on the ground were easy kills for the spearmen on either side.
If the geniuses who founded BJJ (and I’m not talking about the people trying to ret-rofit it to fit the modern law enforcement or military “market”) had lived in a time and place where the battlefield was the testing ground and a spear in the back was the penalty for “delay of game,” the system would have looked much different. I bet it still would have been very efficient.
There are environmental factors in training as well. A system that takes a “lifetime to master” didn’t have much utility to someone who was going into battle as soon as he reached puberty, and did “lifetime to master” mean the same thing, or even get said when the life expectancy was in the low 20s?
Modern systems designed for military recruits—young men full of testosterone and at peak fitness—don’t require the same degree of efficiency as a system designed to protect the old and vulnerable from assault. Further, as battle changed over the centuries from a bloody hand-to-hand melee to a bloody technology-driven firefight, it made less and less sense to spend precious training time on unarmed fighting.
And one more point, from the environmental side: many of our martial arts systems predate the concept of self-defense law. In a world without effective police and courts, vengeance and the destruction of any serious threat made sense. The logical 1800 Okinawan solution to being attacked may risk prison time today. The world has changed.
In this book, Wilder and Kane talk about the other dimension: how goals, what you are fighting for, change every element of how you fight.
In a sport environment you want to win, quickly and decisively, but with solid assurance that your opponent will be able to get back up and play again tomorrow. In a combat situation you want to win quickly and decisively, but with solid assurance that your foe cannot get up and re-engage until you are long gone, if ever.
If you are trying to get the car keys from your drunken uncle or breaking up a family fight, not only do you want zero injury, but you are not dealing with trained competitors and the person you are throwing, locking, or striking may not be capable of protecting him or herself. That puts the responsibility for both the throw AND the fall entirely on you.
Self-defense is the biggest change and the hardest of all—you must make your technique work whatever your goal sometimes to incapacitate the threat, sometimes simply to escape—when you have already taken damage, your structure is compromised and applied against a threat who is bigger, stronger, and has complete tactical advantage. That’s the baseline for surviving assault and it is a world beyond the difference between sport and war.
Simple changes in goals profoundly change how you prioritize your choices (weapons are unacceptable when drunk-wrangling but the first choice in combat) and how you execute your technique (at least one koryu version of osoto gari collapses the trachea, blows out the knees, and dumps the threat on his back).
What the authors have done in this book is simply to give you a taste. Don’t try to memorize the differences in application between a technique used on an enemy and a drunk. Try to understand the differences and then take a hard look at your own training. Knowing that there is a difference between submitting an opponent and disabling an enemy is not the same as practicing the difference, nor is it a guarantee that you can switch to the appropriate mindset at the right time.
If you are preserving a quick-killing soldier’s art from the old days, what must be modified to handle someone you don’t wish to hurt? What must you learn to bring it in line with a legal environment the founders never imagined?
Studying one thing is not, and never can be, studying everything.
Train hard. Pay attention. Ask questions. Do your best to always be clear about what you are really doing and why.
Rory Miller is the author of Meditations on Violence, Violence: A Writer’s Guide, Facing Violence, and Force Decisions, among others, and co-author (with Lawrence Kane) of Scaling Force. His writings have also been featured in Loren Christensen’s Fighter’s Fact Book 2, Kane/Wilder’s The Little Black Book of Violence, and The Way to Black Belt. He has been studying martial arts since 1981. Though he started in competitive martial sports, earning college varsities in judo and fencing, he found his martial “home” in the early Tokugawa-era battlefield system of Sosuishi-ryu kumi uchi (jujutsu).
A veteran corrections officer and Corrections Emergency Response Team (CERT) leader, Rory has hands-on experience in hundreds of violent altercations. He has designed and taught courses for law enforcement agencies including confrontational simulations, uncontrolled environments, crisis communications with the mentally ill, CERT operations and planning, defensive tactics, and use of force policy. His training also includes witness protection, close-quarters handgun, Americans for Effective Law Enforcement (AELE) discipline and internal investigations, hostage negotiations, and survival and integrated use of force.
He recently spent a year in Iraq helping the government there develop its prison management system. Rory currently teaches seminars on violence internationally, and in partnership with Marc MacYoung has developed Conflict Communications, a definitive resource for understanding and controlling conflict. Rory’s website is www.chirontraining.com. He lives near Portland, Oregon.
Foreword—by Marc MacYoung
The last time I found myself looking down the barrel of a cop’s gun, I was kneeling on some guy’s head.
In the officer’s defense, it was the middle night in a bad part of town, we were out on the sidewalk and there were two of us on top of this guy. So his pointing a pistol at us was an understandable reaction.
The nice policemen suggested that I and my partner might want to stop what we were doing and allow the other gentleman to get up. I held up my hands and said, “I will comply! But this guy is on the fight and, if we let him go, there’s a good chance he’ll attack us again.”
Still, the officer was adamant about us letting the li’l feller go. While we were discussing his release, two more police cars arrived. We stepped back and the guy popped up like a jack-in-the-box from hell. We were quickly separated into two groups by the officers and questioned. As should be the case, we were facing the officer interviewing us with our backs to the other individual involved.
We told our story: who we were, where we worked, that this intoxicated individual had attacked two customers attempting to enter the business. We’d come to their assistance. He had a death grip on one of the customer’s shirt and I’d used a knife to cut it, so they could jump in their car and leave the scrap of cloth that was still lying on the sidewalk). We’d waited until they had left, then we let him up. When we did so, he’d attacked us. Once again we’d put him down in a controlled manner and were trying to talk him down when the officer had arrived.
The officer looked at me and asked, “Did you hit him?”
“No sir. I did a prescribed takedown to control him without injury. We never struck him, just controlled him so he couldn’t hurt us or the others.”
About then the other party decided to offer a suggestion to a female police officer. Not only was the suggestion not polite, but it was loud too. As a final point, he called her a name. Women generally do not like being referred to as that particular part of their anatomy.
The officer in front of us blinked when he heard this. He quietly said, “You two can go.” We politely thanked the officer and returned to the business. We looked over to see our old friend
