For some years now (more specifically, from the 2014), the Italian Army has also officially incorporated a combat methodology into its training programs capable of allowing the fully equipped soldier to survive on the battlefield, even without the use of firearms: the so-called MCM (Military Combat Method).
It arises from the need to equip military personnel with armed forces, employed in certain missions (national or in foreign operating theaters) with special technical skills, drawn from different martial arts (including, above all, the Pancrazio Athlima), and of theoretical notions about trauma and the psychology of the combatant.
To form those who, in turn, will then be the future instructors of this method, is currently the CAPAR. (Training Center for Paratroopers), training institution of the "Folgore" paratroop brigade, through a hard six-week course, mainly focused on the development of certain abilities (strength, endurance and speed of execution) and, above all, on training to know how to manage the 'emergency according to the concept of "force escalation", leading the military to face the potential clash with the due proportionality of action-reaction with respect to the threat to be neutralized, always preferring, where possible (in particular, in situations related to order management) public or "riot control"), the less bloody or "invasive" solution of the same, and considering the "physical" one only as last resort, to be reserved for the most critical situations and not otherwise resolvable (also in compliance with the requirements of legitimate military defense).
The origins and the fees of the MCM in the other armies
Introduced into Italian military training by the will of a paratrooper (Colonel Rodolfo Sganga), in order to fill the capacitive gap that the Italian Army had shown since the Second World War, the MCM draws most of its fighting techniques with bare hands from pancrazio (whose term - in ancient Greek: παγκράτιον, pankràtion- means "omnipotence" and derives, precisely, from pan = all e Kratos = power, strength, to indicate that the wrestler defeated his opponent using, in fact, all his strength and every part of his body, using every technique admitted to a naked hand), an ancient combat sport that was part of heavy athletics of ancient Greek origin and which consisted essentially of a mixture of fighting and boxing.
It finds its counterpart in similar training programs, in vogue in other armies, including, to name the most famous, the Israeli "Krav Maga" or the "Combatives" of the US Army (The mission of the US Army Combatives Course - as stated right on the site of the US Army Infantry School1 - is to train Leaders and Soldiers in quarters Close Combaters in order to instill the Warriors Prepare to close with and defeat the enemy in hand to fight. The Modern Army Combat Program (MACP) started in 1995 with the 2nd Ranger Battalion and has spread at the grass roots around the Army. TC 3-25.150 and Basic Combos is one of the Forty Warrior Core Tasks of the Warrior Ethos initiative): with the Americans, the Italian armed force has established, since the 2015 (when three MCM instructors of the Project Group had to achieve, after two months of stay at the aforementioned US Army Combatives School of Ft. Benning) GA- the corresponding qualification, useful for training personnel training), a collaboration between the respective training bodies for hand-to-hand combat, also in order to increase the interoperability of the respective elements.
training
The training carried out in the MCM consists of exercises with weights and free body, in abdominals with ten kilos behind the neck, in running on the sand or in the water, in carrying injured people with a partner or a thirty kilogram mannequin on the shoulders , in lifting a truck tire for twenty-five meters horizontally and overturning it on the ground, or in the fast transport of two metal crates of ammunition, but of different weight for each hand, to balance an unequal load. And then a lot of fighting, both with weapons (blackjack, bayonet, improvised weapons - like a bunch of keys or a stick - and everywhere, on the shore in ten centimeters of water or immersed up to one and a half meters in the sea) bare hands, with remote techniques (kicks and punches), melee (elbows, knees, projections, levers) and on the ground (immobilizations, strangulations): all this, always considering the particular individual equipment of which the Italian military is equipped , in the not always obvious consideration of the different possibility (or, at times, impossibility) of applying a certain technique by wearing light clothing or, on the contrary, a bulletproof vest, a backpack weighing twenty-five kilos on the shoulders, the infrared night vision device (which causes a reduction in the range of vision, distorting the perspective) or, again, the gas mask which, especially in conditions of physical stress, causes hypoxia.
In short, the introduction of the Military Combat Method in the training program of the Italian Army, can well be considered a further step towards the so-called soldier of the future who, never as in this case, seems to have ancient origins (derived, as mentioned, from Pancrazio ): and, once again, they have the noble provenance of the glorious Hellenic world, from which already Roman culture had to draw, conscious, since its beginnings, of the superiority of the ancient Greek artistic production compared to the Latin one.
A fascination and, above all, a timeliness that, to this day, continue to pervade the Italian tradition, to the point that they still seem to echo the words of Orazio who, in the Second Epistle, just to testify the strength and the influence that the Greek culture on the Roman power (and on the western one in general) would have had, then and in the times to come, had to write: "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit" (Greece, won, the fierce winner won). The fruits of that victory, it seems, continue to linger. Of this, given the noble heritage, one can only be proud of it.
1 - http://www.benning.army.mil/
(photo: Italian Army / US Army)
