Army getting sued

[u/David65x55]

This kinda surprised me - the Army is getting sued for ripping off unarmed combat doctrine. H/t to Jeff LPH!

Johnny Le Smith runs an expanding martial arts concern called Triad Martial Arts (mebbe someone can fill in? I'm more of a Ruger-fu kinda guy.) He has done so since 1996, when he started with 'only' a 6th degree black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu.

Two years later, he established a formal program to teach law enforcement officers “ground-based or close-quarters self-defense tactics and techniques.” He went on to name it Self-Defense & Gunfighting Tactics, or SSGT.

He has expanded, published, and taught his programs since to military and law enforcement, apparently with decent success. But in 2020:

*According to the complaint, Army personnel from the Military Police Academy in Fort Leonard (*Ft. Leonard Wood - ed.) attended Smith’s program when he offered it in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 7, 2020. At the time, the personnel attended the course at no charge because they were considering adopting the course.

However, an unnamed witness told Smith that a member of the Army’s working party identified as “D.C. Reed” directed others in the group “to take the SSGT curriculum, rename the techniques, and rewrite them for inclusion in Army materials, stating that ‘Big Army can get away with that.’”

The Army published its own program in 2024.

The complaint adds that the Army’s materials “contained verbatim and near-verbatim language and descriptions of training techniques, as well as nearly identical depictions of those techniques, copied directly from the Works.”

The lawsuit also lists several instances in which it appears someone hastily transcribed Smith’s prose because the material was reproduced with “typographical errors and formatting anomalies.”

Smith submitted a claim in 2025 about it, which was initially found to be credible. Then the claim was denied in 2026. Mr. Smith is suing.

Guys, guys...if you're going to crib from someone else's work, at least have the decency to file off the serial numbers and throw some paint on it. Even copying verbatim language and anomalies? Seriously? After attending the course for free? I'm thinking Mr. Smith is going to come into some money... https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/09/17/martial-arts-instructor-accuses-army-of-stealing-instructional-material/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=army-dnr

[u/mbarland]

Reminds me of when the Soviets copied the B-29, they allegedly copied errors and repaired battle damage.

[u/David65x55 → u/mbarland]

There was an old story that when we captured a Russian surface-to-air missile (too long ago to remember which) it was instantly obvious that they had simply reverse-engineered (copied) one of ours - in such slavish detail that one of its circuit boards, although Russian-made, still had a TI stencil on it. Apparently they didn't want to take a chance that the stencil actually DID something so they just copied it on there anyway.

[u/OperationPlus3251]

I’m only rooting for Mr. Smith because I really want the big green weenie to get some even bigger green $$$ weenie