kickcatcher
Green Belt
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Many people draw parallels between MA/self-defence training methods and military training methods. As long as we can keep sufficient perspective and context, I think that there are some good analogies and lessons in this.
The Falklands war was fought between Britain and Argentina in 1982. The British military was all professional and generally regarded as highly trained whereas the Argentines were mostly conscripts who received a far lower standard of training and made less efforts to maintain combat readiness.
The British training model was generally geared towards trying to make the training as realistic as possible so that the step-up from peacetime to combat was as small as practical an ethos equivalent to the pressure testing mentioned in other threads.
1. During the transfer of troops to shore, a British paratrooper fell over and broke his leg. This caused a bottleneck of troops leaving the ship and resulted in several hours delay in landing half of a battalion meaning that the troops were still aboard ship when the sun rose which needlessly risked men and vessels. This was generally put down to a exercise mentality, people subconsciously reverting to training practices where exercises stopped if something went wrong, having a detrimental impact on combat effectiveness. The MA equivalent is pulling punches in a real fight because you normally train semi-contact.
2. A smaller force of British paratroopers take Mount Longdon against superior equipped and positioned enemy. The British troops had semi-automatic rifles whereas the Argentineans had fully automatic. The Argentineans had landmines, snipers, artillery cover (the British advanced into contact without a preliminary barrage), heavy machine guns, superior numbers and where dug in on paper they should have won. But the real outcome was down to training the British were more professional under fire because they had trained more realistically. Many Argentineans slept through the battle and literally soiled their trousers- because their training had not prepared them for the realities of combat. Adrenaline turned to fear .
3. Training problems again: many paratroopers had trouble pulling the pins out of their grenades because they had never thrown a live one in training the training ones had looser pins and they were supposed to loosen the pins of the real ones before going into combat but did not know that.
Do you think these examples have relevant parallels in SD training?
