Special Combat Aggressive Reactionary System

Special Combat Aggressive Reactionary Systems (SCARS) is an American combat fighting system created by Jerry L. Peterson.

Founding
SCARS is based on sciences of psychology, physiology, physical movement as well as research on the nervous system. SCARS was developed by Peterson after serving two tours in the US Army 173rd Airborne Brigade during the Vietnam War. It was debuted in 1987, and began to be taught to various military, law enforcement, and security units, such as the Arizona State police. Currently, SCARS is taught through private seminars, larger scale contracts, online training and DVDs. It contains no defensive actions, as all checks against the enemy's kicks or punches are delivered as strikes to vulnerable nerves.

The program is based upon the idea that every human body reacts in the same way to specific injuries, and the program puts together various strikes to specific nerves, bones, and organs in order to debilitate an aggressive individual. The goal is to produce an "autokinematic reaction", which is a medium-term extreme level of pain. The three main elements of SCARS are geometry, physiology, and physics, and avoids the spiritual aspect that is prevalent in many martial arts. It focuses on immediate threat elimination and does not include an element of spiritual development.

Government personnel training programs
SCARS was initially presented to the Department of the Navy in 1988. SCARS Institute of Combat Sciences has developed training courses for the US Army, Air Force as well as foreign governments and various law enforcement agencies. For the first seven years the fighting system remained exclusively known to and practiced by government personnel. The program was taught via seminars, government contracts, and also the SCARS Institute of Combative Sciences, once known as "the most expensive school in the world".

The US Navy developed a training manual for teaching SCARS to members of the Navy and SEALs. It states in its introduction that it was used as "an educational system dealing primarily with the thought process in high risk areas of combat" and meant to "increase an individual's decision making skills in high stress areas of conflict".

Public Education
In 1993 the company produced video programming to teach its techniques to the general public. Those who learn from the full series of videos are allowed to begin attending training sessions at SCARS official training center. It is intended to teach reliable defensive techniques over the span of three days. The remainder of the Navy program was not released to the public in the videos or otherwise. The videos were first distributed in 1993 as the most expensive collection of defence videos ever produced, however they sold a large number of copies, grossing $1 million in the first nine months. In 1999 a SCARS TV program was scripted and cast, though it was not produced. Blake Peterson also published the book ''Attention! Teachers, Students and Parents! Survive the Unsurvivable! - What Science Tells Us About Fear, Self-Defense, School Shootings and Why Guns in Schools Might Not Be the Best Solution'' in 2013, using SCARS as the basis for teaching supervisory figures how to deal with the increasing gun violence in US schools.

Criticisms
Due to its length (taking men out of the field for 30 days), cancellation of some SCARS courses was approved on April 17, 1998 by the Naval Special Warfare Commander, G.M. Moy, Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations. Navy SEAL LCDR Mark D. Divine called SCARS "a very effective offensive fighting system," but also criticized Peterson for "his ego and inflexibility."