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Though martial arts–including bayonet and sword thrusts and unarmed close combat techniques–have been employed by members of the US Marine Corps since its inception during the Revolutionary War period, a new era began in 2000, with the creation of the US Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (MCMAP). In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the US military–specifically the Army and the Marine Corps–began to concentrate on training its special operations soldiers in techniques that could be used in international peacekeeping missions and other military operations other than war (MOOTW), where close combat would be necessary but force was not required to be lethal. Shortly after General James L. Jones, commandant of the Marine Corps, took office in the summer of 1999, he ordered a study done on the possibility of having all Marines train in a martial art such as Aikido or Taekwondo. During his service in the Vietnam War, Jones had seen Korean Marines practicing Taekwondo, and thought that martial arts could be useful in operations other than war. Jones idea was a martial arts system that that could be used in any environment, terrain or situation. He also wanted to combine combat training with rigorous physical conditioning, mental discipline and character-building. After the study ran in the spring of 2000 at Camp Pendleton, California, the MCMAP was established, with its headquarters at the Marine Corps base in …