Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Brewer
It's always dangerous to quote out of context, which is what you've done here, TT. Those quotes were in reference to why the Army decided to add things like BJJ and other MMA based training methods (along with stick and knife training from kali, courtesy of Marc Denny and pals) instead of relying on pure boxing. In other words, you're shooting your own argument in the foot. The Army - specifically Matt Larsen and his command - decided that they needed to fix the problems that were associated with the program taught to soldiers before. To do that, they shied away from a lot of the Fairbairn - Applegate - Sykes based material and traditional based stuff that had been taught before and incorporated things you can use and train against active resistance. In other words, they incorporated wrestling, BJJ, kickboxing, and kali.
The quotes you've chosen are persuasive, but put into their original context and into the context of what was happening in the Army at the time MACP was introduced, they hurt your argument. It's like this statement:
One way to read that is that the soldiers were not capable of performing effectively given the nature of Army requirements.
Another way to read it is that soldiers have never been able to learn all that the Army requires of them.
The first is a negative statement about the Army's requirements; the second is a negative statement about the soldier. Context is the key to understanding and putting it into its proper frame. Since soldiers have all entered combat for the first time with nothing except their training - no real-world experience at all - the training is indeed of real value.
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I don't know how you figure I took that out of context, here's the entire letter.
"First, when you say they you mean me. 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 have been in the infantry in both the Army and the Marine Corps for the last eighteen years and the truth is that until recently there was almost no combatives training happening. What little there was, was almost universally thought of as a joke and a waste of time. It is hard for the “combatives” crowd to admit but it is the truth. The big question is why. Why did both soldiers and commanders think that combatives training was a waste of time.
In my opinion it is because the Army has been trying for the last sixty years to implement the very things you are advocating. You said that you were in the infantry. I assume you were an advocate of combatives training while you were in. Why then did the system that you are advocating not spread throughout the Army from your platoon or company the way the current system spread from the third platoon charley company 2/75th?
I don’t want you to take that the wrong way, I am sure that we agree on what soldiers need to know. Knowing what they need to know is the easy part. Its how do you actualy get them to know it that is hard. How do you motivate that pencil neck commander/squad leader to get his men training? That is the real question.
That is also where the systems of the past have failed. 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.
If you look at the way marksmanship is taught as an analogy, combat marksmanship is a very difficult and complicated task. You are fatigued and breathing hard, firing from unusual positions or while moving. Your targets are fleeting and hard to identify, not to mention NODS, optics etc.
Now all of that being true, no one question the need for BRM. Even though it bears little resemblance to the sort of shooting that we expect of our soldiers on the battlefield.
This is not so with combatives. The training methods that have been used with combatives is much like teaching shooting at the soldier of fortune convention. You put a guy down behind a machine gun. He squeezes of a few rounds. Its cool. He walks away motivated. He may even have a good feeling about the training, but at the end of the day, no one showed him about site alignment. Is he a better shooter, marginally if at all.
Now you take that same man and show him how to strike with the ridge of his hand, tell him to grab their nuts, stomp them with his heel. He is motivated. He may have a good feeling about the training, but is he actually a better fighter? Or when the actual fight happens is he going to resort back to his natural farm boy technique? We have done quite a bit of experimentation to prove the latter.
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 ground fighting is not too dissimilar from standup fighting, and the lessons learned there make it easier to teach further techniques.
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.
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. I’ll talk about our training plan in my next letter.
Matt Larsen"
I wasn't gunning for Matt or I'd have ripped all the info he perpetuated in order to get his system accepted. I left out his slams of combatives because they were off subject for this forum and he was made a fool of by people for those comments very shortly after making them. I posted the relevant portions to the discussion at hand that pertained to training, but if you want to discuss the comments he made belittling Rex Applegate, W.E Fairbarn and WWII combatives and the men who used and founded them I'd be delighted to participate in that discussion as well.
Matt began bad mouthing combatives after the official solicitation from US Army SOCOM Ft Bragg for instruction and instructional materials for CQC training specifying the USMC Line system in support of the Special Forces Qualification Course was leaked making LINE the official training SF wide (not group specific). The solicitation number is ZA92-02-Q-0024. This was a change from Matts program. Here's the quote from the Sol. "Most recently during fiscal years 01 and 02 LINES training has become the standard training incorporated into the Special Forces Qualification Course." After this was leaked at SOC.net where Matt and his FM were already getting ripped to shreds by current operators he wrote that letter. It only went downhill from there when he began insulting Fairbairn, Applegate & Sykes combat records and credentials.
It's interesting how little details are there if you just know where to look, who is the man tasked with training the instructors for the Army Q course? Ron Donvito, who the hell is Ron Donvito you might ask, he's the man who invented the LINE system formerly used by the Marine Corps. So while details of the program are still classified the background of the man training the instructors isn't and it's WWII combatives.