A HOLLOWED-OUT MILITARY? Losing a ‘life-or-death skill’? Proponents fight planned changes to combatives training.

Planned changes to combatives training have proponents fighting for the survival of the program and the “life-or-death” skills it teaches.

These hand-to-hand skills save lives, and lives are at risk without those abilities developed over the course of the combatives program, they say.

The Modern Army Combatives Program, headquartered at Fort Benning, Ga., consists of four skill-level courses — a weeklong basic course, a two-week tactical course, and a basic combatives instructor course and a tactical combatives instructor course, each of which is four weeks long.

Proposals from Training and Doctrine Command call for eliminating all four levels of training and creating a master combatives trainer course that would be no more than two weeks long.

On Facebook, this suggestion from Jason van Steenwyk in response: “They should have rebranded as a self-defense course for women, gays and transponders to empower them to protect themselves against barracks bullies and rapists. Then they’d get plenty of funding and Big Army would require an 8-hour combatives stand-down for every unit in the MTOE.”