A few quotes from Matt Larsen.
"I wrote the FM, I was one of the guys who developed the program in the Ranger Regiment, I was NCOIC of combatives for the Ranger Regt. And then the Ranger Training Brigade and now I am the NCOIC of the Army combatives school and of all combatives training for the infantry school.
I mentioned this before that when we began the research for this program, we did some experimentation.
One of the things we did was take a 100 man RIP class and divided it in half. Half received ten hours of boxing instruction, the other half did PT. After the instruction, we had boxing matches between those with the training and those without. Strangely enough those who received no training won more fights. We did this three times with different amounts of training and different boxing instructors with the same results. Our conclusion was that from the perspective of actual fighting ability small amounts of boxing training is actually counter productive.
Lets face it, there has never been a time when the average soldier was competent with the techniques that the Army doctrine called for them to know.
That is where BJJ comes in. Soldiers begin their learning with the basic ground grappling from BJJ, not because that is how we envision them fighting, or because many fights go to the ground (that is another discussion), but because it is easy both to teach and to learn.
It is also true that to win a fight you must have a strategy. The strategy of almost anyone that you are likely to fight is to pummel you with strikes until you are incapacitated. Perhaps adopting that same plan is not the best way.
’ll talk about our training plan in my next letter."
Matt Larsen
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