More on drawing our enemy out to fight on our own terms
Bookworm on Mar 02 2012 at 3:21 pm | Filed under: Military
Earlier this week, I did a post about the way a good fighter doesn’t just use mindless tactics but, instead, uses tactics that draw the enemy onto his own territory. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that you want a fight to be to your strengths, not to your enemy’s strengths. I illustrated that point with a Gracie Jiu jitsu video showing that a good ground fighter is going to win against other martial artists.
Since then, a friend who knows much more than I do on the subject of warfare pointed something out to me that both highlights a thinking mistake I made and perfectly illustrates my point. The Gracies’ tactics work well in a controlled environment: a smooth, possibly padded floor, and one opponent. Under those circumstances, if you can get your opponent to the ground, then you’ve got him in your territory.
In the real world, though (outside of a fight in the Romper Room Bar, complete with thick carpets on the floor and padded walls), fights take place in less hospitable surroundings. The ground beneath you may be strewn with broken glass, rocks, and other dangerous and/or unsavory items, and your opponent may have friends. Under those circumstances, if you hit the ground, you may be hurt, and you’ve limited your mobility. But why listen to me? Here’s a real fighter explaining:
Bottom line: I made the same mistake I was complaining about vis a vis our military: namely, thinking too linearly about my strengths, without considering the other party’s advantages and the ways in which I can counter those advantages. But while my facts were wrong, I think my logic is correct. You can’t just fight to your strength; you have to fight to your opponent’s weakness, or at least disable his advantages.
Incidentally, I have heard from reliable sources that our military has the ability to engage the enemy in an optimally constructive fashion, but that external limitations (politics, I assume, although I haven’t been told) prevent our forces from doing what needs to be done.
Related posts:
- Drawing our enemy out to fight on our terms
- Fight fiercely, Military, fight, fight fight!
- A totally unfair fight
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3 Responses to “More on drawing our enemy out to fight on our own terms”
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I agree totally with your point.
I’ve not studied Brazilian jiu-jitsu but I did study Judo (incl. grappling) and classic Japanese combative Jiu-Jitsu.
Watching your video of the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu grapplers in competition, I can tell you that if somebody came to grapple me like that in a combat situation, they would have popped ear drums, gouged eyes and their nose into the brain (in about the first 3 seconds) before I broke their neck on impact. Just saying.
The highest form of martial arts is…never to use them.
Greetings:
Well, the way my favorite Platoon Sergeant explained it to me was this. Just as in basketball, you can drive to the hoop or, alternatively, shoot the jump shot, there are two basic plays in the infantry game; Find ‘em, fix ‘em and finish ‘em or, again alternatively, Let them find you, fix ‘em, and finish ‘em.”
A while back, there was a battle at a place called Warnak in Afgahistan. Our troopers had set up a combat outpost (in somewhat sub-optimal conditions) and were subsequently attacked by the Talibunnies. Eight or nine Americans were killed as were two or three hundred bad guys. All the mainstream media I saw (which included a lengthy report on NBC) painted that battle as a serious comeuppance or an outright American defeat. Regrettably, the Americans ended up abandoning the outpost and left the adjacent village, whose occupants were believed to have aided the Islamists, standing. I would have done neither.
During my all-expense-paid tour of sunny Southeast Asia, my battalion established a firebase at the junction of a road and a river. Over the next six months or so, there were three large scale battles fought there. The casualties that the NVA suffered were so large that our Brigade flew out a bulldozer to police up the area after each battle. Our planners had found a position of great importance to our adversaries and they paid heavy prices in their failed attempts to recover it.
This ability, that has evolved, to downplay our successes while highlighting and emphasizing all our misfortunes, is serious chink in our armor and a grave disservice to our soldiers in that field.
You had the right point but chose to use the wrong example. BJJ is the example of in the box thinking, not out of the box thinking.
What Royce had was greater experience grappling against strikers, so he had a “tech” edge that his opponents did not have.
People may remember that incident where one Marine was wrestling with an insurgent on the ground and the insurgent (figuring out he can’t out wrestle a Marine in full body armor even on the ground) pulls out a grenade and pulls the pin. The Marine then has to cover up the grenade to prevent the shrapnel from killing two of his buddies. The question is, what was his two support doing? Watching? That’s exactly what they taught them to do in BJJ. Watch as one guy wrestles on the ground with another guy. The fact that they were even “close” enough to get hit by shrapnel meant that they were “standing there for a significant amount of time”. Significant enough that they could have walked up, put a boot on the insurgent, pulled out their pistol, and executed him faster than he could pull a grenade and activate it. But young inexperienced males usually do what their training says when things are going crazy. Their training, however, was designed more as a sport and a physical exercise, than anything designed for open warfare.
It takes many deaths to figure things like that out in war.