Chinese Military Kung Fu

**SifuAbel** · 10-24-2003, 05:05 PM

"yes, but its how theyre trained to use them so they consistently work agaisnt a dangerous opponent."

Oh lord.........

"but to really put it into play and make it work with timing and power takes an approach to training that most schools miss entirely. sanda happens to be a good training method."

You mean sparring does, san da is a venue.

Somehow, I don't think the boys and girls over in iraq give a **** about kicks right now.

**No_Know** · 10-24-2003, 05:42 PM

"who needs h2h training when you got a **** gun?! I'd rather spend that time on target practice so i never have to worry about them getting close."

Never have to worry about them getting close? They are theoretically doing the same thing you are. And there are more of them. But I might think that there is the wonder that if you come out of cover to sight your target, you are sighted...then shot.

Never have to worry?

You shoot on the run with how many clips or magazines? that you could not ever run out?

Or perhaps you stay in the same place to get them All yet they do not zero-in on your location or catch your timing for comming-up to shoot?

You shoot with sharpshooter accuracy while moving From a location To a New location of cover? And they still do not shoot at you? Shooting at them seems to make you a target Yin and Yang world in which one lives.

To answer the question though; perhaps the sharpshooting H2H prejudiced person who runs-out of bullets while getting snuck-up-on with all that shooting going on. Hmmmm your back is to the enemy behind you that you did not hear while you shoot. But you're practiced so you can cover both your backs with sharpshooter accuracy?

"and by the way: the person with 20 years of REAL fighting experience will beat the person with 20 years of SIMULATION fighting. if you have a guy thats been streetfighting for 3 years and does it every week, he'll wipe the floor with that 20-years-been-doing-kungfu-but-only-been-in-2-fights sifu."

Wear yourself out before the game. The person with bone breakages and head traumas who Focuses on Certain strategies versus the healthy flexible person with a wide range of strategies. ?

However you care to think about it. Becareful of deluding yourself to Either extreme in perhaps nearly anything.

I No_Know

**No_Know** · 10-24-2003, 05:54 PM

I might think that kicks (shoes) could be important in a sunny country where the ground is sand.

**SaMantis** · 10-25-2003, 06:29 AM

Apple pie wins by a mile ...

**KC Elbows** · 10-25-2003, 06:19 PM

If the concern is restraining or capturing people, I would think boxing and muay thai are right out. Judo and various chin na based arts seem more suitable.

I don't buy that all kung fu has such a big learning curve, I think fighting itself has its own learining curve, and that curve can be shortened by training to some degree, but can only be surpassed by fighting.

As for battle field usage, more attention should go toward basic spear, since those movements are identical to bayonet usage, than should go toward unarmed. Then, knife work, whether basic kung fu knife or kali or whatever. Then training regarding unarmed combat, simple stuff again.

No matter what style is used, the soldiers won't be proficient. Give boxing in basic, and you'll have a bunch of soldiers who aren't really boxers. Same with whatever style.

As for the comment of the best armies using competition arts, that has absolutely nothing to do with their quality as armies. The PRC's armies use spear techniques for bayonet, but that's pretty unimportant. Aside from the issues of peace keeping forces, hand to hand is less important than just about anything else involved in modern warfare. It's less important than quality of dehydrated food. I could be wrong, bayonet charges might be the big thing in warfare now, but I don't think so, and its sure as hell not important whether our soldiers can hip toss in the field.

This is talking the bulk of our forces. I DO believe in more comprehensive training for certain elites. But for 90% of any of today's armies, hth training is for morale more than combat. It's so they don't start thinking "man, without this boomstick, I'm a walking corpse."

So, my answer is that it's not important what system you teach most of the forces, it only matters for the elites, and most of the elites who wish to supplement their regimen will do so by finding the best on their own.

**rogue** · 10-25-2003, 07:18 PM

I'm wondering if h2h is being emphasized in the USMC because of their new urban warfare focus.

**KC Elbows** · 10-25-2003, 07:23 PM

Originally posted by rogue
I'm wondering if h2h is being emphasized in the USMC because of their new urban warfare focus.

Probably the case. I wonder if some of it is also related to regime building in Iraq. Seems like there's more need for hth in capturing/arresting someone than in killing someone these days.

**rogue** · 10-25-2003, 07:36 PM

Arresting someone is a *****. Too many things happen while just trying to secure the subject. Urban warfare happens in close quarters where shooting may get your own guys or non-combatants killed. I think as the battlefield moves from large group movement to the small groups in cities it complicates things and forces the soldiers to have more varied combat skills.

**KC Elbows** · 10-25-2003, 07:54 PM

It seems to me that using the situations the US is in as a guide, that it is better to be able to guide the situation so that conflict is left largely at the level of police activity, in otherwords getting the symathies of the locals and using that and specialized troops to arrest those causing problems, than to fall into full urban warfare, because the broad range of training necessary makes it less likely to table a winning force from accross the globe, whereas the enemy can do so with much greater ease, because urban warfare might not win sympathies from locals for us.

Meaning I think certain specialized troops might be useful with more hth training: but overall, if our entire army needed that, our entire army was being misapplied.

**rogue** · 10-26-2003, 05:32 PM

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

**rogue** · 10-26-2003, 05:40 PM

Thread on military h2h by Matt Larson.

A sample...

As far as hand-to-hand, the major challenges are motivating soldiers to train and providing a format for technical growth. It has never been the case that the average soldier was a proficient hand-to-hand fighter. The main problem is how to motivate them to train. Lets face it most people do not want to do hard physical training. There is always small minorities who are “into it” but that has historically been the limit. Competitions, both voluntary and mandatory are one way to provide motivation. Providing a technical format is much easier. The hard part is not how to train reasonably proficient fighters quickly however, but to do that and at the same time lay a bio-mechanical, technical, and tactical foundation for growth while doing so. Just as I think the guys at Camp Ritchie would have been flabbergasted if they had been able to see Jerry Barnhart shoot, I think the standard of hand-to-hand can easily be much higher.

Matt Larsen

**Hardwork108** · 11-05-2011, 08:49 AM

This is an interesting Video Clip of Chinese Military Kung Fu applications. The video's title describes this as "Arrest Boxing", but it looks more like "Meet your maker boxing", as some of the techniques look pretty lethal.

Notice that even what is presumably a functionally oriented military force, is using kung fu forms in its training methodology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuhGa...eature=related

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