"Marine Corps Martial Art"

[arnisador]

http://www.washtimes.com/specialreport/20051218-013829-7607r_page2.htm

An article on MCMAP from last month's Wash. Times.

 

[kroh]

One of my instructors has been in contact with some one (a civilian) that has been let into the MAP program. I guess he was let in to go through the cirriculum so as to evaluate its teaching method compared to other martial arts.

From what I have been told...I want to go through the E-Tool training. Nothing says loving like a shovel to the face!

As for the army system that was developed...It is heavily based on the ground fighting of Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu. While I agree that ground fighting is a necessary component to a complete fighting system, i think a program centered on it for battlefield conditions is not realistic. I am a former soldier with many friends still in and they pretty much feel the same way. The army is promoting this method of training less for the combat effectiveness of the whole affair (if you have to get into a grapple on the battlefield you are screwed anyways) but more for the esprit de corps that it builds by holding competitions (like the Russians do with Sambo).

Regards,
Walt

Regards,
Walt

 

[CMS]

Here's the program:
http://www.usmc.mil/directiv.nsf/0/a78deffe637d16dc852569770049c6f4/$FILE/MCO%201500.54A.pdf

Enclosure 1 to this instruction includes all the belt requirements

 

[samurai69]

This is a cut and paste from geoff thompsons forum, maybe it clears things up a bit


One of our members here is Mike Brewer, though he rarely posts. He's a JKD guy mainly (I think, sorry if I'm wrong their Mike) and has recently attended and succesfully completed the much talked about Modern Army Combatives Programme (MACP) that has caused quite a few raised eyebrows in the Combatives community in recent years.

A bit of background.

When referring to Combatives, many of us include the work done by people such as Fairburn, Applegate and Sykes to prepare allied soldiers in WW2. These were the trail blazers in the field. The training consisted of a small number of strikes that were easy to learn yet potentially devastating in effect.

The MACP has an obvious influence of Gracie Ju Jitsu, and has been rejected by many in the Combatives world for many reasons including:-

* Groundwork is not the method to use for military H2H training
* It takes years to progress in the MCAP
* It is too sports oriented
* There is too much reliance on the tactic of holding someone down, and hoping that you're fellow soldier arrives to kill him (prior to the other guys ally doing it to you!).

In the main I've sided with the WW2 guys view on this. But I like to keep an open mind. Mike is a pretty well resected and experienced figure, and I value his views greatly. He's put some pretty good arguments forwards claiming that the MCAP is better than the FAS stuff, so I've reproduced a few of his thoughts here.





The full thread is over at Defend.Net

http://www.defend.net/deluxeforums/showthread.php?t=18489

Here goes:-

"I just finished taking an Instructor's Course for the MACP (Modern Army Combatives Program), which is why I've been absent from the boards this last week. First of all, I'd like to say that the certification course is very well put together, and I'd like to extend kudos to Sergeant First Class (retired) Matt Larsen for developing such a demanding program. I am a virtual Picasso of bruises, scrapes, blisters and mat burns, and the muscle soreness I'm feeling form head to toe makes it a near certainty that I won't be sleeping comfortably for a few days. It was 40 hours of grappling and other fighting methods, done in just four days, and I can tell you that even going in with some experience, it takes a heavy toll. Still, while most of the techniques I learned were nothing new, the drills were some of the more alive and worthwhile I've ever done. We've all addressed military hand-to-hand fighting at some point on these boards, and while we're all aware that there are some pretty serious limitations to the tactics advocated by the program, I'd like to look at it purely from the viewpoint of training for Tactical Military and Law Enforcement Situations. After all, that's what this particular board is about, right?

Now, it's a foregone conclusion (at least to any soldier or cop that I've ever met) that firearms are the best possible option when facing deadly force in close quarters. But let's assume for a second that you and your squad are clearing a room and your weapon goes black and there's a bad guy in front of you (for the uninitiated among us, a "black" weapon is one that's run dry or jams). You don't have time to transition to a secondary weapon, so you have to engage in hand-to-hand fighting to subdue your opponent. The "fight" is now simply a contest to see whose buddies will get there first. I'll wrap a guy up, and in a few seconds, my buddy will come by and bayonet the SOB in the back for me. In other words, with this scenario, I'm not actually fighting for the arm bar or choke, but simply to control the guy until my back-up arrives (which should be poste haste, since we likely entered the room in rapid succession).

The more obvious limitations to the system arise when one considers the type and weight of body armor and other gear usually worn by soldiers. The ballistic plate in the IBA makes sitting up from a supine position damned tough, so maneuvering from the guard is nearly impossible. With a gas mask on one hip, rolling up to your hip is equally challenging. God forbid you're wearing an assault pack on your back that prevents you from getting your shoulders or butt on the ground. Now factor in a flopping weapon on a sling and a couple more weapons taped and strapped to your body and leg (that you'll have to fight hard to keep your opponent from getting to, let alone using yourself), and it becomes clear that even getting control of the bad guy will be a major challenge. This is especially true if the bad guy is lightly clad in robes instead of loaded down with equipment."

At this point I put in my own view about the beauty of the FAS simplicity, and asked him which he thought was best. Here he goes:

"In my opinion (and that's all this is) the new system may be a little better in the long run if for no other reason than it is much simpler to learn and implement. Soldiers today on average get just one hour per week to train hand-to-hand fighting, and most don't actually use it for that since there are so many other things to be good at. The new system allows soldiers to learn the tools rapidly and employ them with effectiveness so that at the most basic level, the soldier has some functionality. With what I've seen of the F/S methods, they take a lot more practice to get right. I mean, I can show you how to throw a knifehand to the throat in about ten seconds, but to get it to work, you have to have a good grasp on the more subtle aspects of fighting like distance, timing, angle, etc. That takes a lot more time to train. The MACP program at least gives soldiers the ability to apply the "Ground and Pound" strategy right away, and it later gets into many of the same kinds of lethal tools as the F/S method did. The big difference is that it includes the ground game asa foundation, so all of the chops to the neck and so forth are being done from a superior position with the soldier controlling his opponent.

You have to consider that in the days of Sykes and Fairbairn, soldiers only had one or maybe two weapons to get proficient with. They only had one or two guys per squad learning to use commo equipment. They didn't have to worry about ciphered radios, GPS systems, learning to drive three different types of vehicles, shooting (literally) 9 different US weapons systems and 4 foreign weapon systems, laptop computers, and all manner of technological and doctrinal knowledge that today's soldiers have to get good at. In those days, training time for H2H (not to mention the likelihood of having to use hand-to-hand methods) was far more prevalent than it is today. It's the same 24 hour day, but with the advancements in weapons and tools, today's soldier simply uses up a lot of his day getting good at the things he'll need to avoid hand-to-hand encounters.

To be totally fair, my opinion is partly due to having had several discussions and training sessions with "old timers" from the F/S era. Since the MACP program is very, very similar to what people like Paul Vunak have been doing for years, my background before the MACP was about the same as a very experienced combatives instructor might be today. In comparing techniques and tactics, I almost always found that while their techniques were solid, I could almost always get away with more, because I had some added dimensions that they didn't. Grappling and a good clinch allowed me to negate almost all of the F/S techniques, and my kali training made the F/S weapons training seem remarkably easy to deal with. In other words, they had a very good toolbox, but their training methods didn't support the development of realistic skill. That's the big separating factor in the new program. It's only going to be as effective as its techniques, true. But without a realistic training method, the techniques mean precisely nada. The modern Army Combatives Program was put together from most of the arts we train. It starts with BJJ simply because it's the easiest to learn and apply for most people. It also happens to be one range that almost every other country's military leaves out (most prefer to focus on stand-up), so it gives US soldiers a big advantage (An advantage very similar to the advantage Royce had in the first UFC). After the ground, they add in tools from boxing and Muay Thai. The system is rounded out with a healthy dose of kali, which as you already know gives the practitioner some great knife and stick (or e-tool, etc.) skills, along with the ability to intercept and use destructions. The end result is a system remarkably like Guro Dan's or Vunak's JKD. As well it should. Many of the people that the developers of the system went to in building it were right out of the Inosanto Academy (people like Marc Denny), and the rest were from the Torrance Gracie Academy.

The other thing that I believe makes it a stronger program is how it's trained. I don't want to give away too much, both because it's not a public program and because I want to see the ideas everyone else has on this forum, but suffice it to say that I saw people who'd never fought in their lives going in against World Class boxers (right out of the Army World Class Athlete Program) and getting to the clinch and taking the boxers down after just 35 hours of training. We also had to do mass attack drills on the ground. At one point, I had to wrestle five guys (I lost, but I got an arm bar on one and a choke on another before they got me) at the same time. It's a good training progression, and they don't recognize the limitations of MMA competition when training. They allow for the notion that there may be crowds of people who are armed, they allow for eye gouging and all of the other nasty F/S type techniques, and they train it in a very realistic and spontaneous way. Does it have disadvantages? Absolutely. That's why I had to rework a lot of things about the program when I was teaching it to my own unit. But back then, I wasn't a certified Army instructor, so it was okay. Besides, I was teaching a relatively small group of Special Ops guys. Their capabilities and aptitude was a great deal higher than your average admin unit might be, and the MACP had to be tailored for the lowest common denominator. It had to be as functional for a 5'4" personnel sergeant as it was for the front line infantry guys. So while I would still say there are things I'd add or take away from the program, and techniques I might do differently, I think Matt Larsen and his team did a great job updating and improving the Combatives program as a whole. If for no other reason that the fact that the training is so damned gruelling, it is a seriously beneficial course. Let's face it - I have a pretty good background in this stuff, and I was dead tired, sore, battered, and bruised by the end of the course. Out of a 40 hour course, I'd say easily 30 hours of it was actively spent grappling resisting opponents. That's over the course of four days (the fifth day was spent testing), so you figure each soldier in the program spends anywhere from 6-9 hours a day rolling with live opponents. When's the last time you had a 9 hour session on the mats, let alone four days of the same thing straight? It takes a whole lot out of you! We experienced a wash-out rate of about 20% (6 out of 25 people failed to finish the course due to injuries or lack of motivation) and the ones who did finish were totally spent. It was indeed a soldier's program that taught us all to dig deep and finish the fight even when we were on our last leg.

I know that's kind of a long winded answer to a pretty short question, but I thought it might be important to justify why I think the new program has so many advantages over the F/S method. It makes much more rounded fighters, accounts for the weaknesses of other military programs worldwide, and doesn't eliminate the effective elements of the F/S methods, but rather improves the delivery system for making them all work while adding some much-needed aliveness and realism to the training method."

So, there you have it. A reasoned and respectful argument that MCAP may well be more approriate for todays military than FAS.

Me? Sheeesh..... I don't know! -