I can't believe that nobody has mentioned Mike Pick yet. Oh boy....where does one start?
If you need a good laugh, here is his bio.
http://www.usadojo.com/biographies/mike-pick.htm
First...he is fat. Her smokes heavily. Not my choice in a combatives instructor.
10th Group hired him because he was friends with a prior Group Commander. Once he was in; there was no getting rid of him. Group paid him about 80k a year for seven years. If you can scrape up a copy of the video he made of 10th SF combatives, it will demonstrate why nobody attended combatives classes for Mike Picks instruction. You stand there. He runs his mouth and hits students. No sparring. All garbage. That is....if he showed up. His contract was for mornings during PT, he would show up late to an empty dojo, then head home. He also agreed to run a two week intensive course for support company prior to deployment. The day came, Pick was off in another state teaching a seminar. Double dipping. Nice.
I arrived back at 3/10 and was absolutely disgusted. A Group of us got together and worked for years to oust Pick. We went to every team and asked if they were using the combatives ptrogram. They all said the same thing. It sucks. Not one A-team was going. A few support guys...thats it.
Next, I used the Freedom of Information Act. They stated that Pick has never served in the military. When I confronted Pick; he said that he was CIA and that he didn't have any records. Yep. No kidding. The CIA always recruits E-2 Marines don't they? Where else would you get a guy for sentry removals? I brought the forms to the Group CSM. He told me that the documents would get me in a lot of trouble. What a guy.
We put together a separate combatives room. It was next to Picks room. Our room was filled everyday. We had two or three teams in there every morning. Pick would come over and run his mouth.
Group also purchased $120,000 of knives from this guy at $250 a piece. The "Pick Tactical" is a big Bowie knife with a notch on the backside. The notch is for sentry removal. As Pick tells it, you use the notch to catch on the guy's teeth so that you can scramble his voice box during a sentry removal. That way, you don't get thet "yelp" you normally get when you remove a sentry. Picks tells this like he did it dozens of times. Just like in the movies. Those knives were sitting in the supply room. Nobody wanted them. They actually bought two shipments, 60k a piece. The second one was purchased at a time when some teams were deploying to Iraq with iron sites. It was more important to buy "Pick Tacticals" than aimpoints. Pick has friends in high places.
He also sold Group "carbon fiber" stealth knives for the airport. One of the knives fell off the display table at a demo and shattered. Nice.
During his seven years; he never attended any training. He never asked to watch a CQB session. He could have gone up on the catwalk and seen what guys were faced with during CQB. Never. He didn't have to becasue he knew it all already. He loved to tout his membership in the Close Quarters Instructors Club or whatever. Too bad he never attended any real courses, or the real thing prior to becoming an instructor.