I've looked this up in the past, and I'm pretty sure I came to the conclusion "They totally made it up." I haven't looked recently, but if I recall, the combatives program you're referring to wasn't even in use in 1997.

Perhaps the answer is there somewhere, and I just missed it, but I spent probably three or four hours on this a few months ago and came up empty-handed, leading me to just, um... Define it in the way that was most useful to my story, lol.

Bad scriptwriters! *shakes fist* Thank you so much for saving me from four hours of research that I could better spend making stuff up! :D

I bolded the relevant section, which doesn't look as if it's quite the same as "Train The Trainer".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-to-hand_combat

"Also in 2002, the U.S. Army adopted the Modern Army Combatives (MAC) program developed by Matt Larsen who was a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment, with the publishing of US Army field manual (FM 3-25.150) and the establishment of the US Army Combatives School at Ft Benning, Georgia. MAC draws from systems such as Brazilian Jiujitsu, Muay Thai and Kali which could be trained "live" and can be fully integrated into current Close Quarters Battle tactics and training methods. As of April 2008, for the first time in US Army history, soldiers who graduate from an official Army course can earn an MOS identifier, H3B and H4B for level III and IV MACP certification respectively.[2]

The US Air Force adopted MAC as its hand-to-hand combat system in early 2008.[3]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Army_Combatives

These links may help as far as letting you back-engineer a combat specialty Carter could be fluent in as of 1997/8. I can't find anything relating specifically to USAF Unarmed Combat techniques, but it's really more likely, given everything, that Carter's been to SERE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival,_Evasion,_Resistance_and_Escape than that she's a master marksman *an* a master of unarmed combat *and* a top combat pilot *and* a theoretical astrophysicist.

I hope this helpes a litt.e

Edited (can't spell) 2010-11-23 04:49 pm (UTC)

Thanks! :D