Ok, I see statements online all the time to the effect that fighting today is an entirely different fight than it was forty or fifty years ago. I see people talk about how fighting has evolved and changed and grown. I see them say that what worked then just doesn't work today. Sure, that technique was effective in the fifties, but these days people know how to fight, and that sorta thing won't work anymore. People talk about adjusting to the reality of "today's streets," or they make comments about how "fighting isn't like it used to be." My question is, is there really any validity to this?
I mean, people have been killing each other for thousands of years. Thousands of years. Have we come up with something in the last fifty years that nobody thought of before now? How is that possible? It seems unlikely to me. I don't know, cause I haven't been around all that long, but how could we have suddenly figured out something about unarmed combat that nobody caught on to until now? Even knife fighting and stick fighting is nothing new. People have probably been hitting each other with stuff almost as long as they've been hitting each other without it, how did they miss what we've supposedly figured out all the sudden?
Like I said, I see this kind of blanket statement all the time and nobody ever challenges it. Today I happened to get into this discussion with some friends of mine, some older, and one of them said, "Yes, fighting is different now than it was in the fifties, sixties, seventies." He was there. He said, "Look at your gun fighters. The best quick draw in the old west would be dead before his gun left the holster if he went up against some of todays shooters. Combat always evolves. The British beat everybody for a hundred years by walking in a straight line until we started doing the Viet Nam thing and shooting them from behind trees and bushes. Your best boxer from fifty years ago might have been undefeated in his prime, but he wouldn't last a minute against one of todays fighters." He has a point. But I'm still not convinced.
For instance, he's right about the Brits and the Revolutionary War, but isn't he also right to use Viet Nam as an analogy? Wasn't that, all poor executive decision making aside, a similar situation? We wanted to fight a conventional war where we march through the forest and crush everything in our path, and the enemy shot from behind trees and bushes. Doesn't that show that rather than evolving, we just see that certain tactics work better in certain situations?
What about the quick draw and the boxer? Would they really get smoked today? It's easy to say, because there's certaintly no way to test it, but it seems a little like hubris to me. To think that we are somehow a superior breed of man. Something made those guys the best in their day, doesn't it take a little away from their accomplishments to say it was just that they didn't have any real competition? Or is that just stating facts?
I see this stance with knife techniques alot. Someone will start talking about their favorite knife disarm or defense technique, and invariably someone chimes in and says, "That would never work these days. People today know too much about knife fighting to pull that maneuver off." Are we really supposed to believe that today's technique makes yesterday's obsolete? Were trained knife fighters such wimps forty years ago, or four thousand years ago, that you could use poor technique and still win? Or were these techniques always dicey at best, and difficult to pulled off against a skilled opponent?
The only thing that I can see that could crush my position is the increasing influence the media has over our training. As evidenced by that fact that you are reading this post, we all incorporate the media, through television, computers, video, and print, into our own training in ways that our forebearers did not. I can go online and see examples of hundreds of different techniques, and then judge for myself which I like and wish to add to my style. This could lead to a honing and evolving of combat in general, as the good is kept and the truly obsolete is discarded. But is this really all that new a phenomenon? Didn't yesterday's warriors compare notes? Didn't they sit around and get drunk and tell old war stories? And don't I still have to practice the technique? Even if I have a better repetoire of techniques, won't I still either be skilled or unskilled? Or rather, some degree of each in various aspects of combat? How is this really any different from how it's always been? Many of us practice techniques that we at least pretend are thousands of years old. Doesn't this imply that people have been at about the same general level of skill for at least that long? Haven't we always had a range of ability as a species that encompasses everything from the unskilled dork to the professional warrior?
I guess it just makes me wonder. Many of you have been around longer than I. Have you witnessed this great evolution in combat? Have you seen some kind of mass subconscious fighting expertise develop in the common man? We don't seem all that invincible to me. I can't fly, shoot lightning from my fingers, or move things with my mind. So if we've improved so much in only fifty years, and we still suck this much at fighting, were we just a bunch of uncoordinated idiots throwing rocks at each other three hundred years ago?
-Rob
I mean, people have been killing each other for thousands of years. Thousands of years. Have we come up with something in the last fifty years that nobody thought of before now? How is that possible? It seems unlikely to me. I don't know, cause I haven't been around all that long, but how could we have suddenly figured out something about unarmed combat that nobody caught on to until now? Even knife fighting and stick fighting is nothing new. People have probably been hitting each other with stuff almost as long as they've been hitting each other without it, how did they miss what we've supposedly figured out all the sudden?
Like I said, I see this kind of blanket statement all the time and nobody ever challenges it. Today I happened to get into this discussion with some friends of mine, some older, and one of them said, "Yes, fighting is different now than it was in the fifties, sixties, seventies." He was there. He said, "Look at your gun fighters. The best quick draw in the old west would be dead before his gun left the holster if he went up against some of todays shooters. Combat always evolves. The British beat everybody for a hundred years by walking in a straight line until we started doing the Viet Nam thing and shooting them from behind trees and bushes. Your best boxer from fifty years ago might have been undefeated in his prime, but he wouldn't last a minute against one of todays fighters." He has a point. But I'm still not convinced.
For instance, he's right about the Brits and the Revolutionary War, but isn't he also right to use Viet Nam as an analogy? Wasn't that, all poor executive decision making aside, a similar situation? We wanted to fight a conventional war where we march through the forest and crush everything in our path, and the enemy shot from behind trees and bushes. Doesn't that show that rather than evolving, we just see that certain tactics work better in certain situations?
What about the quick draw and the boxer? Would they really get smoked today? It's easy to say, because there's certaintly no way to test it, but it seems a little like hubris to me. To think that we are somehow a superior breed of man. Something made those guys the best in their day, doesn't it take a little away from their accomplishments to say it was just that they didn't have any real competition? Or is that just stating facts?
I see this stance with knife techniques alot. Someone will start talking about their favorite knife disarm or defense technique, and invariably someone chimes in and says, "That would never work these days. People today know too much about knife fighting to pull that maneuver off." Are we really supposed to believe that today's technique makes yesterday's obsolete? Were trained knife fighters such wimps forty years ago, or four thousand years ago, that you could use poor technique and still win? Or were these techniques always dicey at best, and difficult to pulled off against a skilled opponent?
The only thing that I can see that could crush my position is the increasing influence the media has over our training. As evidenced by that fact that you are reading this post, we all incorporate the media, through television, computers, video, and print, into our own training in ways that our forebearers did not. I can go online and see examples of hundreds of different techniques, and then judge for myself which I like and wish to add to my style. This could lead to a honing and evolving of combat in general, as the good is kept and the truly obsolete is discarded. But is this really all that new a phenomenon? Didn't yesterday's warriors compare notes? Didn't they sit around and get drunk and tell old war stories? And don't I still have to practice the technique? Even if I have a better repetoire of techniques, won't I still either be skilled or unskilled? Or rather, some degree of each in various aspects of combat? How is this really any different from how it's always been? Many of us practice techniques that we at least pretend are thousands of years old. Doesn't this imply that people have been at about the same general level of skill for at least that long? Haven't we always had a range of ability as a species that encompasses everything from the unskilled dork to the professional warrior?
I guess it just makes me wonder. Many of you have been around longer than I. Have you witnessed this great evolution in combat? Have you seen some kind of mass subconscious fighting expertise develop in the common man? We don't seem all that invincible to me. I can't fly, shoot lightning from my fingers, or move things with my mind. So if we've improved so much in only fifty years, and we still suck this much at fighting, were we just a bunch of uncoordinated idiots throwing rocks at each other three hundred years ago?
-Rob