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Marines would be required to make green belt

MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va. — If you had hoped to skate by with a tan belt for the rest of your enlistment, think again.

Proposed changes to the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, likely to be finalized as early as this month, establish a higher standard skill level for all Marines while reducing overall training hours and more thoroughly addressing MCMAP’s academic aspects, said retired Lt. Col. Joseph Shusko, director of the Martial Arts Center of Excellence here.

Pending approval, the changes will require Marines to obtain a green belt — the third stage in MCMAP’s five-belt curriculum — within the next four years, Shusko said. To help them advance through the belts more quickly, training will be consolidated to combine areas that now overlap and eliminate others that have less relevance to Marines’ battlefield needs.

The plan also calls for tougher tests that focus not only on MCMAP’s physical maneuvers but its “character tie-ins” as well, Shusko said. Each of the program’s martial arts moves has an academic component designed to provide Marines with life lessons and enhance their leadership skills. MCMAP instructors have been required to teach the character tie-ins, but Marines were never tested on them. Soon, they will be.

“If I can hone my mind as a warrior … and then tie that to the physical aspect, I’m that much better of a martial artist,” Shusko said. “… It’s not about making the toughest guys and gals on the planet, which we do, but it’s about the ethical warrior — men and women of character.”

The proposal must be approved by Marine Corps Combat Development Command, which oversees the MACE, but Shusko said he anticipates most, if not all, of the proposed changes to be adopted. Once that happens, Marines can expect to see a Corps-wide message outlining the new requirements.

Tougher standards

Under MCMAP’s existing guidelines, all Marines are required to earn a tan belt, the first of the Corps’ five belts, with only grunts and other combat arms Marines expected to advance beyond that. But after years of fighting two unconventional wars in which the notion of actual “front lines” simply does not exist, there is far less distinction between the “war fighters” and everyone else, Marine officials say.

“Some were having a hard time trying to understand if they were combat arms or not,” Shusko said. “… It was unclear. Now, [the proposed changes] have been vetted through most of the chain of command and it makes it very clear: A Marine’s a Marine. There is no difference between logistics or infantryman, active duty or Reserve. It will be one standard for the entire Marine Corps.”

Every Marine earns a tan belt before graduating from boot camp, as do new lieutenants coming out of The Basic School. The tan belt requirements won’t change, but the AlMar will bump up the standard over the long run.

Marines already in the Corps will have two years from the AlMar’s release to earn their gray belt and four years to earn their green belt, Shusko said.

That means the 73,888 active-duty Marines with only a tan belt — about 37 percent of the force — now will have to make a greater effort to incorporate MCMAP into their regular routines.

First Lt. Kristin Dalton, who trains black belt instructors, said the MCMAP program benefits Marines at all levels, regardless of rank or belt, noting that the proposed changes would require them to become more well-rounded Marines. It will, however, pose a few challenges, she said.

“It is critical that commanders utilize their instructors and instructor trainers, and really push the MCMAP program on their Marines,” said Dalton, director of public affairs at Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C. “As an instructor trainer, I have an obligation to make myself available to Marines for MCMAP training, yet I do not have the authority to mandate Marines attend training. Without command support, it is nearly impossible to ensure Marines receive the training they need regardless of the established time frames.”

As Marines advance their skill levels, the Corps likely will have to add instructors and instructor trainers, Shusko said, though no magic number has emerged. The service has about 1,600 black belt instructor trainers, most staff sergeants or above, and another 10,000 instructors at the corporal level or above.

The number of Marines who participate in the seven-week instructor trainer course at Quantico continues to increase each year, Shusko said. The MACE runs about three courses annually, with about 50 to 70 students in each.

The Corps runs about 40 to 50 instructor courses each year.

As demand increases over the next few years, rank requirements for instructors and instructor trainers will remain the same.

“It’s a leadership billet,” Shusko said. “You are advanced to the instructor or instructor-trainer level based on maturity and rank.”

Less training time

The Corps surveyed more than 500 commanders in 2008, asking a variety of questions related to operational tempo. The survey revealed that Marines love doing MCMAP, officials say, but often struggle to fit it into their pre-deployment training. As a result, Marine officials set out to reduce MCMAP’s training hours and ease the strain on units struggling to prioritize requirements.

“They asked us to look at the gray and green belts and see if we can use best practices to reduce the time a little bit, but not devalue the program,” Shusko said. “We did look at the syllabus for those belts, and then we added the brown and black belt syllabus, too. We figured we might as well scrub everything.”

In April, a host of black belt instructors from throughout the Corps convened at the MACE along with several mixed martial arts experts and representatives from TECom. As they reviewed MCMAP’s syllabi, it became apparent that Marine instructors have grown more efficient. Courses that once took two hours to teach could be taught in about 100 minutes or less. Officials also decided to combine some classes, such as lethal and nonlethal techniques.

“We are taking away some of the things we consider redundant,” said Master Sgt. Tony Polzin, the staff noncommissioned officer in charge at MACE. “A good example is nonlethal baton and weapons of opportunity. They pretty much have the same techniques. The only thing that changes is the target areas, so in nonlethal you would be looking at ways to de-escalate a situation by striking someone, and in weapons of opportunity you would be looking at a totally kinetic battlefield environment where you are, of course, trying to kill someone.”

The plan calls for merging those courses and dedicating a bit more time to explaining the difference between techniques.

“We can reduce the number of hours Marines must train to achieve a belt just by altering the program a little bit,” Polzin said.

As part of the review, officials also decided to eliminate some techniques, such as muscle gauging and hardening. In the gauging class, Marines learned to identify areas of an opponent’s body, such as the pectoral muscles, where it’s possible to tear flesh away from the bone when engaged in close combat. Hardening, by contrast, taught Marines to endure repeated blows.

But such skills aren’t really necessary in the field, where Marines almost always have a weapon, Shusko said. So removing those courses, it was determined, would not adversely affect training.

Overall, the proposed changes call for cutting approximately 70 hours of training between MCMAP’s pre-tan belt stage and black belt, Shusko said.

“If it was a perfect world, I would say just keep [the ideas] coming and I’ll keep teaching, but we just don’t have the time to do that,” he said.

New tests

Under MCMAP’s existing guidelines, Marines looking to pick up their next belt are tested only on the physical techniques, but that’s about to change.

Each MCMAP belt level includes character attributes that correspond to each technique. Falling, for example, is associated with suicide prevention, so instructors may explain to their students how falling on a mat can be similar to feelings of “falling” in life — be it from stress or other pressures. That’s typically followed by a discussion about the Corps’ suicide-prevention philosophy.

Under the new rules, when it’s time to test out of a belt, Marines may be asked to recall that information as part of a secondary oral exam.

Shusko attributes MCMAP’s overall success to three core disciplines — physical, mental, character — and says that without one, “the program would fall on its face.”

These character-building exercises are “going to mean a little more coming from the martial arts instructor or instructor trainer,” said Polzin, the MACE’s staff NCOIC, “because Marines have that natural tendency to respect that guy that is teaching them how to fight.”

“So if the guy that is teaching me how to fight is talking to me about suicide prevention,” he said, “it must be pretty important stuff.”

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