If your first reaction to that photo was “Somebody, please tell me what the hell is going on?” you’re not alone.
Published March 12 by the 24th Special Operations Wing, this insane photo was taken earlier this month during a week-long selection course at Hurlburt Field, Florida for Special Tactics Officers, or STOs, the officer-version of enlisted Combat Controllers, or CCTs.
STOs are an incredibly elite group, which is a really nice way of saying there’s hardly any of them in the Air Force, and this photo is a pretty good indicator why.
Here’s a partial list of the chaos we can see, which is happening at the bottom of a swimming pool:
- Almost all the students are hovering over kettlebells at the bottom, which is not where kettlebells usually go.
- Most are also trying to hold onto basketballs, which — being filled with air — are trying to rocket to the surface, which one guy is fighting by pinning his basketball to the bottom of the pool with his head.
- Others cling to ropes tied to 5-gallon “jerry” cans, which are also trying to float to the surface, like kites on a windy day.
- One student is completely upside down while another holds onto two jerry can ‘kites,’ trying not to get pulled into the sky like a minor character in a tornado movie.
- The head-holding-basketball guy has a ‘kite’ tied to his ankle because I guess he didn’t have enough to worry about.
- And the whole thing is — this is obvious but worth emphasizing — underwater!
It’s complete chaos.
Which, according to Air Force Maj. Ross Fleming, is kind of the point.
“This picture, these guys bobbing around, that’s one small piece of it,” said Fleming, a STO who served as an instructor for the class in the picture. Long before the students were in the pool, they’d run or ruck marched dozens of miles, endured hours of pushups, bear crawling and generally getting smoked, and been put through a ‘graduation standard’ version of the Air Force’s special operations-only PT test. In other words, on their first day as a STO candidate, the students had to hit PT test scores that enlisted students need not hit until they are about to graduate from combat control training.
The chaotic pool events, Fleming said, come later in the week, when candidates are physically exhausted but still have to be mentally sharp as team leaders. And nothing tests those instincts like chaotic pool training.
“There’s lots of stress-inducing events, where they’re on their feet a lot, really putting some miles on the body,” Fleming said. “And then you kind of alternate that with the pool, which is a good way to physiologically give them a recovery, but also test them mentally and kind of see where they’re at.”
Fleming will soon be taking command of the Special Tactics Training Squadron at Hurlburt, where he will oversee the entire AFSOC training pipeline for STOs, CCTs and other special ops troops. Working on the instructor side of a selection course, he said, brought back memories.
“I got to do it twice, because I didn’t do great the first time,” he said. “But the second time, I ended up getting picked up. When you’re in the thick of it, you’re trying to — ‘survive’ is not the right word — but you’re trying to gear up for the next [event]. It’s always a surprise. You’re always on your toes, and they really get a chance to assess you as a candidate, and as a whole person.”
Originally from Ohio, Fleming graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2012, where he played football. He spent four years as a communications officer before cross-training as a STO.
The picture, Fleming said, was taken towards the end of the week in early March. Though the snapshot looks impenetrably chaotic to an outsider, the students are in a drill with clear rules and goals, while the instructors observe how students lead, follow and push themselves.
The drill captured in the photo, according to JT Thomas, the director or Special Tactics recruiting for AFSOC, is known as ‘Dive Right.’ The instructions for students go like this:
“Your team has capsized during a combat patrol. An enemy scout plane is approaching overhead; fortunately, your boat has sunk but, unfortunately, you have highly visible debris still floating about you in the water. The plane will pass overhead within 10 minutes and you need to have your full team and all of the floating gear fully submerged for 15 seconds before that plane makes its reconnaissance pass.”
The “equipment” is 5 partially inflated basketballs, 4 kettlebells and 2 empty jerry cans. Close readers will note that 7 of those objects tend to float.
To connect them, the team gets two 15-foot lengths of parachute cord. While the jerry cans can be pretty easily tied with rope, while the basketballs, not so much.
With one student in charge, the team has 10 minutes to come up with a plan.
The picture, it turns out, is that plan in action, as students wrestle with basketballs, jerry cans and cords to keep them all underwater for one 15-second span — and it begins to make sense:
- Each student is responsible for submerging one basketball, whose buoyancy they fight by anchoring themselves with a kettlebell.
- For the jerry cans, two students hold onto them with the cords, including one by the ankle.
- A final student — the only one without a basketball — uses his body as the final weight needed to hold down the cans.
Every student has one job in the plan — except for the head/foot guy, who has two. Oh well — special ops has to be flexible.
“It’s not a life or death task,” Fleming said. “It’s just you get to see that window into their cognitive ability and shift the lens in which they solve problems and look at the world.”
What do you not like?
A question special operators in different branches sometimes get from well-meaning civilians is which branch has “the hardest” training. The answer is debatable but really boils down to a second question: What do you not like to do?
The Army selects its Green Berets and Rangers in several settings, but always at the core of each is a simple hardship: long, brutal ruck marches with very heavy equipment.
The Navy’s Special Warfare community, including the SEALs, have a long list of torments for candidates, but the top factor that ruins students never changes: soaking in the cold water of the Pacific Ocean.
For the Air Force’s special ops world — particularly for CCTs and pararescuemen, or PJs, whose training is historically similar — eager volunteers quit in droves during hours of pool training: events like swimming, tying knots, donning equipment and wrestling basketballs, all underwater.
“The Army knows how to build that funnel and that meat grinder to create Green Berets,” said Fleming. “The SEALs have done a really good job in the last 25 years of building Naval Special Warfare as well. We are still such a small part of the Air Force, an air-minded force, for us to do ground things, we have to have extremely smart, extremely motivated, extremely flexible individuals to lead our force.”
All Air Force special warfare roles — Combat Controllers, pararescuemen, Tactical Air Control Party specialists and Special Reconnaissance, plus the officer-equivalents of each like STOs — begin their training pipelines with an 8-week assessment and selection course at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. Candidates then follow a specific pipeline for each job, which includes parachute training at Army schools, survival training and final ‘schoolhouse’ training specific to each jobs. CCTs and PJs also go through more than two months of dive training.
But for STOs and other officers, the tallest barrier is the selection class. The March STO class, Fleming said, started with 23 candidates, and finished with 6. From those, three were picked to move on and begin the actual STO/CCT pipeline.
“I think the total number for last year was nine,” said Thomas, who oversees the pipeline. “It fluctuates, but over the 25 years, it’s about 27% (of STO candidates are selected). But I think more importantly is, I can’t remember any of our guys ever failing out of the pipeline. Some STOs that did, because it was a decision on their own, like life decisions, right? Some, somebody’s mother got sick, and they had to get out of the pipeline because they had to care for them. But I’ve never had anybody in a long, long time that just went in and looked at the cadre and said, ‘I quit.’”
Fleming said that after years of STO selection, instructors have it close to a science.
“We have to assess every single person on their individual traits, and the process is really drilled out to the point where we really get what we need,” Fleming said. “And that’s why we bring 23 guys down, and we only pick up three, because we know exactly what we’re looking for.”