Training for Compliance

Monday, October 7th, 2013

The US Army decided to drop bayonet training a few years ago. Bayonets are responsible for roughly 0.0% of combat casualties, and bayonet training wasn’t so much for building bayonet skill as for building fighting spirit — which they can build with unarmed combatives training.

Now combatives is getting watered down:

The Modern Army Combatives Program, headquartered at Fort Benning, Ga., consists of four skill-level courses — a weeklong basic course, a two-week tactical course, and a basic combatives instructor course and a tactical combatives instructor course, each of which is four weeks long.

Proposals from Training and Doctrine Command call for eliminating all four levels of training and creating a master combatives trainer course that would be no more than two weeks long.

The modern combatives program is based on Brazilian jiu-jitsu — which isn’t geared toward armed conflict amongst groups of fighters, but which does allow troops to train hard, while training realistically, without too many injuries. It is an excellent choice for MPs and the like.

Anyway, a grappler generally reaches competence — a blue-belt in BJJ — after 100–200 hours on the mat, or a little over a year of training two to three times a week. That’s a lot longer than two weeks, even if they’re 40-hour weeks — and I can say that I’ve never survived anywhere near 40 hours of grappling in one week.

Capt. Paul Lewandowski finds the dissolution of Combatives endemic of a larger problem — that training for compliance is favored over training for effect:

Everything from equal opportunity training to cold weather injury prevention is prescribed at the Army level, and every unit is required to maintain extensive name-by-name records. The core theory behind this compliance-oriented training is that there are only two kinds of soldiers in a unit: those who have received the training to the minimum standard, and those who have not.

In certain tasks, providing soldiers the minimum standard of training in accordance with clear, published, specifications is the best and most effective method. However, there is a disturbing trend in which more and more training is being treated as “regulation compliance.” Reporting the results of training on a spreadsheet or PowerPoint slide captures the effect of training only in the most narrow, linear sense. It treats the soldier who sleeps in the back of the classroom and the soldier practicing until his/her hands are callused as one and the same. Effective military training has an incredible transformative power that cannot be articulated within a slide deck — such as when a squad finally develops the camaraderie to be a high-functioning team, when a young soldier understands that his/her responsibilities aren’t a burden but a source of pride, or when a young lieutenant finds the courage to lead by example. Training has the power to do more than alter a slide — it can alter a soldier.

Combatives training is a sterling example of transformative training. The basic Combatives course is 40 hours of instruction almost always done as consecutive eight-hour days. The course curriculum is physically demanding, with virtually no conventional classroom time. It is extremely taxing on soldiers’ bodies and minds. To graduate Combative level I, students engage in roughly two hours active fighting against one another. Students also must execute a “clinch drill” in which the soldier closes with and takes down a trained instructor who, meanwhile, is actively striking the student in the head and body. The instructors wear boxing gloves but the only protective equipment for most soldiers is a mouthpiece. The vast majority of students report these two aspects of the course — the active combat against other students and being hit full force while achieving the clinch — as the two most harrowing, yet rewarding, aspects of the course.

This type of intensive training offers each individual soldier an unscripted version of combat. Virtually no other training pits individual soldiers against a reactive, intelligent, aggressive enemy.

It’s upsetting that no other training pits individual soldiers against a reactive, intelligent, aggressive enemy.

Comments

  1. Not unexpected. While I won’t quibble that bayonets are less useful for high intensity conflict (though I will note that the last successful bayonet charge took place in 2003), the article betrays a perspective error that is more often seen in US Civil War scholarship: that bayonets are ineffective because so few men are killed or wounded by them. Those who hold this fail to understand that the purpose of bayonets isn’t to kill or wound the enemy, but to make him run away because sharp things are scary, in a way that being shot at isn’t. At this task they have historically been very effective.

  2. Tschafer says:

    I wonder how much of this is driven by the fact that women tend to not like sharp, scary things?

  3. Handle says:

    There are OPFOR and Red Teams to practice fighting a ‘reactive, intelligent, aggressive enemy’ during exercises. One learns a lot when they hand your ass to you.

    Learning fun but modern-combat-useless skills is perceived as a waste of time by some, and can undermine their morale as well. Airborne, land navigation, and combatives have nothing to do with what modern Soldiers do in the fight, but it’s hard to talk sense to someone who loves these things.

    My own bayonet training was a stupid joke – the thing sits in the bottom of the duffel the whole deployment, along with your compass and protractor.

    No Taliban has ever run away from an affixed bayonet. They are less scary than the thing they are affixed to, which is a barrel which can shoot rounds in your face.

  4. Taliban no, Shiite militia yes. I did get the date wrong, it was 2004.

    Like you affirm, though, bayonets aren’t (usually) useful in modern combat. If I remember correctly they are still useful for crowd intimidation and control under some circumstances.

  5. Isegoria says:

    Scipio, I mentioned that 2004 bayonet charge in the linked post on dropping bayonet training.

    At the time of the US Civil War, the bayonet was still a vastly superior weapon for close-quarters combat — if a vastly inferior weapon overall — because the rifled muskets of the era were still single-shot muzzle-loaders. Against modern (semi)automatic weapons though, a bayonet charge won’t stand a chance. Jerry Miculek is hardly an average soldier, but watch him speed-shoot an old .30-06 M1 Garand, and any kind of charge looks like a bad idea.

    It’s a valid point though, that making the other side run away achieves a purpose without generating a body count.

    Sharp things are scary, I agree, but loud things are scary too. I suppose the blade’s advantage is that it’s scary even when it isn’t really being used.

  6. Isegoria says:

    Most young men love sharp, scary things, of course — and they love rasslin’, too. Bayonet fencing and jiu-jitsu seem like great recreational activities for soldiers and Marines — and I believe the injury rates are actually much lower than for “safe” sports like basketball and soccer.

    But you’re right, Tschafer; they might not be popular with everyone in the modern armed forces.

  7. Isegoria says:

    Out of curiosity, how much time do modern soldiers and Marines get to spend “fighting” against red teams? And how scripted or unscripted is their training these days?

    I would think that young guys would line up to join the Army or USMC if they got to airsoft-skirmish every day for free.

    Airborne training is an interesting case, because no one skydives into position any more, but jumping out of an airplane is quite the rite of passage. I know the Soviets used it as a filter for the kind of man you’d want in an assault force.

    Land navigation seems like a useless skill — until it isn’t. When you control the skies — and space — I suppose you get used to mechanized transport, GPS, ets.

    Combatives seems like a merely nice-to-have skill for anyone except MPs and the like who might really need to control someone without shooting them.

  8. Speaking of Airsoft (or something better), MILES gear is cheap and unobtrusive enough now that my local paintball range is offering 3 rounds for $24 using pretty exact (weighted/balanced) copies of M-4s. They use a CO2 cartridge to simulate noise and recoil to some degree and you can get a belt that shocks you if you get hit.

    I’m curious to know if such rigs are used for actual training, or if they are in fact useful for such.

  9. Handle says:

    Even MP’s don’t really use what is taught in combatives. Like regular cops, they have their own, more appropriate personnel physical control techniques.

    It depends which kind of OPFOR you’re fighting, and what kind of unit you’re in. For Army combat units, you can also have a squad from the unit be the ad hoc OPFOR, and most intermediate-proficiency level unit training exercises do that.

    When a large unit (like a Brigade) does a major, month-long unit-readiness-certification exercise, like NTC, CMTC, or JRTC, then there are special units stationed at the training center that do nothing but play OPFOR.

    MILES gear is still used. You’ve got to use blanks to make it work (via the air pressure blast), and they foul up your weapon horribly – it takes three times as long to clean as the same number of regular rounds.

  10. Lucklucky says:

    The US Army is the last organization of the State to be taken by the Left and they are accomplishing it fast.

  11. Isegoria says:

    Both combatives (jiu-jitsu) and defensive pistol shooting are skills that MPs or civilian police officers should not need often, but which they may need badly.

    My MP friend came back from Iraq as a young, fit white-belt in jiu-jitsu. His combatives training familiarized him with jiu-jitsu, but nothing more. When we went to the range together, I was fairly new to defensive pistol shooting, but he was amazed by what even a novice could do — namely, draw and put two shots on target in under a couple seconds.

    He had become a prison guard by then, and he was practicing for his annual pistol qualification. Our institutional standards for such skills are very, very low.

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