Losing a 'life-or-death skill'?

Proponents fight planned changes to combatives training
Sep. 9, 2013 - 03:31PM

Planned changes to combatives training have proponents fighting for the survival of the program and the “life-or-death” skills it teaches.

These hand-to-hand skills save lives, and lives are at risk without those abilities developed over the course of the combatives program, they say.

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.

In an email obtained by Army Times, officials from TRADOC call for “implementation of the new program as quickly as possible.”

Officials at the combatives school at Fort Benning have until Sept. 30 to come up with a two-week curriculum for the proposed master combatives trainer course, said a senior noncommissioned officer who asked that his name be withheld.

Officials from TRADOC declined to respond to requests for information from Army Times.

If the proposed changes come through, in addition to the elimination of competitions, “I think it’s going to be detrimental to the force moving forward,” the senior NCO said. “We’re taking away so much training, and it’s not only soldiers’ ability to fight, but confidence, instilling the warrior ethos in the individual soldier, and some of those intangibles that can’t be measured.”

“It’s a life-or-death skill,” said Staff Sgt. Colton Smith, chief combatives instructor for III Corps and Fort Hood, Texas. In December, the two-tour Iraq veteran won “The Ultimate Fighter,” Spike TV’s reality mixed martial arts competition. He said combatives are essential to his job as an infantryman.

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http://www.armytimes.com/article/2013090...ife-death-skill