Army Times Article
Squaring off to build soldiers’ warrior ethos
By Matthew Cox Times staff writer
If the Army wants a force full of warriors, it might want to start by making its soldiers fight one another. That’s what Sgt. 1st Class Matt Larsen is preaching these days as he tries to make his approach to hand-to-hand combat mandatory training for all soldiers. Training all soldiers in unarmed combat in Basic Combat Training may be one way to achieve the Army’s push to ignite a “warrior ethos” throughout the ranks, said Brig. Gen. (P) Benjamin Freakley, commandant of the Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Ga., in remarks at the Infantry Conference in September. As the head of the Army’s Modern Combatives Program, Larsen couldn’t agree more. “The defining characteristic of a warrior is the willingness to close with the enemy,” he said. “You can be good at everything else, but if you’re not willing to go through that door with me, you’re not a warrior,” said Larsen, a former member of 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. His goal is to train a cadre of instructors in every unit in the Army to teach soldiers a system of techniques taken from jujitsu, wrestling, judo and boxing. Since 2000, basic combatives have been taught to infantry officers and NCOs at Fort Benning’s leadership development courses. Larsen wants to expand the training so that it’s uniform and mandatory in all units. The program, Larsen said, builds courage and self-confidence by requiring soldiers to face each other in regular, refereed bouts at the unit level. It’s like “Fight Club” but with a few more rules than were portrayed in the Hollywood movie. The combatives program grew out of Lt. Col. Stan McCrystal’s 1995 effort to reinvigorate hand-to-hand combat in his 2nd Ranger Battalion. But there was a strong belief among the Rangers and many others in the Army that the unarmed combat moves being taught were too specialized to work in combat situations and were a waste of training time. “In a nutshell, there was nothing wrong with the techniques, except they were too high-end — life doesn’t fall into those niches. When life happens, you have to have a system,” said Larsen, who was a staff sergeant in the unit when he was appointed by McCrystal to head a committee to study martial-arts programs all over the world. Larsen’s committee designed a program based on Brazilian jujitsu. From there, a new approach to training emerged that detailed a specific order for teaching each technique to create a complete fighting system. After learning basic grappling holds and joint locks from Brazilian jujitsu, Rangers progressed to takedowns and throws from wrestling and judo and stand-up fighting techniques from boxing and Thailand’s Muay Thai. Larsen, who later headed up combatives training for the 75th and the Ranger Training Brigade in the late 1990s, started leading the Army’s combatives program in October 2000. Since then, Larsen’s program has spread to courses at Benning such as the Infantry Officer Basic Course, the Infantry Captains Course, the Basic Non-Commissioned Officer Course and Advanced Non-Commissioned Officer Course. Larsen would like to see Army units start their own combatives programs — and his program already has caught the attention of the 3rd Infantry Division. 3rd ID’s senior leadership has embraced the idea, said Capt. Jay Yancey, who is in charge of operations for the unit. “They think it’s important,” he said, describing the increased emphasis on less-than-lethal techniques in stabilization efforts like the one in Iraq. “It adds something to their tool belt besides deadly weapons.” The biggest challenge to achieving Armywide success, Larsen said, will be getting enough NCOs trained while the Army’s operational tempo is higher than ever. Mobile training teams may be one solution to teaching the program’s three levels of train-the-trainer courses. •Level I is a five-day course that focuses on the basic grappling and joint locks. •The two-week Level II course deals with more complex techniques while taking time to explain the mechanics behind each move. •Level III is a monthlong course that focuses on standing up unit programs and integrates surprise scenarios in which soldiers unexpectedly have to use combatives, because a hand-to-hand fight never happens when you’re ready, Larsen said. “It doesn’t happen when you have just come out of a locker room and you’re ready. It happens when you have just done a 25-mile road march,” he said. Warrior ethos Larsen’s opinion is underscored by lessons learned in Iraq, especially the March 23 ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company out of Fort Bliss, Texas, in which the enemy killed 11 soldiers and captured six. That, and incidents like it, in part, have triggered the Army’s big push on the warrior ethos. “You’re a soldier first, a technician second,” Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the commander of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., said recently at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting in Washington. “If there is no rear area, then you have got to be a warrior.” Wallace is leading a study to search for ways to develop a warrior spirit in all soldiers. Larsen argues that combatives is an excellent vehicle for teaching warrior traits such as courage, self-confidence and the will to win, no matter the hardship. “We do not win wars because we are great hand-to-hand fighters. We win wars because of the things it takes to become a great fighter — that’s what the warrior ethos is all about; the soldier has got to have it,” Larsen said. But Larsen has a tough fight ahead of him before his grass-roots effort goes Armywide. The first step will be to get the combatives train-the-trainer courses on the Army Training Requirements and Resources System, a computer database that supports the training needs of the active component and the National Guard and Reserve. The Marine Corps places a strong emphasis on warrior training, as illustrated by the popular saying “every Marine is a rifleman,” Larsen said. “Every Marine, no matter who they are, they think of themselves as a bad !!!, and that is what soldiers need to do, too,” he said. The Marine Corps launched its hand-to-hand training in May 2000, Larsen said. In the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, Marines earn skill-level belts, tan through black, by completing specific hours of instruction and then successfully demonstrating certain techniques to progress to the next belt color. “They really do have a good program,” Larsen said. “The reason it’s successful is because the commandant of the Marine Corps supports it.” Larsen would take the Army combatives program a step further by requiring soldiers to face each other in regular competitions. “Who do you think trains harder — soldiers or boxers?” he said, explaining that the only way to get soldiers to take the program seriously is to have unit leaders routinely pick soldiers from different squads, platoons or companies and have them duke it out, combatives style. “It doesn’t have to happen very much before everybody realizes that you have to be a fighter