At Crucible Security Specialists, the ax hand, or downward chop, is a self-defense staple.
	Click For Next Image
	When J. Kelly McCann (right) confronts the assailant, he immediately raises his hands into a calming posture that also allows them to be put into action quickly (1). The assailant balls up his fist and prepares to strike, forcing McCann to act: He drives a spike kick into the other man’s groin (2).
	Click For Next Image
	J. Kelly McCann (right) assumes a non-threatening defensive posture in front of the aggressor (1). The aggressor does not back down, so McCann traps an arm and executes a slashing elbow to the chin (2).
	Click For Next Image
	Crucible CEO J. Kelly McCann (left) tries to defuse the situation (1). When he fails, he launches an elbow strike into the front of the opponent’s neck (2) and an ax hand into the side of it (3). He then pulls the other man’s head downward into a knee thrust (4), slams his elbow into the back of his head (5) and stomps on his leg (6).
	A basic Crucible gun defense involves controlling the arm and keeping the gun pointed in a safe direction, then striking with a chin jab.
	Stick use and stick defense are part of Crucible’s impact-weapons curriculum.

It doesn’t advertise. It doesn’t allow civilians under age 28 to attend its courses. It rarely even offers classes to the public. And it requires that students undergo a background check, supply details on every place they’ve lived for the past 10 years and provide a letter from an M.D. attesting to their mental health. But it offers perhaps the best integrated armed and unarmed defensive program in the world.

Located in Falmouth, Virginia, Crucible Security Specialists is not well-known in the martial arts community because it is not composed of martial artists. In fact, what it teaches is not martial arts; it is combatives. The clientele is made up of primarily military special-operations and law-enforcement units, along with government entities both domestic and foreign.

The organization also provides training to people who guard high-risk individuals and corporate execs in hotspots like Bosnia, Columbia and Israel. Its security assessments and personal-safety seminars are highly sought after by Fortune 100 corporations and government agencies, especially those engaged in travel to less-developed countries.

Crucible delivers instruction in the use of firearms, impact weapons, edged weapons, less-than-lethal weapons and unarmed combat, as well as in executive protection, high-performance driving and explosives detection. The instructors hail from the ranks of the U.S. Marine Corps and various spec-ops units. To maintain their operational currency, Crucible requires all of them to periodically deploy overseas to provide training to various military, police and protective-services units, or to actually participate in an operational capacity. That experience distinguishes them from their peers and keeps their instructional material on the cutting edge.

Man in Charge
Crucible’s head instructor and CEO, J. Kelly McCann, got an early start in unarmed combat from his father, a former hand-to-hand instructor.

McCann later joined the Marines, where he advanced to the rank of major.

He served in various anti-terrorism, counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics capacities. He was assigned as the special-missions officer at the III Marine Expeditionary Force Special Operations Training Group and later to the Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict Branch of the Marine War-fighting Center in Quantico, Virginia.

After leaving the service, he penned a personal-security column and book under the pseudonym of Jim Grover and produced a number of best-selling videos about armed and unarmed combat. McCann is currently CNN’s security analyst and a subject-matter expert for the U.S. Marine Corps close-combat program.

McCann and his crew occasionally make courses available to the public.

The most comprehensive of those is Individual Protective Measures, a five-day program that covers the use of the handgun, pepper spray, folding knife, collapsible metal baton, empty-hand strikes, ground fighting, unarmed responses to armed attacks and what McCann calls “situational self-offense.”

The training takes place at Crucible’s 88-acre facility, which includes several outdoor shooting ranges and a large training hall that houses classrooms and 2,400 square feet of mats.

The Training
For maximum realism, most of the firearms training is conducted on clothed mannequins that are posed in aggressive postures and armed with mock weapons. The shooting distances range from two feet to 25 yards, and the instruction emphasizes the difficulties of deploying a weapon in a high-stress situation.

The course also includes transitioning from unarmed striking to shooting. McCann has found that most people experience difficulty when they attempt to merge fully committed strikes with the use of a firearm. Therefore, he spends a fair amount of time having his students practice that skill.

Even though Crucible teaches armed and unarmed responses to violent attacks, the overwhelming theme of the course is awareness, early detection and avoidance. That enables you to sense the potential danger of a situation and get away from it before it turns deadly.

If you can’t get away, you should use your skills to mitigate the effectiveness of the attack by taking the element of surprise away from your assailant. Violence should always be your last resort, McCann says. “Your first and primary weapon will be your brain and mouth.”

Merely appearing alert is enough to deter most criminals, McCann teaches, because it’s easier for them to find someone else who isn’t paying attention.

“You will always be attacked when conditions are most advantageous to your attacker and least advantageous to you,” he says.

Resorting to Violence
If you cannot use guile and wit to avoid the confrontation and violence appears imminent, McCann advises striking preemptively and following through until the aggressor is sufficiently disabled to allow you to safely escape. As he says in Jim Grover’s Situational Self-Offense video (Paladin Press), “If you wait for final confirmation of an attack, it will often come in the form of injury to yourself.”

Once you decide to preemptively attack the assailant, you must overwhelm him and render him unable to hurt you. It’s unrealistic to think you can reliably defeat a stronger, more skilled opponent any other way. The fact that you tried your utmost to avoid the situation makes it appropriate to use force to prevent it from being used on you.

Waiting for an attack to be launched and then attempting to defend against it might work in dojo drills when you know which attack will be used, but on the street you never know what’s coming your way, McCann says. It is more effective to concentrate on your own attack than it is to wait for your opponent to make the first move.

When facing a potential assailant, McCann teaches, you must remain aware of your body language and facial expression. Neither should manifest aggression, even when you are about to launch a pre-emptive strike. Your eyes should be fixed on the other person’s hands, not his eyes, because it is the hands that draw the weapon or execute the punch. Furthermore, if you avoid staring into the eyes of a suspicious person, you will appear less aggressive, and that can work to your advantage.

If his hands are in plain view, you should focus on his center of mass because seeing his elbows move can be an early warning of his intentions. He has to lift his arms before he can grab, hit, cut or draw a weapon.

If a confrontation is imminent, McCann advises you to discretely put a weapon in your hand—be it lethal or less-than-lethal—to avoid having to take it out while you’re under attack.

The fastest draw is no draw at all, he says. Furthermore, the mere act of holding a weapon—a can of pepper spray, for example—can be enough to make a mugger seek a victim who is less prepared.

Correcting Misconceptions
When McCann interacts with his Crucible students and clients, he encounters a number of misconceptions that also permeate the martial arts world. One of the most common is that people tend to think they can always resolve conflict by peaceful means.

Wrong. A peaceful resolution requires two willing participants. If you are facing someone who is unwilling, he takes that option away from you. Knowing beyond all doubt that you did everything possible to avoid a confrontation gives you the moral authority to act preemptively if an attack is imminent and there is no avenue of escape.

Another misconception involves weapons defense. Despite what many martial arts instructors teach, you should not always try to take away an assailant’s weapon, McCann says. Often the best course of action is to inflict enough damage to make it impossible for him to employ the weapon or to make him physically and mentally unwilling to use it. To ingrain this skill in a dynamic situation, McCann has his students suit up in protective gear before practicing knife-defense drills. It soon becomes apparent that a knife in the hands of a moving attacker is extremely difficult to defend against at close range. It also becomes apparent that a defender who has the appropriate attitude and employs the right strikes can make the knifer unwilling to get close enough to use his weapon.

Based in Reality
Realism is an integral part of Crucible’s program. For example, when McCann teaches choking techniques, he has students kneel on the mat, then he moves behind each one and slaps on a quick choke until the student taps out.

That drives home just how fast and deadly such an attack can be. It also ensures that those who have never experienced the feeling get their first taste in a safe environment rather than on the street.

Such hands-on training plays a big role in Crucible’s classes. Students practice deploying inert pepper-spray simulators against each other in mock attacks.

Having to draw and deploy the defensive weapon under direct physical attack leaves everyone with a more realistic perspective on how to carry it, how to practice with it and what can go wrong when you use it.

McCann devotes a significant amount of time to the physiological and psychological aspects of fighting, including human nature, the startle response, and the effects of denial and panic. He explains that for the most part apprehension comes from mistaking the effects of an adrenaline rush for fear and from not knowing what will happen when the attacker makes his move. Therefore, it is essential to decide beforehand that you will fight back—or strike first if necessary.

He emphasizes that you must visualize yourself performing the actions successfully. If you enter a fray mentally unprepared for violence, your chances of surviving are minimal, he says. You must act with complete resolve and intent.

Proceeding with anything less than total commitment can get you killed. Mental preparedness is more important than physical preparedness, he says, because regardless of what you know, your skills will be useless if you lack the will to use them.

If you find yourself under attack, McCann says, you should think only about the fight. Occupying yourself with anything else—such as the legal ramifications of using a certain technique —will slow your reactions.

While Crucible training covers specific responses to common attacks and holds, its main emphasis is on attacking your attacker. The goal is to make him feel immediate pain and fear and thereby derail his plans. You should start with the highest level of force and then de-escalate once the threat has been eliminated. To that end, you must be able to make your techniques work regardless of what your attacker does. If you are too rigid, McCann says, you will fail.

Empty Hands
Crucible’s empty-hand techniques focus on powerful, easy-to-execute strikes that can end a confrontation quickly or set the stage for a follow-up blow that will. Students learn how to put their weight into each technique and how to use proper body mechanics to maximize efficiency and develop as much power as they can in a short distance. It is crucial to maintain forward momentum against the assailant, McCann says. To keep him off-balance and make it difficult for him to attack, you should try to occupy the space he occupies.

McCann teaches only strikes that can be learned quickly. His curriculum includes the following:
• Hammerfist: It involves smashing the meaty edge of your fist down onto the target. It is thrown with full arm movement—as though you were swinging a sledgehammer while surging forward to put your body weight behind the blow. It is especially effective once you have stunned your attacker.

• Ax hand: Also known as the chop or edge-of-the-hand blow, it is executed by first straightening your fingers and extending your thumb, then striking with the fleshy part of your hand.

• Chin jab: Similar to a palm-heel strike, it involves first positioning your hand as though you were clutching a grapefruit.

You then thrust your hand along an uppercut-like trajectory, smashing into the underside of the chin and continuing to drive straight through. The late World War II instructor Col. Rex Applegate considered it the most effective hand strike.

• Face smash: Delivered straight into the face, it starts with your hands held in front of your body as though you were trying to placate someone. You then spread your fingers as if you were holding a grapefruit and move your arm as though you were throwing a baseball. At the same time, you vault off your rear foot to propel your body forward, driving your hand through the target as if you were trying to touch your own knee. The object is to smash your palm into the attacker’s face, with your fingers spread to maximize the chance of hitting his eyes. The technique can also be delivered as a quick piston-like strike from your non-dominant hand—like a boxer’s jab. This particular off-hand face smash is functionally close to William E. Fairbairn’s original tiger’s claw.

• Cupped-hand strike: Ideally it should strike the ear, but it is still effective if it hits the neck or the side of the head. To envision the associated body dynamics, think of throwing a baseball at the side of the attacker’s head.

• Shin kick: It is delivered using a stomping motion, with the inside edge of your shoe making contact with the attacker’s shin. It is often preceded by a step with your non-kicking leg because that motion helps you get your body weight and momentum behind it. When delivered correctly, it can be a fight-ender.

• Spike kick: A devastating move that targets the groin with the tip of your shoe, it is executed by lashing out with your leg so your thigh and shin form a 90-degree angle. Your whole leg is whipped upward as though you were trying to touch your thigh to your chest. It is executed swiftly with no chambering.

• Push kick: Perfect for driving an opponent backward to create space to draw a weapon, it is basically a front thrust kick aimed at the pelvis, groin or upper thigh.

While you should execute each of the aforementioned strikes as if you were using it to end the fight, you should never expect that one blow will do the job, McCann teaches.

If you hit your opponent and then back off, you are giving him a chance to recover and launch a counterstrike.

Instead, you should stay on top of him until he is overwhelmed.

After the delivery of each technique, you should chamber a follow-up, McCann says. You may not need it, but you should be prepared just in case—whether you find yourself battling a terrorist bent on inflicting maximum loss of life or a common criminal who targets you or your loved ones.