Combatives: Military and
Police Martial Art Training
Combativesis the collective term used to describe military or paramilitary
training in hand-to-hand fighting. For police, the emphasis is usually on re-
straining the opponent, while for armies the emphasis is usually on in-
creasing soldiers’ self-confidence and physical aggressiveness. During such
training, the virtues of “national” martial arts frequently are extolled, of-
ten at the expense of actual tactical advantage.
Police and militaries also have displayed considerable interest in non-
lethal combatives.This term refers to methods and techniques (manual,
mechanical, or chemical) that are designed and used to physically control
or restrain people but, unless used with deliberate malicious intent, are un-
likely to cause crippling injury or death to healthy teens or adults. Most un-
armed martial art techniques fall into this category.
Perhaps the first systematic attempt to use Asian martial art tech-
niques by a modern military came in 1561, when the Ming general Qi
Jiguang included moves from a Northern Shaolin sword form in his text
called Ji Xiao Xin Shu (New Text of Practical Tactics). Shaolin Boxing also
was mentioned, apparently because Qi believed that recruits handled their
weapons more confidently if first taught to wrestle and box.
During the 1590s, peasant infantry of southern Japan’s Satsuma clan
were observed practicing firearm kata (forms), and in 1609 the Satsuma
conquest of Okinawa owed much to the Japanese bringing 700 muskets
and 30,000 bullets to what the Ryûkyûans, the native inhabitants of the is-
land, expected to be a battle of arrows and pikes. Meanwhile in Europe the
Republican Dutch began developing military musket drills. Mostly a form
of industrial safety (accidental discharges pose a serious risk in closed
ranks), the Dutch taught their methods using rote patterns like the Japa-
nese kata (forms).
To counter the Dutch, the French and Spanish began developing bay-
onets. Firearms were slow to reload in those days, and not accurate much
past fifty meters. So if one could close quickly enough, then one could be
inside the enemy ranks before they could reload. Originally companies of
pikemen made the charge, but with the development of socket bayonets in
1678, European infantrymen became musketeers.
Throughout the eighteenth century, European professional soldiers
concentrated mostly on developing close-order drills designed to move
troops en masse, and bayonet practice consisted of little more than troops
sticking straw dummies. Following the Napoleonic Wars, however, interest
developed in using sword and bayonet drills as a form of physical exercise.
The first such proposals came from amateurs. In 1817, for instance,
the English fencing master Henry Angelo published a book that showed
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