Kelly: Downed Airmen May Have to Get Themselves to Safe Areas
Aug. 4, 2021 | By John A. Tirpak
The combat search-and-rescue mission will be extremely challenging in a fight against a peer adversary, and the focus may have to shift to downed Airmen finding their own way to safety, Air Combat Command boss Gen. Mark D. Kelly said Aug. 3.
The future of CSAR is “a tough, tough equation,” Kelly said during a Life Cycle Industry Days seminar run by the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. The mission may have to change given the long distances and enormous expanses of water in the Indo-Pacific theater and the “speed, the vulnerability, and the range of our current rescue platforms.”
Air Combat Command is “looking at it from the lens of … how much can the isolated personnel get themselves out or get themselves to a place where they can be recovered, as much as how the recovery force is going to get to them.”
https://www.airforcemag.com/search-and-rescue-downed-airmen-safe-areas/
