That is the problem, the context. Modern MMA seems to be mostly about grappling, which is useful in a way, but if you are grappling and go to ground in a mass combat situation, you are dead meat, as the enemy has friends. So while you are getting your mount and planning your ground and pound, you are getting shot/stabbed/but-stroked to death.

See my previous comments about cavalry combat, and combative pistol use. The flowery dojo techniques are exactly that.

What Fairbairn and Sykes taught was a boiled down, can be learned in a couple of days method of beating an untrained opponent (and most opponents would have been untrained).

And, to re-iterate, from a purely military perspective, the actual military tactical, let alone strategic value of pistol shooting, combatives, fencing etc. is essentially zero, other than for the psychological and conditioning benefits.

Marshall was a fabulist who pulled those numbers out of his ass, pure and simple. I’m not even sure that you could make a case for them being accurate if he had actually gotten them, because it was based on purely subjective self-reporting that he kept precisely zero records of, and for which nobody has ever been able to find actual data records of.

And, to be honest, I’m not sure I believe anyone about any of this crap, basically because it’s all entirely unknowable and totally subjective. Who the hell really knows what goes on out of your sight, in combat? You think you’re doing a good job as a leader, ‘cos you’re checking the ammo pouches to see who was shooting, but maybe PFC Jones is a secret coward/traitor/enemy sympathizer, and he’s been burying his ammo instead of shooting it, and you’ve just assumed that the fires you heard from where he and his buddies were at were them… Ya don’t know what you don’t know.

I’ve always been a big advocate for getting hard data on this crap, but I’ve really got no idea of how you’d go about doing it, other than wiring a unit for sound, and then monitoring it during an action, with full overhead tracking and forensics follow-up. I’m pretty damn sure that if we were to do that, there’d be some significant surprises for the guys doing the data analysis, just like there were with the initial run-throughs at the National Training Center once they had that placed wired up. You want to know what really goes on in combat, you need to do some serious research. Setting up for even doing the very least possible would be highly controversial, and likely get some people put on the hot seat. But, it needs to be done.

Most of the numbers on all this crap are bullshit. Nobody really knows what the actual stats are, or how effective the weapons are. It’s all purely subjective; “I shot at him, he quit shooting back…”. You don’t know if the reason they quit shooting at you was that they ran out of ammo, you killed them, or there was an enemy blue-on-blue that took out the people who were engaging you. The whole thing exists in a haze of confusion and self-delusion.

I’d love to be able to say “Yeah, you’re better off with weapon X than Y…”, but the fact is, Weapon Z is actually doing most of the killing, while Weapon Q is what scares the crap out of the enemy because their culture has a deeply-rooted fear of mutilation… None of which are things that we can quantify or even really “know” in an effective way in order to rationally discuss what we’re issuing the troops.

I’d be up for some serious real-world investigation, but doing it ain’t going to happen under the current reign of fantasists. They’re all about the “overmatch”, which I can’t even find a good definition of…

“Marshall infamously fabricated much of his research — but other sources do corroborate this.”

I’ve seen some discussion of claimed research that, while this was historically true, it is not turning out to be true for video game generations, because they’ve already mentally trained themselves past the reflex hesitation and into BLAM!BLAM!BLAM! without having to think about it.

I have no sources or citations available for this. I merely note that I find it believable.

I was never SF or an MP… My feeling on combatives was pretty simple: If I needed to grapple someone, I’d fundamentally screwed up somewhere along the line. Valuable skill, yes, but… Better not to make the mistake in the first place, y’know?

The entire idea behind combatives and bayonet drill these days is really psychological; to a degree, you don’t want the troops really good or lethal at it, because they are most likely going to be using that crap on each other, instead of the enemy. Or, so I surmise the thinking going… Could be wrong; maybe they really do want to have it work, and are just utterly inept.

It’s kinda like the physical fitness test crap they’re going through–The political constraints are way more of a deal than the actual testing criteria, which if we were honest, would likely put 80-90% of the females in the force on civvy street, as the Brits put it.

The reality as I see it is that the luvvies want to leapfrog reality as it existed for all of prior history to some ideal that we’re only going to reach in a span of time measured in generations. You are not going to overcome the sexual dimorphism we have until the advent of powered armor and artificial wombs, but everyone wants to behave as though those were real things, today.

And, hell, given the plumbing issues, we may never succeed in making conditions for the girls such that they’re as effective as the boys–Consider the fact that you’d have to have freakin’ catheters in every suit you built for women, and ohbytheway, the health implications of that for those women. Imagine how much longer it would take to get into the armor, if you had to stick in a catheter, vs. putting little Willie into a sock…?

Reality is what it is. You’d best be looking at it with clear eyes, and see what is actually there to be seen, vs. what you wish was there. Women in combat arms is one of those things that ain’t really there, but because we want it to be, we’re ignoring everything else to make it happen for the benefit of their almighty “careers”, which are likely to end in a POW/rape camp once reality intrudes into their little fantasies.

Paul, no. If you can’t practice it full speed against an actively resisting opponent, then you can’t really get any good at it, and therefore in practice it’s NOT effective, period.

That’s the hard-learned lesson of modern MMA since UFC 1 in 1993. In the old days (pre-UFC), a minority knew it perfectly well, including no doubt some of those “combatives” instructors, but now it’s very widespread knowledge. This is a huge improvement over the days of strip-mall karate schools. BJJ, Judo, wrestling, Sambo, boxing, kickboxing, and Muay Thai each have their limitations, but they all WORK (in their contexts), because they are trained for real, for real application. Not just for pretend. AFAICT, most of what Americans called “martial arts” back in the 1980s didn’t work, and probably never did. It was largely pretend.

Kirk, as an institution, I doubt the Army really knows shit about unarmed fighting, nor should it be expected to. That expertise is 95% on the civilian side. So just copy what the more clueful civilians are doing, tweak it slightly for the military context, and call it good enough. For the ordinary guy, civilian or military, BJJ is probably the right choice. Ideally, also offer MMA, Judo, boxing, and other martial sports as optional add-ons for the hard-core. Plus some context on how one-on-one duels are exactly the opposite of what you should be trying to achieve as a military unit, which I understand the Marines already teach.

Logistics snafus… Interesting, and probably very important. But I know nothing about that; thus my minor contributions above on stuff I actually know a little bit about.

Part of that was that the ACR mentality was that “We’re self-contained, all alone, and ain’t nobody else out there to help…”. Brigades belonging to divisions were usually utterly apathetic, and acted like support was someone else’s problem, not theirs.

Which was why 507th happened, TBH. I think that if that company had been attached to an ACR, the ACR mentality would have probably handled the whole thing differently, and we might have had a much different outcome.

The Army largely had its head up its ass from the time I enlisted back in the early 1980s up until I retired. It wasn’t 100% across the board, but the things I witnessed and experienced? Yeesh. Most of which were entirely avoidable, and things that the “higher powers” were made well aware of–It was just that they didn’t have the gumption or the care to do anything about the issues. I’m not kidding when I say that all of the issues experienced by our unit in 2003 were things we’d foreseen ten years earlier.

We were sitting in Kuwait before going north, after all the debarking and other stuff was done, and our S3 basically gave everyone a quick briefing on how he foresaw the way things were going to go. He made no bones about the fact that we weren’t leaving Iraq any time soon, that it was a 50-plus year commitment if anything meaningful was to be accomplished (in direct contravention to what the politicians and other higher-ups were saying…), and he laid out how he foresaw the whole thing going.

The only thing he got wrong for the course of the next 24 months was that it took about six months longer than he projected for the Iranians to get EFP munitions into widespread use in Iraq.

Why wasn’t he in charge? No damn idea. Dude was brilliant, but not a politician. The political hacks were the ones they made full colonels and put in charge of everything, and I’ll be brutally honest: Most of them were utterly useless time-serving jackasses more concerned about their next OER than actually doing well at the mission.

Trust me on this–No matter whether it’s Kodak missing the boat on digital imaging or the Army being unprepared for the IED campaign, there’s someone inside the hierarchy who was likely railing against the stupidity of it all as they watched the “leadership” ignore all warnings and any common sense.

That’s simultaneously the biggest comfort and most frightening thing to realize: The people in charge are mostly so incompetent that they can’t possibly get themselves off the railroad tracks before the oncoming train hits, and that’s both beneficial and a disadvantage at the same time. Imagine, if you will, today’s politically correct and “diverse” military tackling a widespread internal insurrection. About the only thing they’re going to be able to do is threaten nukes, and that’s a.) not going to fly very far, and b.) given the crap we’ve seen coming out of the former SAC and other nuclear forces, not likely to actually work if they did try it.

I’m pretty sure I understand what it must have been like to have watched all the idiots during the Year of Five Emperors. Not sure I’m really all that happy to live through such times, but, hey… What the hell, it’s entertaining.

In a “WTF will they try next…?” sense.

I am wondering how that gets put together as the pieces weren’t quite for the same puzzle, and it’s not FOB to FOB, but there is the base knowledge about.

Wait thar a minute pardner…put that shovel down…

We did it routinely in my units in the 90s. Mind you that was 3d ACR after, yes AFTER desert storm, and then in Europe 1AD in the 90s, again after, AFTER DSS. So it was learned. Hard.

Tactically meaning line units is the only place we can do anything Kirk. Learned hard or not.

As for the MTOE, you’re a very stubborn person to not give that up quick. It’s ok, I might have thought about it too once or twice. I mean yes, it’s nonsense for anyone not bringing Bezoes money to the Generals to consider it.

I think you’re a systems guy from the sound of it, maybe even a real engineer. That must drive you crazy.

But at the tactical level of squadron, BN, BDE I’ve seen LOG done routinely.

Now if you respond, I will have to retort with the tales of MOBE/DEMOBE from Bldg 500, Ft Bliss…hint, colored arrows painted on all 4 floors for the infantilized units to be henpecked through by fat women who couldn’t cut it at the DMV, infantilizing a generation of soldiers and leaders, entire units.

^which is why learning as adults on the battlefield may be a bridge too far ^

Ever.

Ask me how I know.

No, wait, I’ll tell you. In 1993 I was a young promotable Staff Sergeant running a line platoon in the last Active Duty Corps Wheeled Engineer unit. Did reasonably well at that, and for some reason the CSM and Battalion Commander thought I’d be a good fit running the battalion support platoon, which as you know is supposed to be the slot for your senior platoon sergeant in the battalion so that they can learn how logistics works before becoming a First Sergeant. I didn’t want the job, and said so–It was completely against what I thought were my strengths, which were training and systems. I was overruled, and went over to support platoon as the junior-most platoon sergeant in the battalion, which was ‘effing idiotic. Found out later that the reason for this was that everyone else in the battalion had taken a look at the company commander (reputedly the first woman, ever, to command a combat engineer company, even if it was just an HHC…) and her chosen First Sergeant (who was an affirmative action type that couldn’t actually do anything more complicated than put on a uniform and look good at standing in front of a formation), and told the CSM and battalion commander that they’d submit retirement paperwork before working for those two. So, I got the shaft.

Going in, I knew nothing about running logistics or doing LOGPAC operations. Turned out, nobody did, really–They had never, ever done it for realsies. Which was pretty fucking obvious when you looked at the MTOE, because it gave me exactly one radio to conduct convoy operations with, a HMMWV, four fuel HEMTTs, seven cargo HEMTTS, a five ton truck for the battalion mess section, a Vietnam-era forklift that hadn’t actually, y’know, run in over 15 years, and only enough men to drive the trucks around the motor pool. No co-drivers, and even my NCOs and I had to drive–By default, I was the guy in the HMMWV, driving the LT around. Nobody else to do it–They were all driving HEMTTS by themselves.

On. The. MTOE. How the hell was that supposed to work, given that our footprint for logistics required operating over a division-sized area of a given battlespace? If you sat down and looked at it, we had more ground to cover than any other organization type in the Army, and no security assets to do it with. Oh, and did I mention that much of our real combat power, out in the Heavy Equipment sections actually consisted of unique stuff that a division of any type wasn’t going to be able to support? So, zero chance of leaching off of their logistics network…?

Let’s not get into the fact that along with zero internal comms, I had the small arms complement of a line squad spread across all my vehicles, with no real firepower above a couple of M249s and some M203s. There was a .50 cal, but the ring mount was meant for the old 5-ton trucks, and they wouldn’t order me the parts to convert it, and even if they did, that went on the mess truck which wouldn’t be doing LOGPAC operations ‘cos it had to be running around the BSA doing mess section things in order for everyone to eat…

I sat down and looked it all over, and realized that a.) I was gonna be on my own, b.) I didn’t have the necessary bits and bobs to do the job, and that c.) nobody cared. My LT and I did voluminous research about what we’d likely have to do, looking at the typical Corps OPORDS and tasking our battalion would probably be getting, realized how big our fucking job was, and tried to prepare/train for it all. We actually did the first “real” LOGPAC our battalion had done in living memory, and it was a cluster-fuck of truly epic proportions. Even just training internally, and without the battalion being spread all over hell’s creation, it was a disaster. We couldn’t even convoy effectively as an element–No radios. You had to take the HMMWV out in front, passing everyone on the highway, stop, and then count trucks to make sure you still had everyone, then drive like a fucking maniac to get out ahead again. We wound up buying those little Motorola handhelds at the PX out of pocket, just so we could talk to people without making them stop.

I had a three-ring binder full of crap that we needed to get or implement if we ever went off to war. We could gain no headway with the assholes writing the MTOE, either–They told us we didn’t need more than one driver per vehicle, as if we could just shit licensed HEMTT operators at will, when needed, or as though those guys we snaffled up from elsewhere when we moved didn’t have jobs and official roles elsewhere in the HHC already. The radios? LOL… The weapons…? Again, LOL. Forget up-armor kits–We provided volumes of data about how necessary they were going to be, but, again, nobody cared. I had white papers from South Africa, talking about what they’d had to do going into Angola, and all of that crap. Nobody cared. We got in a new company commander who’d spent two tours in Somalia, and he was completely on-board with the whole thing, joining in on all the fun of trying to force some sanity on the whole thing. Two years later, he wrote off his military career in frustration, because absolutely nothing got done to fix the issues, and again, nobody cared. We were lone voices in the wilderness.

Hell, we wrote off to the idiots running the FMTV program, and told them “Hey, dumbasses… Cabover design BAD. That puts the crew right over the front axle, which is gonna be the first thing blown up through the crew compartment when they hit a mine or IED… South Africa learned this the hard way; that’s why all of the South African logistics vehicles are conventional engine-forward designs with armored capsules for the engines and crews…”.

That got us nowhere–The reply was that a.) the logistics concerns of a shorter wheelbase for loading into ships took priority, and that b.) we didn’t need to do that sort of ridiculous thing because we were smarter than South Africans and wouldn’t be taking our wheeled logistics vehicles into combat situations…

Our pleas that they design uparmor kits concurrently with the trucks went nowhere, for similar reasons. “No identified need”. ‘Cos, you see, unless a commander demanded it, they weren’t doing it. Nobody cared that this shit was plain as the nose on your face, if only you looked around the world at how other conflicts were fought, and at how the Soviets had been preaching “rear area battle” since the beginning of Barbarossa.

The cherry on top of the ice-cream sundae of fuck-uppedness, though? Come 2003, some ten years after all this, we’re alerted to deploy as slice to 4ID. Against, I might add, the promises of all and sundry, up to and including the FORSCOM commander. See, we’d been doing ash and trash on Fort Lewis rather than training, ‘cos someone had to be the “bill payer” to allow the Stryker Brigades to stand up. So, we got no training time allotted to us–All of it was “post support”, when you got down to it, aside from two weeks a year we were “allowed” to go to the field as a battalion. By this time, I’d left the battalion, gone to the NTC, and come back by way of Korea. The assholes dropped me right back into my old support platoon, which was… Interesting. Nothing had really changed, just the faces. Ten years on, nothing fixed. I was able to pull my old notes out and start all over again with the MTOE fight, but since there hadn’t been any realistic battalion-level training since I’d left, well… It was same shit, different day.

Did that thankless job for a year, and then with retirement looming, they shifted me up to brigade in order to make room for another POS affirmative action hire that not only spent his time as First Sergeant sexually harassing all the female soldiers in my old platoon, but who also actually refused to deploy with us to OIF, demanding that he got back the status he’d given up as “sole surviving son”. Convenient, no?

What was the most fun, though? Watching the cluster-fuck as they tried to get ready to deploy with that support platoon. All of a sudden, the horrified realization that they’d have to do real LOGPAC operations hit, and the money tree got shaken. Weapons, ring mounts, radios… All sorts of goodies came showering down, and a bunch of off-MTOE permanently assigned soldiers who could be licensed as HEMTT operators showed up. I handed my three-ring binder of “Shit we need to do before war she is fought” to the new platoon sergeant, wished him and his LT well, and then went off to do staff things while snidely pointing out to the CSM that’d moved me out of the line battalion that his “chosen man” was a piece of shifty shirking shit. He didn’t like that, not one bit, but the bastard deserved it–He’d basically promoted a uniform, not a real soldier. Stupid fuck couldn’t even run a range, but he’d been taken in by the pretty-pretty, and didn’t pay attention to the incredible drop in morale in the HHC of that battalion. Ah, well… Water under the bridge. I’m sure he’s successful, somewhere.

Yeah. So… Don’t try to make a case that we ever knew how to do logistics down at the tactical level. We did not. I spent a considerable chunk of my time as an Observer/Controller at the NTC playing O/C for the support platoons of the Engineer battalions. They weren’t any better or any more prepared out in the line units we saw, and their MTOEs made even less sense. There was also the minor issue that the NTC did not see “logistics” as something they should have been training, because every time I pointed out that there was essentially no “friction” in the LOGPAC process, I was told that if there were, then it would detract from training the maneuver guys, which was the point of NTC in the first damn place… My point, which wasn’t ever paid attention to, was that it wasn’t exactly realistic to train as though every LOGPAC convoy was going to get through, every time. That mentality inculcated bad habits, just like the failure to include Corps-level slice elements led directly to things like the 507th Maintenance Company fiasco, ‘cos nobody ever bothered to train those people, or to train the divisions that the slice elements weren’t getting training at all on basic combat operations… When the 507th happened, it was literally the blind leading the blind, because those poor fucks had no idea what they needed to do, never having trained at the NTC, and the 3rd ID guys had no idea that the rest of the Army was basically budget triaged into not doing any kind of realistic training whatsoever–The 507th’s idea of a realistic training exercise was setting up their tents in their motor pool, and then doing garrison ops from those tents with the troops locked down as though they were in the field. Convoy operations…? LOL… We ain’t got time or money for that bullshit. And, that’s the way Big Army wanted it. Deliberately, and with malice aforethought.

Do note that instead of institutionalizing and making permanent the PSD elements we all had to set up out of hide while deployed, they are studiously looking the other way and humming, instead of adding men and equipment to the MTOE, which means that the next time around, we’ll have to throw together ad-hoc little elements all over again, stripping line units that are already denuded of necessary manpower.

The system is fucked. Always has been, and likely always will be until the whole shoddy enterprise collapses. They told us all about how to go about “fixing” MTOE and doctrine issues in schooling, but the thing they never taught us was how to fix idiots running things above us that would ignore all of our documentation and requirements.

Shit’s always been broke, yo…

The boys and the leadership are very sharp TACTICALLY.

The problem is once wartime logistics ever hits it’s going to be a bigger shock then the British got in the Falklands [whoops, can't go back to base like we can in Rhineland] but the British adapted well and fast. Then again the British hadn’t spent 20 years being infantilized by MOBE/DEMOBE process and FOB contractor logistics. And yes an entire generation is infantilized once the ammo they took runs out.

We’ll learn at cost.

And no, they don’t know how to do log. You’d have to be my age. No one has done log since 2003 invasion of Iraq, maybe Afghanistan. But this FOBBIT crap has made us not just soft but stupid.