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Combatives program won’t reach new airmen

The Air Force will expand hand-to-hand fighting, or combatives, training for deploying airmen this year, but airmen going through basic military training likely will not learn combatives anytime in the near future.

The Air Force’s basic combatives program already is taught to new officers entering the service, but new enlisted airmen will continue to be left out until sometime in 2010 at the earliest.

Col. Scott Bethel, deputy director of technical training for Air Education and Training Command, said the combatives program is not being added to BMT right away because the schedule of the newly revamped basic training — which expanded from 6½ weeks to 8½ weeks in November — is too tight to accommodate the training.

“[Officers] had a little more slack in their program, a little bit more opportunity to capture that bit of training,” Bethel said. “With the BMT, it’s literally [planned] down to the half-hour or 15-minute block. … It just was easier at this moment to stick it into the officer programs.”

Launched in January 2008, the Air Force combatives program is a 10-hour course that teaches basic ground-fighting skills such as grappling techniques, arm bars and chokeholds. Based on the popular Modern Army Combatives Program, it focuses on defensive and evasive maneuvers to fend off and subdue an attacker.

All new officers receive combatives training through Officer Training School, Reserve Officers’ Training Corps summer training, the Air Force Academy or the Air and Space Basic Course. Between 8,000 and 10,000 officers received the training in 2008, according to AETC.

The priority now, Bethel said, is to expand the training to airmen who are about to deploy in certain high-risk assignments and career fields, likely to include those with high deployment tempos, such as transportation, and outside-the-wire jobs like explosive ordnance disposal, tactical air control party members and combat weather. It is already included in the Advanced Contingency Skills Training course at Fort Dix, N.J., which is required for all Air Mobility Command airmen deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan and some in other fields such as public affairs and legal.

The Air Force is in the process of creating a Common Airman Skills Training program to replace the Common Battlefield Airman Training Center that was canceled last year, Bethel said, and combatives likely will be included in that new curriculum.

“The curriculum there is still under development … and so we have a lot more flexibility,” he said.

About 10,000 airmen per year likely will be trained in combatives through Common Airman Skills Training, according to AETC. No additional details were immediately available.

No BMT revamp until 2010

Basic trainees have not been forgotten, said Col. Edward Westermann, commander of the 737th Training Group at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. The new, expanded basic was approved by the BMT triennial review council in 2007, and the members decided not to include combatives because a formal program did not yet exist. The council did add pugil-stick fighting, Westermann said.

The BMT council meets next in 2010 and will consider whether to add the combatives program, he said. That means trainees would not receive Air Force combatives training for at least 18 months.

Bethel said AETC is not considering adding combatives now, ahead of the BMT review, because the 8½-week BMT is brand new.

“We’re sort of letting that settle and [seeing] how the new curriculum goes,” he said.

But the question remains if and when airmen already in service who are not preparing for a deployment will receive the training.

There was talk last year that combatives could be added to professional military education programs, but Bethel said that is not being considered. Education and training are two different businesses, he said, “and PME is in that education camp. ... We’re kind of reluctant to do a whole lot of other training that doesn’t contribute to that education component.”

But the combatives program still is relatively new, and further changes are likely.

AETC is establishing a combatives center of excellence, which would serve as the focal point for combatives curriculum development. In the meantime, Bethel said he is pleased by the progress the course has made.

“The feedback has been pretty positive,” he said. “Besides the basics of learning the close-in combat skills, it’s always a camaraderie-builder to work on teams and have any kind of competition like that. … A lot of the students have said they would enjoy more opportunity to practice it and fight one another.”