In NO particular order, here are the most brutal military training out there!
8 - Kaibiles - Guatemala To even be considered for membership in Guatemala’s
elite Kaibiles is a massive honor – only 128 people enter into the program a year,
and the graduating class has never been larger than 10.
Training is a brutal, intense two months designed to break down the recruits physically and
mentally.
It’s hard to decide what’s worse – on the physical side, they have to crawl naked
through thorns and perform field surgery on themselves.
One test referred to as “The Inferno” requires them to spend two full days neck-deep
in water without sleeping.
Training takes place during both daytime and nighttime.
Sleep is permitted for no longer than three hours a day, if the right to it is earned.
The right to eat must also be earned; before being allowed to eat, soldiers must successfully
climb a rope, do five pull-ups, ten push-ups, and run two miles in 18 minutes or less wearing
full combat gear, then duck walk to the mess hall, after which they are given 30 seconds
to eat.
The Kaibiles are infamous for their reputed practice of forcing recruits to k*ll animals,
which includes raising a puppy and bonding with it before k*lling and eating it, as well
as biting the heads off live chickens.
Are you kidding me?!?!
In addition, recruits are shot and forced to perform field surgery on themselves, and
to drink water out of recently fired artillery shells.
As part of the course's finishing ritual, every recruit must drink "Bomb", a mix of
tequila, whiskey, rum, beer, water, and gunpowder, served in a bamboo glass with a bayonet tied
to it.
Soldiers must drink it carefully, so as not to get drunk and cut themselves with the bayonet.
Once they successfully complete this ritual, they are inducted into the Kaibiles.
How are these dudes not insane at the end?!?!
7 - Spetsnaz - Russia Whereas most Special Operations Forces train
to make you a more competent warrior and hone your skills, the Spetznaz embrace the fact
that war is full of pain and misery, so they train their guys accordingly.
Training involves learning a unique martial art.
Being a Spetznaz martial art, it obviously teaches the soldiers how to disarm and k*ll
as quickly as possible, as well as how to fire two guns at once.
After soldiers are fully trained in the art of ass-kicking, a popular training exercise
is to allow Russian recruits to beat the living sh*t out of each other to test their skills.
But obviously recruits can only test their own skills so much -- to really test the limits
of what a soldier can do, you need the experienced guiding hand of a superior officer.
Listen to this one.
Supposedly, young soldiers are woken up in the middle of the night, dragged through the
dark and thrown into a room.
The room is dark, cramped and filled with blood and rotten organs…..yes….chunks
of rotten flesh and piles of bleeding entrails.
The blood and organs come from a nearby slaughterhouse, which makes absolutely no difference to the
soldiers who were still asleep just moments ago.
Blood is a part of war, and if the soldiers can literally wade through it, it's not going
to bother them in a battle situation, which just may just give them that split second
advantage to catch their opponent by surprise.
The Spetsnaz also undergo various disturbing “pain management” drills, such as standing
in a line and getting punched and kicked by their instructor.
The point of this is to make it so they can ignore injuries in combat and strike back
hard.
6 - Marine Corps - Taiwan Every step of the path Taiwanese men need
to take in order to become Marines is incredibly difficult, but none are quite like the path
called quote “Road to Heaven”.
Conducted during the tenth and final week of their training at Kaohsiung military base,
the Road is a grueling crawl along a pathway of jagged stones and coral.
The men aren’t allowed to wear anything but shorts as they tackle the belly-down crawl,
and instructors stop them and force them to do calisthenics at various points along the
brutal crawl.
By the end, their bodies are bloody, tattered messes, but if the recruits don’t perform
to the Marine standard, they’re forced to do the whole thing over again.
The "Road to Heaven" starts with a hard fall from standing to planking position.
The fall looks to be tough on the elbows, but immediately after, the recruits begin
to crawl through the sharp rocks on the points of their knees and elbows.
In some ways, the training simulates a landing on a rocky beach, but it appears to function
mainly as a test in which the trainees must will themselves to conquer pain.
The path has ten stopping points, and at each one the recruits must stop and perform an
exercise.
If an instructor isn't satisfied with a recruits' form, or perhaps their level of misery, they're
ordered to start again.
As they make their way, instructors pour salt water over the open wounds of the soldiers
in training.
What!
Friends and family are encouraged to attend this final training event and can be seen
on the sidelines tearing up as they watch this bloody ordeal.
5 - Commando Hubert - France The French don’t exaaaaactly have the world’s
most fearsome reputation when it comes to their military.
But to become a frogman in the elite Commando Hubert division requires training that would
easily destroy most ordinary men.
No more than a dozen of the military’s best divers are allowed into the program, which
lasts a total of 27 very intense weeks.
The meat of the training comes in the second phase, in which the recruits are required
to plan and execute simulated raids on ships by swimming under the cover of darkness, and
boarding and planting fake explosives without being caught.
By the end of it, recruits are expected to be as comfortable in the water as they are
on land.
One mistake at any point can lead to instant expulsion from the program.
Considering the complexity of most of the tasks this unit is responsible for, and the
extreme, mostly wet conditions wherein they need to complete them…perfection of execution
is a pretty tall order.
4 - Storm Corps - North Korea Of course North Korea would push their soldiers
to the limits of human endurance.
What else is there to do there?
What the Hermit Kingdom lacks in technological advancement they make up for in sheer insanity.
If high school graduates enter the “Storm Corps,” they have to do 13 years of military
service, a three-year “military service of loyalty” extension after the standard
ten year term.
Storm Corps soldiers wake up at 5 in the morning, walk out to a tree wrapped with heavy ropes
and punch it 5,000 times.
They then punch ragged tin cans and piles of salt to turn their fists into clubbing
wads of scar tissue.
The most difficult thing for a new recruit is extra training after the scheduled daily
tasks.
After the evening check-up, squad leaders take cadets out and make them exercise for
an hour including sparring, kicking, balancing and pull ups, and then makes them run up a
200m mountainside with a mattress on their back.
The North Korean army wants every Storm Corpsman to be able to defeat 10 armed men single-handed.
Kim Il Sung himself was quoted as saying the Special Operation Force "is the strongest
elite force of the entire Korean People's Army and is the unique vanguard force of the
Armed Forces of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."
3.
Shayetet 13 - Israel Israel takes their military very seriously,
with every non-Arab citizen required to serve for at least two years.
There are many levels of service, though, with some of the most devout conscripts heading
straight for Shayetet 13, the Navy unit that serves as one of the military’s primary
special ops forces.
The training regimen to join takes a total of 20 months, accepting only the most elite
recruits.
The survivors are molded into terrifyingly efficient soldiers with extensive hand-to-hand
training in the martial art of krav maga.
During the quote “Dedicated” phase, the most rigorous phase of training which lasts
about a year, most of the dropouts leave during this phase.
This phase includes training in advanced diving techniques with close-circuit systems, underwater
demolition, sea-to-land incursions via diving, ships, submarines, and parachuting into the
sea.
The unit's snipers also undergo six weeks of sniper training, divided into three weeks
of long-range sniper training at the Israel Defense Forces Sniper School, and three weeks
of short-range sniper training for hostage situations.
Cadets then train in maritime counter-terrorism operations, such as the boarding of vessels,
oil rigs and near-coast buildings.
Those that graduate are known as the “silent men” for their incredible stealth, and much
of their training involves being put in dangerous and scary situations where making any kind
of sound would disqualify you from the program.
2.
Special Warfare Command - South Korea With a constant threat from their volatile
northern neighbor, South Korea's Army Special Warfare Command is responsible for special
operations in the country.
SWC soldiers frequently work closely with US Green Berets and their operations include
guerrilla warfare, assassinations, and counter-terrorism.
Every year, members of the SWC must participate in winter warfare training in the mountains
of Pyeongchang, east of Seoul.
Conditions in Pyeongchang generally include temperatures as low as negative 22 degrees
Fahrenheit as well as deep snow.
During the training exercises, SWC soldiers need to complete various exercise regimes
in the cold, including shirtless long-distance runs.
The idea behind all this is to acclimate soldiers to any intense conditions they may find themselves
in during a real war situation.
Seemingly bizarre, the training instills a sense of mental and physical toughness within
the SWC ranks.
Aside from becoming acclimated to adverse physical conditions, all members of the SWC
must achieve a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and advanced marksman skills.
1 - Navy SEALs - United States The training regimen of the U.S. Navy SEALs
is legendary all around the world, and within the world of special operations forces.
Most notable is the time that’s called "Hell Week," a week-long smorgasbord of pain and
suffering.
Training activities range from carrying heavy wooden logs up near-vertical sand dunes to
the infamous trial that’s "surf torture," in which soldiers lock arms and wade into
freezing cold ocean water.
They stay in the water for 15 minutes at a time, take a five-minute break to be checked
for signs of hypothermia and then are ordered back in over and over again.
All of this happens while having only a total of four hours sleep.
And that's not four hours per day, either -- that's over the course of the entire week!!
HOLY S**T!
There usually isn't a formal announcement when "Hell Week" actually starts, with the
only announcement being the sudden, massive series of artillery explosions and gunfire,
and the screams of the instructors telling everyone to get their asses outside.
That's because in preparation for what has to be the world's worst surprise party, the
entire base is tricked out to simulate a real-life combat zone.
The central courtyard where the trainees are made to exercise is lined with barrels filled
with artillery simulators, which, as the name would suggest, are blanks that replicate artillery
strikes all the way from the whistling of the "incoming" shell to the very massive and
very real explosion that soon follows.
The trainees will continue to do their drills among the random explosions, while instructors
walk among them, screaming and firing off hundreds of blanks from machine guns.
They also have an industrial-strength fog machine that fills the place with a misty
haze in between the all the already dizzying pyrotechnics.
Needless to say, the fighting forces of the great United States are respected around the
world, and to ascend to the elite ranks you need to put yourself through some serious
pain.
The path to becoming a Navy SEAL has to go through “Hell Week,” one of the most insane
collections of training pain we’ve ever heard of.
And yeah, unsurprisingly 75% of the prospects drop out before the entire program is over.
Here's what’s next!