challenges. Surviving in a desert requires a different set of skills than surviving in the Arctic. Dense forests present different problems than open water. Students learn how to locate water, construct shelters, navigate unfamiliar terrain, signal recovery forces, and sustain themselves under a variety of conditions.
Field exercises become increasingly demanding.
Students spend extended periods operating outdoors with limited resources while applying the techniques they have learned in the classroom. They establish camps, navigate cross-country, build shelters, maintain fires, and learn to solve problems under changing conditions. Instructors deliberately introduce uncertainty and friction because real-world survival situations rarely unfold according to plan.
Throughout the course, students are evaluated continuously. Academic performance, fieldcraft, leadership, instructional ability, and professional judgment all influence whether they advance.
Learning to Teach
Technical expertise alone does not make a SERE specialist. The Air Force is not simply creating survival experts. It is creating instructors. Students must learn how to brief, demonstrate, evaluate, and teach. They are expected to explain complex concepts clearly, manage risk, supervise training, and ensure students understand not only what to do, but why.
After months of classroom instruction, field exercises, and continuous evaluation, those who meet the standard graduate from the apprentice course and earn the sage green beret of the Air Force SERE specialist. For most career fields, graduation marks the end of initial training. For a new SERE specialist, it marks the beginning. While they have earned their berets, they still have to undergo on-the-job training and a 12 to 18 month certification process before they become fully qualified SERE instructors.
Why SERE Still Matters
It would be easy to assume that modern technology has made survival training less relevant than it was during the Second World War or Vietnam. Today's military operates with satellite communications, advanced navigation systems, unmanned aircraft, and sophisticated intelligence networks. Rescue forces can locate and recover isolated personnel far more quickly than their predecessors could only a few decades ago.
Yet history continues to demonstrate that technology cannot eliminate uncertainty.
The fundamental challenges facing isolated personnel have changed surprisingly little over the past eighty years. Fear, fatigue, hunger, uncertainty, and the pressure to make decisions with incomplete information remain constant. The environment may differ. The technology may improve. Human nature does not.
Recent events provide a reminder that the problem has not disappeared. In 2025, an American pilot shot down over Iran was forced to rely on many of the same principles that have guided isolated personnel for generations. This incident underscored a reality familiar to every SERE specialist: when a servicemember becomes isolated, survival still depends on discipline, decision-making, and the ability to endure uncertainty until rescue forces can reach them.
That reality is why SERE training continues to occupy an important place within the military profession. The objective is not to create survival experts. It is to ensure that servicemembers possess the skills, discipline, and confidence necessary to endure unexpected circumstances until recovery becomes possible.
That possibility remains the reason SERE specialists continue to teach the lessons first learned by downed airmen, escaped prisoners, and survivors of past wars.
They hope their students never need the skills they teach. History suggests some of them will. And when they do, those lessons may become the most important training of their careers.
Read the full series: Part I · Part II · Part III
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Byron Owen is a Reconnaissance Marine with tours as both a platoon commander and commanding officer at the elite 1st Force Reconnaissance Company. He also had the honor of commanding several intelligence and cyber units to include Cyberspace Warfare Task Group 1, and 3d Radio Battalion. He writes about leadership at www.rucksackleadership.com, information warfare at keyterraincyber.com, and is the author of the upcoming book Bury my Heart in Baghdad.
