Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting!

Sounds about right. Combatives always reminded me of Rex Kwon Do. "Grab my arm. No, the other arm. No, MY other arm." Worthless.

 

Like anything in life, it depends on who you get instruction from. Rex Kwon Do is half of any brand of martial arts joints, civ or mil. If you get it from some E6 92Y who is doing it because he really likes JCVD movies, well, yeaaah. I had the pleasure of receiving Combatives training from several deranged gentlemen that believed 100% was the only way to practice and, why not, you've got free healthcare! My "graduation" photo from that particular happy fun-time event is the instructors standing next to me with half of my face covered in my own blood. Everybody is all smiles.

Anyway, my point is that you can't trust the military to be ninja squad through and through. You have to volunteer to get slapified like a school girl by the real ninja squad. Or just stick to picking fights outside the Ugly Stick with the hope that you'll find somebody who is more advanced in the fighting arts than a shaved gorilla with some tribal tats who uses the SMASH! method. Though, really, that'd be a good training experience, too.

 

It sounds like we had a different experience with it in that you actually got something out of combatives (and had instructors who had actually been in a real fight at least once in their lives). I still say it's worthless and will continue to do so until some Level Elevendy Billion combatives instructor with +20 damage points comes along and proves me wrong.

 

Come now, Walt. Nothing is worthless if you integrate into the Big Picture of Stomping Motherfuckers. Not even Combatives.

Combatives is just an Army-approved method they stole from the Marine Corps which stole from boxing, karate and BJJ.

It's like how all these mega ego military motherfuckers got all of their skills from dorks that play gun games (3-Gun / IPSC).

Would I recommend Combatives as something to focus on? Fuck no. I'd recommend one go train from a less polluted source.

The US military, after all, is too busy squabbling over what color uniform to wear to actually be proficient in combat skills.

 

Fair enough. Allow me to clarify my position: I think that the Army Combatives system is absolutely worthless at taking a Joe off the street and teaching him to fight. Arm bars, omoplatas, and triangle chokes are all incredibly niche techniques in a real fight, especially when you're wearing 50lbs of bulky kit and have a big-ass rifle slung to your chest, right next to your BFK. Therefore, a BJJ-based method of combative training (practiced in only PT's or ACU's) for folks who have no other fighting experience is fucking retarded. Like Rick Perry retarded. Especially in a military environment when there are literally dozens of other base-techniques that would be more immediately useful.

As a follow-up, I have never met a single combatives instructor who was worth a damn after getting punched in the mouth.

 

Totally concur. Hell, I wasn't even thinking about that Special Move garbage. Said niche techniques are especially useless when the primary aim of any type of unarmed altercation on The Field of Modern Warfare (TM) is to regain control of some type of weapon, preferably a gun which you can use to blow a big hole in the other dude's upper thoracic. What isn't useless about it, however, is that it shows how incredibly difficult it is to do even basic fighting techniques while dressed up like a ACU-clad Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Body armor and helmets make unarmed combat really retarded. Things like groin kicks make a big comeback. You realize the utility of a fixed blade knife with a 4"+ blade and that folding knives just aren't fast enough when somebody has you in a choke hold from behind. Your slung rifle becomes an evil pendulum / choke hazard (try grappling with a M4/M203, it's a surefire way to get hit in the face or balls by your own blaster). The biggest thing I took away from Combatives was that I needed to make sure that I was faster with my secondary harm-doer and that do everything possible to not end up on the ground where I'm gonna get dead.

 

Well cool. Now we can be friends again. Kirstang is still on the bubble, though.

 

Dude, I'm like a hundred pounds on a good day. Some hulking hombre comes at me with Whatever Fu and I'm going for my friggin' Glock. I'm not big enough to slug it out with anybody. That and people that are super into martial arts develop that one-on-one tunnel vision. The time you spend wrestling it out Dirtbeard allows Mudtooth to sneak up on you with an AK. Karate works great for one-on-one scenarios. Too bad life isn't an '80s action flick where the black-suited bad guys wait patiently and attack in such a fashion to ensure a fair fight. People are real ruthless bastards.

The honor in fighting is in surviving. If punting you in the sack and biting off your ear will get me home that night, I'm going for that shit first.

 

training is done in ACUs and either boots or PT shoes, through level 2 at least.
@plan 9, I did my level 1 and 2 while I was at Bragg, we didn't wear any of that.

 

In their usual disturbingly off-message way Cracked actually made a very good point about fighting: The only people that are genuinely good at winning real world fights are fucking sociopaths, because they're the only people that are just plain mean enough to keep getting into them and tearing up everyone else.

 

This was directed at Walt but since he shows up here about as often as an Elvis sighting and you, Mewmew, will likely never show up at TFP again, I'll comment like I do to keep the discussion going:

The US Army Combatives program is a bunch of alpha male chest thumping bullshit because the reality of being a modern soldier is that you'll be loaded down with so much goddamn armor and other extraneous kit that you'll be unable to execute even the most basic standing or ground hand-to-hand maneuvers. The only value in the ACP is that it familiarizes Private Joe Snuffy with the idea that bad guys can punch him in the face (and how that feels) and that his equipment is a huge liability should he get into a wresting match with a mandress. All the niche stuff gets in the way of the fundamentals: stay moving, use your whole body to move and do what you can to avoid HTH situations since they really suck a fat one when you're in full kit.

As it stands, soldiers would be better off learning how to handle a BFK and practicing muzzle strikes with their plastic laser blasters. Handguns are too expensive and training intensive.

Instructors are failing soldiers by not having them train in their full combat equipment.

...

Ya know, I really like Cracked but the fun-size articles are typically written by nerdy white people that have very little in the way of experience in the topic they're covering unless it's Star Wars-related or features random trivia that you can dig up via Wikipedia. That argument is offensive as it belittles military professionals that dedicate a good portion of their lives to developing a skill set that isn't particularly marketable anywhere else. Most of these professionals would prefer to never have to use said skill set. A wide range of people learn how to fight because the world is a violent place and they realize ignorance of such isn't a viable defense. Being good at fighting doesn't make you a sociopath any more than being good at sex makes you a rapist.

The good guys have to be able to fuck people up, too.

...

Really wanted to like AKK but it's hard to find it practical when you can't actually do many of the maneuvers on a sparring buddy unless he's wearing a Michelin Man suit.

I mean, you don't really have to practice groin kicks from a cat stance a whole lot anyway but I was curious: What was your experience with practical exercises, 2DBB?

...

Fantastic. I look forward to hearing about how you're knocking kidneys into the ceiling in a couple of months.

 

The only martial art I've studied, other than two weeks of karate when I was nine, is Kendo. Not all that practical from the perspective of the street, but there is nothing that will make you feel more like a bad ass than swinging a shinai at someone's head and connecting. That, and the armour looks cool.

And yes, I played a lot of D&D when I was kid.

 

Major cool points.

Man, I'd love to get into Kendo. The footwork and distancing alone would be a lot of Aww-Yeaaah!

 

It's all about the Ki Ken Tai Ichi.

Ki - spirit
Ken - sword
Tai - body
Ichi - one

The spirit, sword and body must all be one to make the perfect strike. Distance and footwork are a massive part of that.

The best part of Kendo (besides the killer cardio workout) is that there is no defense. There is nothing done that isn't also accompanied by an attack. It's all attack.

 

I took fencing in college. Yeah I'm that tough.

 

I used to do a lot of judo in my mid to late 20s and had some great instructors (Olympic medalists and a world champion). It was the only time in my life that I could claim to be really fit.

I'm around 6 feet and skinny, so fighting people in my weight range often meant fighting people with a lower centre of gravity which was hard work when standing and made me prefer ground work. Standing work was easier in some ways against taller people, even if they were heavier - but I still liked to go to ground, which was great leveler for me.

As a sport, it was great and it made me very fit and more physically confident. As self-defence, I've rarely had it tested (and it would make no difference now anyway, I suspect). Being street smart (and not over-confident) and able to defuse situations has probably served me better than any physical ability in that respect, I think.

If really pushed and there was no alternative, I go along with this:

 

I need to get my knees fixed so I can do some more BJJ. Getting old sucks. I wonder if judo would be any better for me...

 

Oh, you're not a "turn the other cheek" kinda guy? How interesting.