COMBAT EFFECTIVE?

 By Phillip Starr

We hear it all the time; “That traditional martial arts guy would be easily beaten in an MMA match!”, and other more colorful variations. It's an old argument that has no basis in reality. MMA, per se, is a sport. The object of an MMA match is NOT to render the other fellow unconscious...it's to WIN THE MATCH! And that doesn't require a knockout. Moreover, participants must adhere to certain rules, they must wear the proper protective gear, they fight in timed rounds with brief breaks in between, and they've never been tested (at least on a large scale) in battle.

Traditional martial forms were designed for life-and-death scuffles where there's no second place winner. The object is to survive. Period. There are no rules whatsoever, no protective gear, no timed rounds...you fought until one of you was incapable of continuing. And a number of these arts have been put to use in actual combat. They're still with us...because the survivors valued them, kept them, and passed them on to the future generation.

Back in medieval times, the game of chess (which is thought to have originated in India) was used to teach principles of battlefield tactics to the aristocracy. After all, in the event of a military conflict, they were the ones who would fill positions of command. This kind of tactical thinking (chess) was used clear into the 20^th Century with considerable success. By and large, both sides were using the mindset of chess, which was created as a game. Until Vietnam.

The NVA command (which was in close contact with communist China) used the tactics learned in weiqi (more commonly known as the game of go), which had been considered one of the “four essential arts” of the cultured scholars in ancient China going back to the 4^th Century. And the Chinese book, “The Art of War” (written by Sun-Tzu more than 2,500 years ago), was their playbook, which had been created for combat and used innumerable times. They weren't playing by our Western rules. The end result has been that at military academies in the U.S., all students are now required to study Sun's book.

In short, assessing genuine combat effectiveness between something that is a recently created sport and things that have proved their mettle on the battlefield is silly. And inaccurate.