Airmen learn to get down and dirty with hand-to-hand combat moves

Officer Training School basic trainee Amy Natalini performs self-defense techniques on Officer Training School basic trainee Lori Granger during the school's inaugural Air Force Combative Program training Jan. 29. OTS trainees will continue the 11-hour unarmed combat skills training as part of more than 70 hours of expeditionary skills training mandated by the Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley in the fall of 2006.


Airmen learn to get down and dirty with hand-to-hand combat moves
By Lisa Burgess, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Thursday, January 31, 2008

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Air Force doesn’t fight up-close and personal, or so the theory goes.

When an airman mixes it up, he’s sitting at a computer, or from 10,000 feet, with the flick of the thumb on a pickle stick that signals the release of a 500-pound laser-guided missile.

So it was a landmark moment for the Air Force on Tuesday at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., when a group of some 70 officer candidates spent two hours sweating, grunting and grappling with one another in hand-to-hand combat.

The officers- in-training are the first to be trained in the Air Force’s new “combatives” ground combat course, the first standardized hand-to-hand combat instruction ever intended for the entire Air Force corps.

Eventually the entire force is supposed to get the training, and it will continue throughout airmen’s careers, although the details of when and how that will be done have yet to be sorted out, according to officials at the Air Force Education and Training Command at Maxwell.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=52069