Due to the different age groups and branches on here, I'm curious what Combatives were taught and your opinion about them?

When I joined the Army was teaching the stuff you see in the old WW2 combatives manuals. Hip toss, knife disarm, a few other things that look good on paper. When I got to RIP we were learning what would be the future of Army Combatives. Matt Larson taught us what would become level one. But, what the Army took a week to learn, he taught us in about theee hours. It was a lot more brutal and less refined. It was practiced throughout the 75th Regiment and once a year they would fly instructors in from the Gracie academy in Brazil to teach our best fighters who would pass on what they learned.

I rejoined the Army in 2004 and everyone was getting certified in level one in Basic. The Army had a big push on combatives, and a few injuries later commanders stopped doing it for PT. That’s when the Army eliminated Level 4 and made level 3 only available at the school house in Benning.

A few years after that USASOC gets interested in something called SOCP from Greg Thompson. It’s definitely an evolution that makes sense. What Matt Larson was looking for was an effective, easy to learn, hand to hand system to replace the old hand to hand, and what he developed was revolutionary at the time. With his background in Martial Arts and karate it makes sense that he would lean towards something empty handed for when you’re unarmed. It’s still an extremely effective empty hand program considering how much you can progress without spending significant amounts of time on it. SOCP was an evolution that brought more weapons and was geared towards the door kicker entering a room. A situation that has a lot more applicability to the USASOC community.

I’ve been pretty impressed with the whole evolution. 22 years ago when I joined, Basic training was doing pugilist sticks and bayonet course for combat training. Five years later and we have a working combatives program. For the previous 50 years it remained unchanged. We’ve come a long way in a little time and we’re still evolving

The Marine Corps taught us hand to hand combat sufficient to kill the enemy. The key is to keep all your skills current so that you are fully prepared for the fog of war.

When I started it was called hand to hand combat, later years we were given combatives training which was a form of mixed martial arts I think 2005, and in 2014 combatives was taught again for our deployment.