This book is one of very few sources that thoroughly describes most of the "LINE" system formerly used by the U.S. Marine Corps prior to the MCMAP program. For this reason in particular it is of value to martial arts historians and theoreticians. The descriptions and illustrations are clear enough to understand the techniques and the system is described in just enough detail to comprehend how it is all supposed to fit together strategically, at least as far as the system was designed.



As the variety of reviews here attest, this is a combatives system that is not easily characterized. It is unique in the degree to which it was designed for military needs and this helps explain both its strengths and its weaknesses. Many people find it "simple, direct, and effective," while others find it "overly complicated, impractical, and ineffective." Which is true?



Distilled to its strategic basis, one of the main central ideas is to try to break something, use that as an opening to knock the opponent down, and then finish them. That's a practical, effective, and lethal strategy if you can reliably break something and reliably follow up on that. The system also assumes that stepping on someone's neck with full weight in combat boots is a likely to be lethal or paralyzing. None of those things is reaching too far for a motivated well drilled Marine in combat dress. So the system does make sense in theory for the intended use and audience. Would it always work? Of course not. Yes, those wristlocks sometimes get people into trouble, and can be unreliable and lack robustness but they are often surprisingly effective and particularly efficient at getting someone into position where you can hurt them. The botton line is that most of these tactics would often work for the conditions under which they were intended to work, which is a main goal of this type of standardized training. If you want techniques that are more robust, then you want a less specialized combatives system that requires more training or strives for a different kind of result.



The remaining question, for those debating whether this is a viable "self-defense" system is whether it is sufficiently robust underly varying conditions, sufficiently flexible, and sufficiently comphrehensive for whatever you conceive "self-defense" to be. I would say that on all counts, this is an inadequate self-defense system. It requires too much fine skill to be used under environmental and fatigue extremes (where the Fairbairn/Applegate system excels, as does Krav Maga and other "reality based" systems), it by design sacrifices flexibility for quick learning and standardization, and it by design sacrifices comprehensiveness for focused objectives. If you are facing someone of unknown intentions and your only options are to kill them or let them get the jump on you, you definitely have an inadequate self-defense system. On the other hand, if you are ambushed and overwhelmed and have no skills for covering up and your only well-drilled tactic is to try to find a limb to break, you may never get the right opening and similarly your training failed you.



A good instructor could easily adopt many of these techniques for a serious self-defense program, but the situations where you really want to use the break-drop-finish tactic in civilian self-defense are relatively infrequent. The situation would have to be sufficiently serious that other direct and dangerous methods found in more robust, flexible, and comprehensive systems would be appropriate as well.



I recommend this book highly for collectors, historians, and theorists of martial arts and close combat because the system is unique and interesting. I would not recommend this as a manual for civilian self-defense, regardless of how you conceive of self-defense. It is neither "too brutal" for the mean streets, nor neccessarily "ineffective," it is just *specialized* in its design, and *not* specialized for civilian self-defense. It is even too specialized in some ways for Marine Corps training. This system is designed to make motivated drilled Marines in full battle uniform efficient at crippling and killing enemies. It is not a self-defense system, or even an all purpose military combatives system. For those uses, you either need simple direct and deadly like "reality-based" combatives if you are overwhelmed by violence and need deadly response, or flexible, progressive, controlled, and humane like jiu-jitsu if you dealing with a less extreme situation. For example, a comparison of the LINE system with the CQD system recently taught in Navy special warfare (see Down Range: Navy SEALs in the War on Terrorism) is particularly instructive.



By the time you become good enough with the LINE system to use it, you could have developed even more appropriate skills using less military-specialized and more flexible yet still highly practical systems. While few groups outside of SEAL have adopted the CQD approach, that kind of approach has the potential to be used very effectively for civilian self-protection. In contrast, LINE concepts like Break-Drop-Finish are fascinating from a theoretical perspective and deserve to be studied by instructors, but this would be an irresponsible self-defense system by any standards. And that, I suspect, rather than either "too effective" or "ineffective" is why the U.S. Marine Corps moved from LINE to MCMAP.