For three days, liberal outpost San Francisco was transformed into a mock battleground.
Members of the US Air Force were pitted against a range of military and civilian law enforcement agencies playing the bad guys in an effort to sharpen the airmen’s skills to survive behind enemy lines, as part of the Department of War’s largest urban evasion training event.
All told, more than 150 personnel participated in “Exercise Sourdough.”
From Dec. 8 to Dec. 11, the airmen moved covertly through the city streets with limited resources, while being hunted by opposition forces made up by members of the city’s Sheriff’s Office, the US Coast Guard, SWAT officers from several law enforcement agencies, and other military squads that participated in the drill, according to the Air Force.
Eleven teams with a total of 40 airmen were inserted into downtown San Francisco and tasked with evading enemy forces for the next 72 hours.
“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, the commander of the squadron, in military news outlet Task & Purpose.
The training mirrors scenarios in which the soldier needs to avoid capture in urban conditions in a foreign country until American forces devise a plan to extract them.
The airmen received instructions modeled after communications that would be used in real-life situations.
“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 headlights; approach from the rear; open the trunk; take out your overnight bag and depart, and don’t talk to anybody,” said Bordelon.
“If they are caught, then they are taken to the sheriff’s office, [and] they are interrogated,” she said.
“I think five of the 11 teams were caught. 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,” Bordelon added.
At the conclusion of the exercise, all Air Force teams were extracted by helicopters and boats from multiple California agencies and taken to Moffett Federal Airfield, where they boarded a C-5M Super Galaxy transport aircraft and taken back to Travis Air Force Base.
“The training value cannot be understated because there are few frameworks of this magnitude within the Department of War,” said Master Sgt. Jeremy Campbell.
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