After nearly a 13-year hiatus, the Air Force Academy this summer will reinstate training for cadets to resist an enemy if taken hostage. The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that Superintendent Lt. Gen. John Regni outlined the revamped course on Jan. 10 in a meeting with the academy’s Board of Visitors. Regni said the three-week training course will entail classroom instruction, including role-playing exercises like placing cadets in front of video cameras and forcing them to denounce the United States. Beginning in mid 2009, the course will incorporate field exercises, the newspaper states. The Air Force discontinued the training course in 1995 amid claims that the mock rapes and simulated sexual abuse used to teach the male and female cadets how to resist sexual assault had crossed a threshold into actual sexual abuse. Details of how to incorporate resistance to sexual assault into the revamped training are still being discussed, the newspaper said.
The Pentagon’s new counter-drone task force will play a direct role in arming Airmen with new weapons to defend Air Force agile combat employment, or ACE, air bases in austere locations against enemy drone attacks, the director of Joint Interagency Task Force 401 said Oct. 14.
