Indigenous Ability

Let’s talk buccaneers for a paragraph or few and then settle into a mighty pragmatic lesson that these spoilers of the seas took for granted and that many of we, the 21 st Century coddled crew, a bit less so. Hand-to-hand fights were quite common in the days of sailing piracy, in fact we get our phrase “hand-to-hand combat” from this very fact. A crewman on a sailing vessel was and is a “Hand” and thusly hand-to-hand combat in piratical parlance is just that, a one-on-one affair between marauder and mauradee. Contrary to cinematic depictions of rival ships holing one another willy-nilly with cannon shot, the preferred tactic was to fire upon masts and other standing rigging and leaving as much of the ship intact as possible. Afterall, a sunk ship cannot be looted, a sunk ship cannot be taken over as additional transportation booty. No, the crux, more often than not, was to use sailing prowess and well-placed shot to make boarding feasible. With boarding an ulti...

“ The art of war is no more than the art of augmenting the chances which are in our favor .”-Napoleon All thinking combat tacticians, whether sportsman or reality-arena focused, know and respect the realities of estimable mathematics. That is, the easy disparities or lack of when it comes to adversarial comparisons. For example, “ He is much bigger than I, and likely stronger or at least possessing of more mass so I will adjust thusly .” Or, “ My reach in comparison with the long-armed fellow before me is a bit on the lean side so I would be wise to shift tactics.” In the street we estimate numbers in the following broad categories… One -Number of Potential Foes Two -Size of Potential Foes Relative to our own Size. Three -If a weapon is involved, we make on-the-spot calculations of range efficiencies. Blades are a threat at this distance, cudgels at this, firearms here and so on. In the realm of sports combat weight classes have already provi...

Before we pick apart the titled idea to see if it holds merit, let’s define terms. Vacuum Tactics are any combat sport or street application that requires isolation or handicapped drilling to develop full facility. Example 1 : If one really wants to step up a boxing game one might forgo kickboxing training for a bit so that the hands become the focus. Example 2 : If one really wants to build a facile guard-passing game one may ban leg-locks as the “easy out” until we see the guard-passing rise to the desired level of leg-lockless facility. On the surface such compartmentalized training seems to hold intellectual water but.. Let’s drill down past this first trickle of thought-water and see if there is truly a sustaining aquifer below. Opportunity Costs Opportunity costs is a concept borrowed from economics that simply means, for every purchase we make, each individual “ Yes” decision automatically say “ No, thank you ” to everything else we could ...

A change of pace as we look not only to the past for today’s lesson but also to a completely different realm of combat to see if there just may be any advice that is pertinent for the sport of MMA and real-world operator survival. We’re going to look to strategic advice offered by German flying ace Oswald Boelcke, one of the top (if not the top) innovators and instructors in the Axis’ formidable flying force during the First World War. Boelcke personally chose the legendary young Baron Manfred von Richthofen (the famous/infamous Red Baron) to become his pupil and protégé and coached him to an astonishing string of air victories. Boelcke was flying at a time when the airmen of both the Axis and Allied powers considered themselves “knights of the air”; they exercised a sort of curious chivalry with courtesies often offered to the opposition. Stories abound of pilots who upon finding their primitive machine guns jammed mid-dogfight receiving a simple salute and fly-away from th...