Members of the U.S. Air Force recently spent three days in San Francisco evading capture as part of a large-scale training simulation.
The training, called “Exercise Sourdough,” was held from Dec. 8 through Dec. 11. The airmen were required to navigate San Francisco with “limited resources” as they faced realistic enemy forces, according to an Air Force news release the final day. The enemy teams were played by deputies from the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office, Lt. Col. Mary Lea Bordelon, the commander of the squadron, told Task & Purpose, a military news website.
The simulation ended with a “multi-stage recovery operation” in which the 11 teams avoiding capture were extracted by helicopter, boat and ground vehicle to Moffett Air National Guard Base, according to the Air Force release.
Bordelon told Task & Purpose that the teams received messages about which areas were “safe” and which ones were not, If they were caught, they were transported to the sheriff’s office and interrogated. She told the publication that the exercise was which was intended to mimic an “urban environment in a foreign country and the American forces need to devise a plan to extract them, so they need to survive.”…