It depends.  Some teams are trained better than others, but for the most part the only agencies that can afford full-time SWAT teams are large metropolitan police departments or state agencies.  The vast majority of SWAT teams in this country are part-time teams, with members serving on an on-call basis and training only eight to sixteen hours a month.  As you might expect, those teams have to make the most of that training time and will try to focus on the skills they will use the most.  For the most part, the most common use of SWAT teams is to serve high risk search warrants on residences, and that is the skill teams tend to train on.  The second most likely reason teams are called out is on barricaded subjects, and most of those will take place at residences.  Both scenarios tend to take place in urban or suburban neighborhoods, whether they occur in a densely populated area in Chicago or Dallas, or in less populated areas such as Liberty, MO or McAllen, TX. 

 

One advantage that many police SWAT teams have, regardless of how big or small the department they serve on, is that they tend to contain at least a few members that have served in the military and can bring a certain amount of military training to bear.  When I was the assistant team leader of a part-time SWAT team I tried to occasionally include some military training on patrolling and crossing danger areas, but ultimately I found that our precious training time was better spent training on the missions we performed the most, which as I stated above were high risk warrant searches and barricaded subjects. 

 

I would dare say that the teams that do the most rural training are your county sheriff's departments and state agencies.  When you consider that the average size of a law enforcement agency in the United States is only ten officers, it becomes apparent that state and county agencies are responsible for a lot of the critical incident response in most of the rural parts of this country.  Some state and county drug task forces conduct surveillance missions and raids that would resemble the training scenarios presented at Ft. Benning, Ft. Bragg, or Ft. Lewis.  Some teams that operate in jurisdictions with marine environments, such as the Ozarks, the Great Lakes, the Everglades, or the coasts, will train on conducting raids from boats, since they are often the most direct route to residences in those areas. 

 

I would assume that the FBI HRT undergoes some military training in patrolling and operating in woodland environments, but I would guess that the agency with the most experience in this area is the DEA and ATF on the Federal level.  With the explosion of the meth epidemic in the 1990's, a large chunk of the clandestine drug labs were located in rural areas.  The same goes for a lot of the large marijuana growth operations.  State and federal counter narcotics teams had to drive to the end of the road and then hump the rest of the distance to the dope house in the boonies, and on a few occasions teams were even inserted by helicopter.  Once on the ground and in hostile territory, camouflaged SWAT cops had to evade booby traps, snipers, and a potentially well armed enemy.   

 

9/11 has changed everything on almost every level.  Still, if it came to conducting counter terror ops inside this country, there are quite a few SWAT teams out there in pretty much every state that are up to the task. 

Altough I suppose their small team tactics on the field are probably much less sofisticated and trained that those of military SOF units...

Well I never liked dividing the units in 'tiers'. Anyway if I know right tier 1 would refer to the level of expertise and training of those units, but it does not refer to the main roles of the units so in the tier 1 you would have units such as SF, SEALs but also police units such as GSG9 or HRT in the same basket altough they have different roles. So I was rather making comparison in field combat ability of units with most of the training spent on CQB such as HRT(correct me if I'm wrong) and units such as SF or SEALs whose missions are most often on the fields.

What I was basically asking is who would take care of hostage rescues if hostages were held for example in the middle of the forest and are the federal police units trained for such situations?

I agree with you on the whole 'tier' issue.  I was in the SWAT community for several years, and never heard of the term until I got on this page.  Sure, there are higher levels of training and expertise, and everybody in the SWAT and CT community knows who the big dogs are, but we generally don't break ourselves down that way. 

 

As far as a rural or woodland hostage rescue would go, I would think it would depend upon a lot of circumstances.  If it were just a meth head or psycho holding a couple of hostages in a cabin in rural Arkansas or Montana, then the mission would probably be left up to the county agency, though probably with support from the state agency.  In the case that terrorists, whether foreign or domestic, took hostages in a rural environment, your first SWAT teams on the scenes would still by your local, county, and state teams.  The first federal team that would probably show up on the scene would be the SWAT team from the local FBI field office (most FBI field offices operate small SWAT teams, but they are part-time and not trained to the leve of HRT, which is a full-time team). 

 

There have been a number of rural SWAT operations on the federal level.  Unfortunately, the most well know are Ruby Ridge, and Waco, but a lot has a changed since then.  You have to be prepared for all eventualities, whether it be rapelling onto a high rise building, or hiking into the woods to reach a remote cabin. 

My apologies on the 'Tier' rating. I was just referring to the fact that HRT is typically considered to be an extremely professional unit, on the same level as CAG and DEVGRU.