Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape

Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) is a program, best known by its military acronym, that provides U.S. military personnel, U.S. Department of Defense civilians and private military contractors with training in evading capture, survival skills and the military code of conduct. Established by the United States Air Force at the end of the Korean War (1950–53), it was extended during the Vietnam War (1959–1975) to the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps. Most higher level SERE students are military aircrew and special operations personnel considered to be at high risk of capture.

The U.S. Air Force SERE School is located at Fairchild AFB, Washington, while SERE Training for the U.S. Army is located at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The Navy and Marine Corps SERE School has known locations at: the U.S. Navy Remote Training Site at Warner Springs, California, the remote Marine Corps Mt. Warfare Training Center (Bridgeport CA), Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine.

Curriculum
The curriculum has three key parts: survival and evasion; resistance and escape; and water survival; some parts are classified.

Survival and evasion
Most of SERE training focuses on survival and evasion. Skills taught include woodcraft and wilderness survival in all types of climate. This includes what is known as emergency first aid, a variant of the battlefield variety, land navigation, camouflage techniques, methods of evasion, communication protocols, and how to make improvised tools.

Resistance and escape
Training on how to survive and resist the enemy in the event of capture is largely based on the experiences of past US and allied prisoners of war.

Water survival
How to survive in water is taught at a separate Professional Military Education (PME) course; it takes three days and is typically attended after the main SERE course. In addition to training in the use of aquatic survival gear, more academic skills include first aid tailored to an aquatic environment, communication protocols, ocean ecology and equipment maintenance.

Code of conduct
SERE training is intended, above all, to provide students with the skills needed to live up to the U.S. military code of conduct when in uncertain or hostile environments. It is:

1. I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.
2. I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist.
3. If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.
4. If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information nor take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way.
5. When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability, I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.
6. I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.

Origin of SERE Techniques

The SERE techniques are commonly, but erroneously, believed to be modeled on abusive Chinese "brainwashing" practiced on U.S. POW's during the Korean War, to extract false confessions. Instead, most SERE techniques were modeled after 1950's and early 1960s CIA interrogation and psychological warfare practices. The CIA physical and psychological methods were originally codified in the Kubark Counterintelligencde Interrogation Manual published in 1963, and in CIA torture training handbooks for Latin American regimes published in the 1970s and 1980s, and were employed during the Cold War, the CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, and the CIA's Operation Condor in South America. The other primary source for SERE techniques was 1960's CIA "mind control experiments," using sleep deprivation, drugs, electric shock, and isolation and extended sensory deprivation. Certain of the less physically damaging CIA methods derived from what was at the time called 'defensive' behavioral research" were reduced and refined as training techniques for the SERE program.

Use of Techniques in Interrogation
In July 2005 an article in The New Yorker magazine alleged that psychologists who help direct the SERE curriculum have been advising the military at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp and other sites on interrogation techniques.

The SERE program's chief psychologist, Colonel Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy although he has emphatically denied that he had advocated the use of counter-resistance techniques used by SERE instructors to break down detainees. The New Yorker notes that in November 2001, Banks was detailed to Afghanuistan, where he spent four months at Bagram Air Base, "supporting combat operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters".

In June 2006 an article on Salon.com, an online magazine, confirmed finding a document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through the Freedom of Information Act. A March 22, 2005, sworn statement by the former chief of the Interrogation Control Element at Guantánamo said SERE instructors taught their methods to interrogators of the prisoners in Cuba. The article also claims that physical and mental techniques used against some detainees at Abu Ghraib are similar to the ones SERE students are taught to resist.

According to Human Rights First, the interrogation that lead to the death of Iraqi Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush involved the use of techniques used in SERE training. According to the organization "Internal FBI memos and press reports have pointed to SERE training as the basis for some of the harshest techniques authorized for use on detainees by the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003."

On June 17, 2008, Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times reported that the senior Pentagon lawyer Mark Schiffrin requested information in 2002 from the leaders of the Air Force's captivity-resistance program, referring to one based in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The information was later used on prisoners in military custody. In written testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing, Col. Steven Kleinman of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency said that a team of trainers that he was leading in Iraq were asked to demonstrate SERE techniques on uncooperative prisoners. He refused, but his decision was overruled. He was quoted as saying "When presented with the choice of getting smarter or getting tougher, we chose the latter." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has acknowledged that the use of the SERE program techniques to conduct interrogations in Iraq was discussed by senior White House officials in 2002 and 2003.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival,_Evasion,_Resistance_and_Escape

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The blog author is a graduate of the east coast Navy SERE school near Naval Air Station Brunswick (Maine) in 1983. It was the longest week of my adult life. "Instructors" included trainers who themselves were prisoners of war in North Vietnam.

There is a similar course in the United Kingdom called "Survive, Evade, Resist and Exract."