What’s up, guys? General discharge here. Our voices are disguised so we can bring you top tier information about the military without being detected. Today’s video is going to be about the Air Force’s special operations assessment and selection, otherwise known as ANS. If you’re looking to get into Air Force special operations, whether that be pararescue, combat control technicians, or special reconnaissance, formerly known as Special Operations Weatherman Team, you will have to go through this four week selection course.
Before we get into things, make sure to take a moment and subscribe to our channel and check out our social media. The Air Force Special warfare ANS is located on the Medina annex of Wackland Air Force Base, Texas. Before you show up to Ans, unless your prior service across training or an officer, you will have to attend the eight week battlefield airmen prep course. It’s held in the same schoolhouse and is designed to get you ready for Ans and weed out the people who aren’t supposed to be there, even though you’ll be weeded out again once you go through ANs, if you’re an officer, prior service, or cross trainee, you’ll only have to do a two week prep course instead of the eight week one. Again, regardless of what pipeline you’re in, you’ll be alongside other candidates.
For these four weeks, you’ll be tested on physical fitness, character, water competency, rucks, runs, ability to lead, and much, much more. Being a physical stud is not enough to get you through this. Many people have finished the course and were still not selected due to various reasons. Instructor cadre will take notes and constantly evaluate and judge you not only on your physical fitness, but look at you holistically to finish Ans. There is no past standards, however, to even get your foot in the door here, here are your standards you will need for the past.
The PAT stands for physical abilities and stamina test. The past consists of two time 25 meters underwater swims. Slick. You get 3 minutes rest between the two underwater swims. There’s no time limit for these.
You’ll get a ten minute rest before the 500 meters swim. The minimums for PJ, CCT, and special recon for the swim is 1230 breaststroke, sidestroke, and freestyle are able to be used. You will then have a 30 minutes rest. Then you will have a mile and a half run in 10 minutes and 30 seconds or less. And then you’ll get a ten minute rest, then max pull ups in a minute, minimum eight two minute rest, max situps in 2 minutes, minimum 52 minutes rest, max pushups in 2 minutes minimum 40.
We will leave a link in the description that shows what these minimums are as well as other different programs. Just keep in mind it is kind of difficult to read. Just being good at the past does not ensure that you will make it through selection. Like anything, the better scores you have, the better chances of you making it through. Make sure to supplement your workouts with weightlifting, rucking, stretching and long runs to get your body used to the stress before you show up to selection.
During the four weeks of Ans, you will go through two different segments of training. There’s the field phase, which lasts for two and a half weeks, and selection phase, which lasts for one and a half weeks. During the field phase, candidates will obviously be in a fieldlike setting, sleeping in makeshift lodging and cots with sleeping bags. Training is continuous with no days off. You’ll do surface swimming, water confidence, grass and gorilla drills, running, rucking, calisthenics, and have extended training days.
It’s called assessment and selection for a reason. During the selection phase, the course wraps up and the candidates will receive tests, reviews and cleanup. As we said before, you can still be standing there at the last day and wind up not being selected, so don’t think you’re good to go just because you’ve survived the four weeks. There’s not too much to be said about this training as it’s pretty standard across the board as far as special operations selection with every community’s own twist put into it, we recommend you check out Reddit and online for any breadcrumbs you can find about this course. Remember, it is a tiny portion of your journey ahead if you decide to go into an Air Force Special operations pipeline.
That concludes this video on ans we will be doing separate videos on the specific pipelines of Air force special operations. If you like this video and what we have done with it, let us know. If you’d like to see videos talking about associate selection, leave a comment below on which one you’d like to see first. Is it pjs? Combat control technicians?
Special reconnaissance? Let us know. Thanks for watching and don’t forget to subscribe if you learned something from this video. All your friends are subscribing to general discharge and you don’t even want to be here.