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That lesson was recently learned on the mat in a match between Sgt. Chad Malmberg and Spc. Chad Summers.

The smaller, compact Summers demonstrated unrelenting skill and strength as he denied the taller, lanky Malmberg any escape.

“He’s really good,” said Malmberg, his skin reddened from fighting Summers’ immobilizing tactics.

The 25-year-old Malmberg, an infantryman with the Minnesota National Guard’s 2nd Battalion, 135th Infantry Regiment, is no slouch in going hand to hand, however. The Alpha Company squad leader helped train other Guard soldiers in combatives.

He is one of more than 10,000 soldiers who in the past five years have been certified in training others in combatives — the art of fighting an aggressor hand to hand and subduing him into submission by using painful, debilitating, nonlethal tactics and techniques.

Thousands more are slated to be trained under a two-year plan, which kicks off Oct. 1, to instruct every soldier in the Army in hand-to-hand combat skills under a new, formal training program. To achieve that ambitious end, combatives school leaders have a goal of putting at least one certified trainer in every Army unit, down to the platoon level.

The training plan follows a memo that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker issued in September 2004 to major commands, the Reserve and National Guard calling for combatives training to be “conducted regularly, posted on unit training schedules and executed at company or platoon level.”

Schoomaker said he wanted every soldier “to experience the physical and emotional demands of hand-to-hand fighting prior to engaging in combat” and requested that it be integrated into physical fitness programs based on a unit’s mission-essential task list.

It fell short of being a directive, but guidance from the chief of staff is usually strongly recommended. Units, however, have to find their own funding to get soldiers trained and that can slow the process of taking combatives Armywide.

“Right now it’s just a TDY cost,” said retired Sgt. 1st Class Matt Larsen, a former Ranger who spearheaded the development of and wrote the formal program of instruction for the Modern Army Combatives Program. “It’s more of a grass-roots program.”

Still, Larsen said, a number of brigades, battalions and companies have made combatives training a priority.

“The people at the top and the people at the bottom know what has to be done. It takes a while to permeate that through all the people in between,” he said.

“Just like the rest of the things that are changing in the Army, this is a process. … And there’s a lot of institutional inertia to be overcome,” noted Larsen, who also collaborated on writing the Soldier’s Creed.

The value of having combatives skills, he said, goes to the core of being a warrior: knowing how to close with an enemy one on one and doing it when you’re scared. Being trained in combatives has proven to measurably boost a soldier’s level of confidence, regardless of gender or military occupational specialty.

It gives soldiers fighting options.

Feedback from the field is validating that all the time, combatives training leaders say.

“Hand-to-hand combat is going on routinely and soldiers trained in our system are proving themselves on the battlefield,” Larsen said, pointing out that he has collected more than 250 stories from soldiers who used their combatives skills in Iraq and Afghanistan to gain control of situations without using lethal force.

“Everybody knows we’re not going to win this war by killing a bunch of people. We want to give our soldiers options and make those options fit whatever the situation is,” Larsen said.

“Combatives gives a soldier the ability to escalate to whatever level of force is appropriate.”

Gut-checking for a fight

Larsen and Sgt. 1st Class Jeremy Brown, who was in 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment with Larsen, run the combatives program at Benning, where a steady stream of students has been booked for months to come.

“There are very few ways to judge personal courage. We’re giving soldiers some skills they can use on the battlefield,” Brown said, pointing out that there are few better gut-checks than the fear of facing hand-to-hand combat.

Summers, 22, who works in the S-2 shop at 3rd Ranger Battalion, was a high school wrestler in Rockwall, Texas. He is 5 feet 6 inches tall and rock-solid muscle.

But he’s the first to say it doesn’t take a lot of size or brute strength to know how to take someone down. He thinks every soldier needs schooling in combatives skills because of the many scenarios in which they may be called upon in modern warfare.

“You could be guarding an [enemy prisoner of war] and you can’t shoot them, so you’d have to take them down nonlethally. Or you could be a computer geek and someone runs past you and you might need to take them down,” said Summers, who has deployed repeatedly to Iraq and Afghanistan. “There’s no telling when you’ll need it.”

Not a new practice

The practice of training in hand-to-hand combat began spreading across the Army in earnest about a year ago, when it was included in the 39 warrior tasks and drills approved under the Task Force Soldier and Warrior Ethos initiatives. But combatives in the Army is not new. There has been a combatives manual and some combatives doctrine since 1852.

What is new is that a modern program now exists that lays out specific staffing requirements, training guidance and safety procedures.

In 2000, the Infantry Center opened the Army Combatives School, a program that uses techniques and moves taken from jujitsu, wrestling, Muay Thai, Kali, judo and boxing and a standard program of instruction was finalized in 2002.

The training program currently teaches combatives at three levels of proficiency. A pilot for the fourth level will take place at Benning in November.

In response to Schoomaker’s guidance calling for servicewide combatives instruction, Larsen and his team drew up a plan that calls for using a “train the trainer” concept to produce enough Level 3 and 4 instructors for the Army’s more than 500 brigade-sized elements by the end of 2007. Those instructors in turn will oversee the Level 1 and 2 trainers who will take the instruction down to the platoon level.

“The whole program is designed to be cheap. It’s as simple as training up to three or four guys in a brigade and those three or four guys can train up the whole brigade,” Larsen said.

Certified trainers such as Summers and Malmberg, both Level 2 trainers, are growing in number.

“In our unit, we train a lot of administrative soldiers who are getting deployed, so we try to keep them up on combat tasks,” Malmberg said. The combatives piece was introduced during their recent annual training, and the admin soldiers were all over it.

“I didn’t know how it was going to go over. They really liked it. In the event they ever have to use it, hopefully they’ll be better off,” he said.

Fort Campbell training

At Fort Campbell, Ky., soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division are deploying and, in keeping with Schoomaker’s guidance, have been undergoing combatives training. To ensure that all 101st troops were trained, some have been through an off-post course led by a certified civilian contractor whose fee is $250 a head. On-post training has also been conducted by soldiers certified at the Benning school.

No one had the dedicated combatives training before the first deployment in 2003, but since the start of such training late last year, it has become hugely popular.

“It’s catching on like wildfire over here,” said Sgt. Steve Whorf, a Level 3 combatives trainer who has certified more than 250 soldiers of the 101st as Level 1 trainers. Across the division, there now are about 2,000 soldiers at the same level of certification, including up to 100 women.

“Prior to the program, it was ‘run, keep in shape, know how to shoot your weapon.’ Hand to hand was just all these scenarios, but you couldn’t really apply it,” Whorf said. “People like [the new combatives program] because they’re actually learning how to fight.”

Whorf, of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, ranks among a growing number of troops who have used combatives in the combat zone.

During his last deployment, he witnessed a skinny Iraqi policeman trying and failing to fight off a larger Iraqi driver who had refused to follow orders to turn his truck around. Whorf walked over and grabbed hold of the truck driver’s beefy leg as the two Iraqi men rolled around in the dust.

“I picked up one of his legs, sat on the ground and got him into a heel hook,” Whorf said, describing a move in which he twisted the man’s heel outward, which has the effect of twisting the knee inward.

“I started cranking it slowly and he was kicking me with his other leg. He let off and, as soon as he let off, I let off. I had been doing this for a while and I knew that if I went any further I would have broken his leg.”

But as soon as Whorf released him, the truck driver lunged again at the Iraqi policeman, trying to gouge his eye out. By now the policeman was in pretty bad shape, Whorf said, so he put the driver in another heel hook.

“At that point, I kept cranking until I felt something pop. When that happened, he let go of the guy,” Whorf said of the July 2004 incident in Mosul, stressing the importance of keeping soldiers sharp on their combatives.

“Over in Iraq, the majority of the time you were dealing with irate people. You had your weapon, but in a crowd of people you can’t shoot,” he said. “Pain is going to make the guy stop. This is a perishable skill. People are doing it because they understand it works.”

During combatives training, students are likely to feel pain as well. It’s all part of making the chance of a close encounter with an enemy more realistic.

“If your combatives training wasn’t painful in any way, you wouldn’t be learning, because in hand-to-hand combat there is pain and there is fear,” Larsen said. Nevertheless, he pointed out, the school’s safety record has resulted in fewer than five serious injuries — a broken hip, a broken leg, for example — in five years.

The training has the potential to be dangerous, he conceded, but the chance of death is practically impossible because of the program’s emphasis on safety.

The Army’s combatives training, he said, is meant to be the use of painful but nonlethal tactics.

“Can you kill somebody with a choke hold? The answer is ‘yes.’ Cops do it all the time. But it’s a really inefficient way of killing someone,” Larsen said.