Air Force SERE Training: Phases, Prep, and Who Attends

Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training, known as SERE, is a roughly 19-day course that teaches aircrew and other high-risk personnel how to stay alive in hostile terrain, avoid capture, hold up under interrogation, and get back to friendly forces. The flagship course, designated S-V-80-A, runs out of the Air Force Survival School at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Washington, under the 336th Training Group. Across all of its courses, the school trains about 14,500 students a year.¹

It is one of the most physically and psychologically demanding programs the Air Force runs. Students are cold, hungry, sleep-deprived, and under sustained stress by design. Everything in the course is built around the Code of Conduct, the six-article framework established by Executive Order 10631 that governs how American service members behave in combat and captivity.²

Who Has to Attend

SERE isn’t optional for certain career fields. Air Force Instruction 16-1301 sets a priority order. First priority goes to rated officers (pilots, navigators, air battle managers), career enlisted aviators, SERE specialists, and select special operations and ground combat forces including Tactical Air Control Party, pararescue, Combat Rescue Officers, Combat Control Teams, Special Tactics Officers, Special Operations Weather Teams, and Combat Aviation Advisors.³ Second priority goes to other personnel whose duties require flying. Third priority covers operational support staff who need SERE experience to work personnel recovery programs.

Combatant commanders can also designate additional personnel for SERE before they deploy into a specific theater. DoD Directive 1300.7 gives them the authority to set the required training level for anyone operating in their area of responsibility.⁴ If you’ve been told you need SERE, your unit’s training office schedules you based on your priority and your deployment timeline.

The Three Training Levels

The Department of Defense splits SERE into three levels matched to a person’s risk of capture.

Level A is basic Code of Conduct training delivered during initial accession programs like basic military training. Every Air Force member gets it.³
Level B is an intermediate course for personnel at moderate risk of capture, such as certain deploying forces. Combatant commanders decide who needs it before entering their theater.⁴
Level C is the full course covering all four SERE components in depth. This is the one people mean when they say “SERE school.” Aircrew, special operators, and other high-risk-of-isolation personnel attend before their first operational assignment.

When people describe the intensity of SERE, they are almost always talking about Level C.

The Academic Phase

Before students head into the field, they spend time in the classroom building the foundation. Instruction covers the Code of Conduct in detail, the legal rights of prisoners of war under international law, survival medicine basics, navigation with map and compass, and the psychology of captivity and resistance. SERE specialists teach through lecture, guided discussion, demonstration, and case studies from real isolation and captivity events.⁵

Students also get hands-on training in post-ejection procedures and parachute landing falls during this block. The mental framework built here is what the field phases test.

The Survival Phase

The survival phase drops students into wilderness with minimal equipment. Field exercises at Fairchild run across a large training area in the Colville National Forest in northeastern Washington. The terrain is rugged and heavily forested, and conditions vary hard by season: winter classes face deep snow and sub-freezing temperatures, while summer sessions deal with heat, dense brush, and long daylight that complicates evasion. Instructors describe the basic course as a “global” classroom because the techniques are meant to translate to any climate.

Core skills are shelter construction, water procurement and purification, fire starting, land navigation, and foraging. Students build expedient shelters from natural materials, practice friction, flint, and improvised fire-starting methods, and learn to identify edible plants, set traps and snares, and catch fish with improvised gear from a personal survival kit. At Fairchild, some classes forage for clams, build nets from what they can find, and eat food raw before earning the ability to cook it.

Food is deliberately scarce. Calorie restriction is a training stressor, and hunger compounds every other pressure that follows. How well you keep your camp functional, stay hydrated, and hold your core temperature determines how much energy you carry into the next phase.

The Evasion Phase

Evasion means moving through hostile territory without being detected. Students cover significant distances through difficult terrain, often at night, while simulated enemy patrols hunt for them. Sleep deprivation becomes a serious factor here.

The skills are camouflage and concealment with natural materials, silent movement, counter-tracking to obscure your trail, and route planning that uses terrain for cover. The goal is to reach designated recovery points without being caught. Students learn to read the ground the way a tracker would, then do the opposite of what a tracker expects.

This phase tests judgment under fatigue more than raw athleticism. After days of limited food and sleep, thinking degrades, and that’s the point. The instructors want students to feel how badly exhaustion warps decisions so they can recognize it and compensate for it.

The Resistance Phase

Resistance is what gives SERE its reputation. Students are “captured” and placed into a simulated prisoner-of-war environment built to replicate the psychological pressures of real captivity: prolonged isolation, offensive interrogation sessions, extended sleep deprivation, and environmental discomfort, all in a controlled setting.

The objective is to resist exploitation while adhering to the Code of Conduct. Article V requires that a captured service member give only name, rank, service number, and date of birth, and evade further questions to the best of their ability.² Interrogators use a range of techniques to push past that line, and students learn to manage those encounters by controlling their breathing, holding composure, recognizing manipulation tactics, and giving only what the Code allows without escalating.

The phase also covers how prisoners organize under duress. Article IV requires the senior officer to take command of the group and everyone else to obey lawful orders and support one another. Students practice covert communication methods and learn how prisoner hierarchies function when everyone is stressed. The experience is brutally uncomfortable, and that’s the closest anyone can get to the real thing without actually being a prisoner.

The Escape Phase

The escape phase teaches students how to get out once they’re in. Article III of the Code of Conduct requires captured service members to make every effort to escape and to help others do the same.

Training covers assessing confinement for exploitable weaknesses, identifying patterns in guard rotations, fabricating improvised tools from available materials, and timing an attempt for the best chance of success. It covers both escaping from a fixed facility and breaking away during movement between locations, since transfers are often the most vulnerable point in a captor’s security.

Once out, the focus shifts back to survival and navigation toward friendly lines. The whole SERE curriculum is a loop: survive, evade, resist if caught, escape if possible, then survive and evade again until recovered.

How to Prepare

Physical condition is the single most controllable factor in how a student performs. The Level C course involves long movements on minimal food and sleep, so endurance matters more than raw strength. There is no published entry fitness test for students attending the standard S-V-80-A course, but arriving undertrained makes every phase harder and raises injury risk.

A practical benchmark: be able to ruck several miles with a loaded pack, run three miles comfortably, and do push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups well above your normal fitness test minimums. Swimming confidence matters too, especially if your course track includes water components. Air Force recruiting materials note that “confidence in the water is critical” for anyone working in SERE environments.⁶

Mental preparation matters as much as physical. You will be cold, hungry, tired, and under sustained pressure. Building stress management habits ahead of time helps: controlled breathing, visualization, or simply getting comfortable being uncomfortable during workouts. Administratively, you’ll need a current medical clearance, any required immunizations, and your military ID and dog tags. Your training office provides a reporting checklist specific to your course dates.

Water Survival

Water survival is a separate two-day course at Fairchild, not part of S-V-80-A itself. It covers both parachuting and non-parachuting water entry and is primarily attended by flight crew members and battlefield airmen.⁷ Students train on the gear available aboard their aircraft, including equipment attached to ejection seats, and practice emergency egress from a simulated fuselage that submerges and inverts underwater. Additional training covers single- and multi-person life raft operations and open-water isolation. If your career field involves flying over water, expect this course at some point.

If You Want to Teach SERE

The person running the course is a SERE specialist, Air Force Specialty Code 1T0X1. That pipeline is a separate career field with its own selection process, roughly a year of training start to finish, and its own initial fitness test.⁸ Beyond teaching, SERE specialists deploy as personnel recovery subject matter experts for joint force commanders, plan evasion routes and recovery corridors, and work isolated personnel reports and evasion plans in permissive, hostile, and diplomatically sensitive environments.⁵ It’s a distinct path from attending the course as a student.

1
Fairchild Air Force Base. U.S. Air Force Survival School
2
National Archives. Executive Order 10631 – Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States
3
Air Force E-Publishing. Air Force Instruction 16-1301 – Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape SERE Program
4
Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. DoD Directive 1300.7 – Training and Education To Support the Code of Conduct
5
Air Force E-Publishing. AFSC 1T0X1 Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape Specialist Career Field Education and Training Plan
6
U.S. Air Force. SERE Specialist
7
Fairchild Air Force Base. SERE Water Survival – Preparing Airmen for the Sea
8
GoSERE (U.S. Air Force). SERE Recruit Flyer