A question that I am often asked is about the kind of unarmed combat, “defensive tactics”, martial arts or Hand-to-hand combat training that militaries use to train their soldiers. Many people often assume that the average soldier must be learning something…well…“military grade” that is far more secret and powerful than the civilian population has access to. I have to be honest and tell these people that this perception is mostly fueled by television and movies. The real military is a very different and very bureaucratic place that bears little resemblance to the things we see on the silver screen. This bureaucratic mind set influences most everything a military would do, including martial arts.
Of course things can very a great deal from country to country and even unit to unit within the same military. Therefore, looking at the military is fairly complex because there is a great deal of diversity within these large overly bureaucratic organizations that employ all kinds of people for all kinds of very different jobs and duties. Therefore, let us start with something that is generally pretty obvious if we can step back a moment from the movie and TV fantasy land and look at the general philosophy at the heart of a lot of basic military bureaucratic thinking.
The idea that the “army” has some all-powerful, deadly, best of the best hand to hand fighting system that is better than all the others is fairly silly and everyone who has spent any time in or near the military knows why.
Think about it logically; since when do common soldiers get the best of anything? Not the best boots, not the best rations not the best weapons and certainly not the best martial arts training. Here is why. The modern army has always had to be based on interchangeability, mass production and disposability. Anything you cannot afford to lose in large quantities (including people) is never used by the army, it’s that simple.
The cynical and inescapable bureaucratic truth is that no government is going to spend years training and millions of dollars equipping a soldier that has a short enlistment time or worse yet can be killed or wounded by a $10.00 improvised explosive device. Training of soldiers is generally done in weeks maybe months, not years. Thus, lots of soldiers all over the world receive little if any hand to hand combat training because it is simply not viewed as relevant or valuable use of limited training times and budgets.
Be that as it may, some “combat arms” units place an emphasis on physical fitness and of course most soldiers have to be “motivated”(i.e. forced) to work out because like most other people they are not going to do it on their own. The idea of integrating hand-to-hand training into PT or physical training is not a new one and is a good basic idea of trying to kill two birds with one stone. Martial arts or “hand-to-hand combat” based PT can teach the soldiers something useful instead of just doing jumping jacks or running an obstacle course.
Nevertheless, one of the basic problems with this kind of physical training is that it cannot be quantified very well which bureaucratized exercise programs usually insist on. In other words, they need to be able to measure success. How many push ups can the recruit do? How many seconds did it take the recruit to finish that obstacle course? These kinds of mass producible physical skills are easy to measure and grade into simple pass/fail criteria that are at the heart of systematic bureaucratic organization.
However, this “martial arts training makes good PT” philosophy has seen an apparent resurgence in the US Army over the last several years at least partially do to the rise in popularity of MMA. Furthermore, some elite “Ranger” units of the US Army had been using Brazilian Jiu-jitsu based training for some time. There are plenty more examples of good training programs being instituted by various units in various Armed Forces but the important point I want to make here, is that these programs are being copied from the civilian world and not the other way around.
Nevertheless, these valuable training programs seem to come and go as they fall out of favor with the bureaucratic decision makers. The problems with realistic hand-to-hand training protocols always remain the same. In movies and TV the heroes can do all kinds of super human feats. They can endure the stereotypical brutal training montages that we have all seen in countless movies and then fight vicious hand -to-hand battles all day, then go for a beer and do it all over again the next day.
However, in the real world real soldiers have mundane jobs to do and they cannot do them with sprained ankles, torn ACLs or strained backs, just like you or me. In other words, any PT program that causes unacceptable injuries is going to be shut down.
To finish this post and make my point with some evidence, I’d like to share with you a real world example that sheds some light on what an actual documented policy was, regarding hand to hand training within a contemporary military.
Some of my students over the years have been serving members of the Canadian Armed forces. They often shared with me the training protocols and memos that explained the military defensive-tactics policy. One batch of documents that I read in the late 1990s outlined how Judo had at one time been extensively taught in the Canadian army for the above reasons but had been eliminated because it “developed no practical skills”, caused too many injuries and required extensive facilities.
What was the Judo programs replaced with? They recommended Aikido! For those of you who do not know, Aikido is a no contact, no sparring, very artificial “traditional’ art that’s best endorsement was that it caused no injuries and did not require special facilities or training equipment and therefore could fit into other existing PT classes. Shit, I could say the same thing about Yoga. Don’t get me wrong, I am not writing this to bash Aikido but as any serious practical self-defense researcher knows Aikido, to my knowledge, has never been used successfully in any kind of realistic Mixed Martial Arts setting so it’s not likely to work on a battle field.
In other words, the bureaucrats were more worried about saving money and preventing injuries than with the quality of the fighting systems (to them that is quality and they will not hesitate to rationalize the decisions). Welcome to the real world of military hand-to-hand fighting systems. Furthermore, this is from the Canadian Army that despite its myriad funding problems in the modern era has had a reputation through most of its history as being one of the best trained militaries in the world.
As an aside, I found it interesting that the Canadian military had gone through the same “rethink” on Judo that much of the civilian self-defense industry had. I can’t help but speculate that this was due to the “de-evolution” of judo as a practical unarmed combat system that I wrote extensively about in my “Jigaro Kano, the true founder of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu?” posts. Check that out.