Fear is a natural reaction of a person to a deadly danger. The negative role of fear in combat is well known - it suppresses logical thinking and coordination of movements, so the desire of a fighter not to experience fear is quite understandable.

However, if nature has given us this defense mechanism, then it is necessary.  The most common "fear vaccinations" - chemical and mental "anesthesia" (drugs, fanaticism, etc.) - intoxicate the mind no less than the fear itself. By forcibly destroying fear, a person loses something that actually distinguishes him from the beast: the ability to think logically, to sympathize, to empathize, to have compassion. After all, the addict will not cooperate and will not help, he does not need associates. The fanatic does not want to create, he only wants to destroy. Such fearlessness is something very close to madness.

Experiencing a threat is more a strength of our nature than a flaw in it. In the process of human survival as a biological species, fear plays an important role, being, in fact, a trigger button that puts the psyche in a state of readiness, a catalyst that accelerates the course of physiological processes. Therefore, it is necessary not to suppress fear, but to overcome its negative consequences.

So, there is an alternative to the artificial "blockade" of fear. This is the victory of reason over the instinct of self-preservation.

What forces are needed for this? This strengthens the fighter's determination to engage in close combat.  The answer is known: moral forces help a person to make a conscious step towards death. But is this step enough to win? In search of an answer to this question, let's turn to a typical picture of the evolution of a warrior. Once in a melee situation, you have to fight the will-paralyzing desire to hide, to avoid the fight. Here, even the smallest victory is given at the cost of incredible efforts, the utmost exertion of all moral forces.  It is clear that a reflexive fighter, bound by his complexes, depressed by his own infirmity, is easy prey for the enemy. But the lucky man who managed to survive the first battles gets a chance to continue his military maturation. The growing experience and wisdom of the "science of winning" begin to "work" for the fighter. And then the overcome, defeated fear is replaced by the discretion of an experienced professional.

Obviously, the risk of death, a kind of cull in the "natural selection" of the first fights is still high. When it comes to your own life, you don't really want to rely on chance. It would be better to avoid this, but how?

And what if the fighter is trained so that even in peacetime to lay the Foundation of his fearlessness-to form the basis for future combat experience? The Foundation of such training could be the understanding that combat experience is a complete and integral phenomenon - not divisible into components; that combat experience is not just the sum of skills, skills, and grasps; that it can not be obtained by" arithmetic " addition of heterogeneous skills. This is not obvious to everyone. Combat reality has repeatedly refuted such views, and these refutations are written in blood.

When organizing training, it is necessary at all costs to avoid the temptation to train fighters exclusively to solve the "urgent tasks" of combat, it is necessary to rise above the immediate needs of combat operations in order to learn the laws of armed struggle. Only this will help stop the pipeline for the production of "warrior-athletes" and will create a breeding ground for the birth of fighters who are ready to adequately and competently act in close combat.

In the SBOR system, this is a comprehensive approach, in which shooting and hand-to-hand combat are combined by a common base of movements, which gives a powerful synergistic effect.

Combat experience is the result of the synthesis of the process and the results of successful and unsuccessful attempts to solve real problems. The focus is not on realism, but on the reality of learning tasks. Otherwise, instead of the experience of activity, a game, "stage" experience is born.

Rationalization of movements and non-tension of muscle groups that are not involved in the work are able to implement and connect a variety of melee actions, combine them into a single, universal motor complex. "Civilized" people have lost their original plasticity, exchanged it for a variety of sports, choreography, drill techniques, styles and schools. But it can be restored.

Combat conditions outside of combat operations are essentially non-reproducible, and the complex impact of real threatening factors must be replaced by excessive information and motor complexity of training tasks. Diverse, multidimensional, oversaturated with surprises training situations should introduce the fighter to the borderline state, bring him close to stress. It is in this state that adaptation mechanisms begin to work intensively.

Then the combat episodes no longer drive the fighter into a stupor. The battle is perceived differently: Yes, the threat is great, but it is "visible"; Yes, the danger is real, but the "safety rules"are known. Fear at first still appears, but this is not the paralyzing horror of death, but the fear for the performance of new combat skills that have not yet been tested, not tested in the case. Such fear does not suppress, does not depress, but excites, stimulates, activates.

Only by completing training tasks of incredible complexity for combat reality, you can gain significantly more than an ordinary set of" useful skills " — the basis for combat experience.

What does this mean in the context of preparing for close combat?

First of all – the volume of training tasks. The word "volume" is chosen deliberately, in contrast to the linearity of traditional training conditions. This includes the spatial distribution of goals and tasks, the imposition of limited time to solve them, and the directed counteraction of the environment.

An important role is played by the semantic content of tasks. Pointless shooting "in circles" on the number of points knocked out or mindless memorizing techniques of hand-to-hand combat destroys all combat skills; only a meaningful solution to the problem with an assessment is useful: completed, not completed. But to do this, it is necessary to exclude from the training the unambiguous clarity of the exercises (this is where the typical options grow), there must be a lot of acceptable solutions.

There is only one tool that allows you to increase the complexity of training almost indefinitely and, at the same time, without deceit: a fight with several opponents – a group fight.

A fighter who is ready to conduct a group battle sees all other circumstances of combat reality as a simplification of his task. A fighter trained to "see the situation in volume" will easily resolve any "linear" conflict. A specialist who is familiar with a" multidimensional " problem can easily penetrate any projection of it. In short, group combat accumulates an inexhaustible potential for creative thinking and a rich stock of methodological principles and patterns of building a base of combat experience. Experience is a means to overcome fear.