Are Martial Arts Martial?
Commenting on this post, ucfengr doubts my assertion that martial arts such as Judo, Karate, etc. are mis-named in English, because they wouldn’t be especially useful on the battlefield. He argues that the US military spends a lot of time teaching unarmed combat to soldiers, so it must have some military value.
And he’s mostly right, but it’s complicated.
In some cases, US armed forces members learn martial arts for the same reason anyone else does: It’s fun, and it keeps you in shape. The US Army has a martial arts team just as it has a chess team and a football team. With as many people as the US armed forces employ, they’re bound to have all sorts of hobby organizations to keep up morale.
For those servicemen who are really going to do the fighting, this article about the Marine Corp Martial Arts Program probably reflects current thinking on why they put time and money into martial-arts training. The main purpose is apparently psychological:
Today, the MCMAP’s overarching purpose is to mold and strengthen the USMC collective identity, social structure, and culture.
This follows the article’s introduction about how morale dropped in all the branches after the Vietnam War. The USMC in particular is devoted to maintaining a warrior spirit, and martial arts training helps with that.
A second point is that the MCMAP is not about the unarmed martial arts that civilians generally pursue:
In content, MCMAP is predominantly a weapons-based system focusing on rifle and bayonet, edged weapons, weapons of opportunity, and unarmed combat across the entire spectrum of combat.
This makes perfect sense to me. It’s true that soldiers in war will often find themselves just a few feet from the enemy. But it would be exceedingly rare for a soldier to find himself in a close-quarters combat situation with absolutely nothing that he could use as a weapon. In terms of really trying to kill someone, a popsickle stick or bent coat hanger would be much more effective than a fist.
Finally, there’s a twist: Weaponless techniques are often important precisely because they’re so rarely lethal. Our soldiers often need to subdue people without killing them, just like domestic law-enforcement personnel. For example, the disastrous 1997 Mogadishu raid known as Black Hawk Down started as an attempt at abducting a local leader for interrogation, which obviously could have involved some unarmed submission techniques had they found him.
The program teaches lethal and nonlethal techniques as well as pain-inducing compliance techniques to provide maximum flexibility for adapting to any possible threat level. Marines are taught methodologies for rapidly selecting and using appropriate techniques to fit the situation. Applying the right technique with the least required force to prevent situations from escalating beyond control is especially important in military operations other than war. Selecting justifiable techniques is also important.
So are unarmed martial arts really martial? It depends on what you think war is. If the point were strictly to teach soldiers how to kill with their bare hands, then it would be a waste of time. But that’s simplistic. From a broad perspective, the quartermaster and cook contribute just as much to winning a war as the men on the front line. If unarmed martial-arts training helps maintain morale in non-combat personnel, if it helps maintain a warrior spirit in the Marines and special forces, and if it helps with submission techniques in situations where killing is not the goal, then it must be as martial (in modern terms) as flying an airplane, driving a tank, or shooting a rifle.
Good response, though I think your chess/football analogy is flawed. In Basic Infantry training, they spend a lot of training time on unarmmed combat, but none on chess or football, though I do remember a chess set in our rec-room. One thing I see lacking is the connection of unarmmed combat as part of comprehensive training and how it can impact things like driving a tank or shooting a rifle. Martial arts training is more than just punching, kicking, or throwing, it is a method of teaching an individual to think tactically (maybe less so in the more sport oriented arts). MA training teaches you how and when to respond to and execute attacks. That kind of training helps to build a mind set that carries over into other aspects of training. The analogy I would use is my undergrad work in computer engineering. I took a lot of classes that had very little to do with computers but a lot to do with instilling a “problem-solving” mindset. I view unarmmed MA training in much the same light.
Comment by ucfengr — February 21, 2006 @ 10:45 am