Movement Lethality — from the Mat to the Battlefield

From individual fighting skill to combined-arms maneuver, why every level of combat mastery begins with the ability to move under insult.

Most soldiers will do whatever it takes to be ready. They will run or ruck the miles, lift the weights, and do flutter kicks or sit-ups until they are bruised and bleeding. But ask many of them to step on a mat, spar, or take meaningful, resistant contact training, and you’ll watch the same thing happen: avoidance. Not because they’re lazy. Because fighting exposes you. On the mat there is no scoreboard you can fake. Your ego gets tapped out in front of your peers. That fear of public humiliation is the real barrier to developing fighting skill.

This matters because real combat power, what the Army calls movement lethality, begins with individual fighting ability. Of course, it does not end there. It scales, like a fractal, up the chain: individual movement in close combat → movement as a member of a fire team → squad and platoon fire and maneuver coordinated with mortars and machine guns→ combined arms, artillery and close air, at battalion, brigade and division levels. Everything that makes units dominate the fight, closing with the enemy, seizing ground, exploiting seams, sustaining tempo, depends on movement done under stress and with lethal intent.

This article argues two blunt truths:

1. Fighting is a sensorimotor problem first and tactical packaging second. You must train bodies and nervous systems, not just memorize TTPs.

2. Real movement lethality starts with Combatives and is scalable, the same principles that let a man dominate and win in a clinch let a battalion close and destroy an enemy formation.

What is movement lethality?

Movement lethality is not just about being fit. Nor is it about memorizing a choke or a room clearing method. It’s about the ability to move to advantage in a fight, the ability to sense, decide, and move in a way that creates and exploits physical advantage under stress. It’s not a list of techniques you can tick off. It’s a capacity:

On the individual level that looks like winning the underhook when you shove the enemy up against a wall so you are the one who can access their side arm, framing and creating space, turning your hip and creating the appropriate angle to gain the mount, destroy an enemy soldier’s shoulder joint, or bury your knife in his neck. On the small-unit level it looks like bounding overwatch, “I’m up, He sees me, I’m down”, or insuring you gain fire superiority before your teammate leaves cover. At higher echelons it looks like sustained tempo: getting the brigade enough fuel and ammo, coordinating fires that fix and allow maneuver, aligning movement, logistics, and timing so that tactical actions produce strategic victory.

In other words, movement lethality is a continuum from Combatives to operational art.

Why shortcuts fail

The market for shortcuts is huge because humans are lazy. Almost every home in the country has a treadmill in it, upon which the occupants hang clothing. Because it turns out that you must actually do the PT to be fit. Commanders bring in outside instructors for one day seminars, or five day training events, we attempt to teach advanced TTP packages that promise competence without contact to people who don’t have a grasp of the fundamentals. They claim to “train as we fight” while selling comfort and illusion, not competence.

Four reasons these shortcuts fail:

1. They treat symptoms, not substrate. Teach a cuffing procedure to an law enforcement officer who hasn’t cultivated fighting ability, who doesn’t know how to pummel, frame, or control posture, and you’ve taught choreography. A cuffing technique’s whole point is to keep the officer in an advantageous position if the suspect resists and starts to fight; without cultivated fighting ability, the sensory template of balance, timing, and technique, that procedure is pointless. You might as well teach the officer to tell the suspect to handcuff themselves.

   The same goes for teaching unit TTPs, crossing a linear danger area. They could emplace left and right security, send a reconnaissance element across and, after they secure an area large enough, move the bulk of the unit across between the security elements while the security elements cross last, Or just use bounding overwatch. Every technique assumes the unit knows how to fight. If your squad or platoon can’t conduct fire-and-maneuver, you may as well try to cross the road in a gaggle because the crossing TTPs advantage are pointless. They only serve a purpose when the substrate, real fighting skill, exists beneath them.

2. They ignore how humans learn physical skills. Shortcut approaches also ignore how humans actually learn physical skills. Psychomotor learning follows a predictable path: cognitive → associative → autonomous. First you understand what to do intellectually, then you grind through enough correct repetitions to link perception and movement, and finally you perform the skill automatically under stress. That middle phase, the hours of drilling, correcting, and failing, is where fighting ability is built, and there’s no bypass around it. The nervous system only commits efficient movement patterns when the body experiences real, variable feedback. Classroom instruction and short term classes stop at the cognitive phase; only live practice moves the learner into the autonomous stage where skill becomes reflexive.

   If members of a unit are expected to learn any physical skill, whether it’s fighting, moving under fire, or operating equipment, the learning process itself must be built into their daily and weekly routines. Skills that aren’t revisited decay rapidly; neural pathways that aren’t used get pruned. Training isn’t a single event but a rhythm. Units that schedule real repetitions the way they schedule maintenance or PT develop durable competence. Units that don’t are simply rehearsing knowledge, not building ability.

3. They remove variability. They remove variability. Human movement is messy, and complex skills demand massive sensory input. Fighting, like surfing or flying, is not a linear skill; it’s a dynamic conversation between balance, pressure, timing, and environment. A surfer doesn’t learn to ride waves by watching PowerPoint slides about hydrodynamics, and a pilot doesn’t master the hover by reading about lift and drag. Both learn by doing—by feeling the feedback loop between control input and environmental response until instinct replaces analysis. Fighting is the same way. The body has to feel its way through the chaos—slipping, adjusting, reacting, and recalibrating thousands of times until those corrections become instinct.

   That’s why you can’t learn to fight from compliant drills or classroom TTPs. The variability, resistance, and chaos of a live partner are the raw data your brain needs to wire fighting skill. Without that sensory feedback, you’re not training combat ability; you’re rehearsing choreography.

4. They perpetuate avoidance. By giving the illusion of competence. People who hate fighting love choreographed fighting skills because they offer a perfect escape from the discomfort of real training. They can avoid the sweat, the struggle, and the humiliation of being beaten while still earning a certificate that says they’re “trained.” It’s a clean, ego-safe alternative to the bruises and chaos of live practice. The problem is that paper competence doesn’t survive contact. By substituting choreography for combat, these programs let trainees believe they’re prepared while never exposing them to the feedback that proves whether the skill actually works. The result isn’t readiness, it’s confident incompetence.

That’s why fighters spar. Sparring isn’t just a test of skill, it’s the training modality that forces the nervous system to re-map fear, timing, and motor sequencing into practical behavior. And for a certain kind of person, it is fun. The same people who will be calm in a fight are the ones who learned, early or late, to enjoy rough-and-tumble play.

There’s an entire body of research showing that mammals, especially young males, develop coordination, courage, and social calibration through play fighting. Wolves, chimps, and human children all practice dominance, restraint, and recovery by wrestling, chasing, and mock striking. Those games teach how to modulate aggression and read intent without destroying the social bond. In adults, sparring fills the same evolutionary role: it keeps the circuitry for controlled violence tuned and familiar.

People can learn to like it. The fear of chaos can become fascination once the first layer of panic is stripped away. That’s something I learned directly from Marc “Crafty Dog” Denny of the Dog Brothers. Their motto “Higher consciousness through harder contact” captures the entire philosophy. It means that the road to composure and mastery runs through impact, not around it. The contact teaches presence; the play teaches control. In their gatherings, fighters push each other with sticks and minimal gear, not to maim but to wake up.

That lesson changed how I see Combatives. Good training should have that same spirit: structured danger, voluntary hardship, honest feedback. Sparring isn’t punishment; it’s serious play, the modern version of the same rough games our ancestors used to grow courage. It’s where movement lethality is born, and where the people you want beside you in a real fight discover that the fight itself can be joyful work.

Final point — courage is trained, not granted

Most soldiers are willing to accept the physical grind. What they avoid is the ego bruise. As leaders, train that truth into your culture: make hard training the standard, not the exception. Reward people who fight, not those who duck. Train peer groups of leaders together to reduce avoidance. Expect Combatives to be a routine and integral part of physical training. And remember: movement lethality comes from work, repetition, failure, and adjustment. The units that build battle focused cultures of excellence are not the ones that buy the best shortcuts; they are the ones that build the deepest bases.

Movement lethality begins with one man winning the underhook and ends with theater level dominance. The link between those two ends is the same every step of the way: bodies that have been trained to move under insult, systems that sustain tempo, and leaders who insist on the hard work because they care about their soldiers.

There’s no technology, or TTP that replaces that. If you want lethality, you put in the work. If you want fast, cheap confidence, put your shirt on the treadmill.