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Somewhere over a certain operational theatre, a pilot is flying a combat mission against enemy targets when he has an unwelcome encounter with a surface-to-air missile. The pilot manages to put his ejection seat to good use, and while descending under his parachute he uses his ELT (Emergency Locator Transmitter) to communicate his position. He now stand fairly good chances of being quickly recovered by a Combat SAR unit.
Combat Search And Rescue (Combat SAR or CSAR) is about extracting downed air crews and other selected military personnel from enemy or anyway hostile/unfriendly territory, and returning them to friendly control. CSAR thus involves all aspects of basic SAR missions as regards locating the personnel and recovering them under virtually all geographic and climatic conditions, but with the exceedingly important difference that CSAR missions must be planned and implemented while taking in consideration the possibility of an hostile reaction. The key principle is thus for CSAR operations to be carried out in a covert fashion to the largest extent as possible, but with the clear perception that it may become necessary to take on enemy fire and use firepower to suppress local enemy resistance.
The main rationale for CSAR operations to the benefit of specialised personnel, while in most other cases it will generally be accepted that "normal" soldiers who become stranded behind enemy lines will become POWs, is that pilots, SOF operators and the like are very expensive to train. Accordingly, mounting a complex (and costly) CSAR operation to recover even a single pilot, and thus allow him to fight again, has come to be regarded as a cost-effective practice. Furthermore, the existence of CSAR assets contributes towards boosting the moral amongst units operating in or over hostile territory, and in particular many Special Forces operations would hardly be conceivable if the operators could not count on at least a fair probability of being extracted after their mission.
As regards the latter aspect, it should be noted that CSAR missions in strict meaning of the expression (i.e., recovery of stranded personnel) are becoming increasingly intermingled with missions for the insertion/extraction of SOF teams. These two types of missions are not based on exactly the same criteria, but they use very much the same equipment...