Seize Initiative, Be the Weapon

Fourth Wall Moment: I started this blog because a crashing computer hard drive ate six chapters of a book I was writing about Making America Violent Again.  The first chapter of that book set the stage for the rest of the book.  It was about the ambush.

Violent crimes are all some type of ambush.  In Army doctrine, we divide ambushes into “near” and “far.”  Near ambushes are those that occur within hand grenade range, and far ambushes are those that occur outside of hand grenade range.  In a near ambush, a unit throws hand grenades and attacks.  This is a battle drill that does not have to be thought about or specified in orders.  In a far ambush, they break contact, get out of the kill zone and prepare a plan.

How does this relate to self-defense?  Well, almost all violent crime is a near ambush; home invasions perhaps are the exception.  But, a mugging, a sexual assault, a random assault and battery are all near ambushes and we have to prepare battle drills to defeat them.  A battle drill is a set response to a specific type of attack.  Throwing hand grenades and then charging is just that; a simple, set response to an ambush at close range.  To defeat the ambush, the unit becomes infinitely more aggressive than the ambushing force.  That is exactly how to defeat a criminal ambush as well: become the aggressor.  In my classes I talk about “the switch” that has to be thrown to turn a student from citizen to killer in an instant.  The secret to developing the switch is the same secret that the military uses to develop battle drills: repetitive training on the same simple tasks over and over again.

In armed self-defense shooting the most important skill is not hitting the target.  That is almost guaranteed at the one- to two-foot range of most self-defense shootings.  The most important skill is getting the gun out.  This is why most firing ranges, especially indoor firing ranges, are useless for self-defense training.  Presenting a firearm—that is drawing, pointing and (if necessary) aiming—is far more important to practice than the actual putting a hole in a piece of paper at an unrealistic distance.  The second most important thing to train is retaining the Weapon.  Remember, you may have to fight to the Weapon and fight over the Weapon before you ever fight with the Weapon.  That principle is the hardest for me to teach, that carrying a pistol does not by itself guarantee one their safety, because most violent crime does not occur at the standard twenty-five yard pistol range.  If a bad person is sticking a gun in your face at six inches, drawing your gun and shooting first is not going to happen even if you are Wild Bill Hickok.

In that situation, if you decide to defend yourself, you will need to have some empty hand skills as well as a very efficient method of presenting the Weapon and engaging at close range.  That is a battle drill.  The purpose of the book I was writing was to overcome the illusion that gun-armed, primitive-armed and unarmed self-defense are distinct disciplines.  I know many martial artists who do not believe in guns because they think their skills are good enough to defend themselves without a firearm.  I don’t care if you are the reincarnation of Bruce Lee and Bodhidharma into Brock Lesner, if somebody shoots you from ten feet away, you will lose.  I also know many concealed firearms carriers who believe that the tool will do all of the fighting for them.  I don’t care if you’re Doc Holliday either, if somebody is pummeling the hell out of you while you do nothing but fumble for your gun, you too are going to lose.  I refer to both types of people by the same title: VICTIM.

The solution to both of these flawed ways of thinking is to adopt the philosophy that the defender is the Weapon, not the tool.  Then, whether there is a tool or not, a person can defend themselves as the Weapon.  If there is a tool, it is simply an extension of one’s body, which is the Weapon.  This is a philosophy that both fighters and competitive shooters understand, but for some reason when it comes to unarmed and armed self-defense, the practitioners do not grasp it as easily.  Because half of them want it to be easy, and the other half think making it easy is somehow “cheating.”  All combat is cheating, first of all, and it’s never easy.  If you don’t need to “cheat” to win, it is not really a self-defense situation.

This is another good point to bring up here, the difference between sport and self-defense.  You can’t “cheat” if there are no rules.  Only sports have rules.  Even MMA has rules.  Real combat does not have rules.  Self-defense situation is individual combat, it is life or death, kill or be killed.  In those situations, you do whatever it takes to not be the loser.  Therefore in my opinion, the only unarmed moves you should make are the ones that are expressly banned by the UFC.  Eye gouges, throat punches, elbows to the soft spot on the top of the head, neck breaks, et cetera.  That is “cheating,” and self-defense IS cheating.

That is the point of the near ambush battle drill, to use the hand grenades as a method of cheating, to take away the enemy’s Initiative.  Initiative is the most important aspect of combat.  Whoever has the Initiative at the end of an engagement, is the winner.  Law abiding citizens do not have the luxury of the Initiative at the beginning of a self-defense engagement as we do not chose the times and places where we get mugged.  So, what we have to do is take away the Initiative from the enemy, then with the Initiative, eliminate the threat.  All unarmed self-defense techniques teach this.  The mugging scene in the movie Collateral is a great example of this principle when you have a tool to extend your body (which you should watch on youtube).  But, notice in the movie, Tom Cruises’ first move is unarmed, he takes away the Initiative, removing himself from muzzle direction, then draws and fires, finishing the engagement with the Initiative firmly in his grasp.  That is a very good fictional depiction of armed self-defense (and just an awesome movie), but you have to ignore the fact that he’s the bad guy.

Conclusion, if you noticed in this blog I capitalized the words Weapon and Initiative.  These are the first two principles I used to teach my soldiers.  W is for Weapon.  The person is the Weapon, not the knife or gun.  If you adopt that mentality, then any tool you use is an extension of the Weapon.  Which means anything can be used to augment your body from a B2 bomber to a beer bottle; make them extensions of your body and Be The Weapon.  But remember, the First Rule of Unarmed Combat: Don’t Get Into It!  Arm yourself with something, which can be anything.  Next, I is for Initiative.  Whoever has the Initiative at the end of an engagement is the winner.  All combat is fundamentally a struggle over the Initiative.  You have to develop battle drills to seize the Initiative from an attacker, and then finish that attacker using the tools you have access to.  Last thing I will say is this: if you are not prepared to be as violent as necessary, to kill an attacker to save your life or the lives of others, do not carry a lethal weapon.  In which case, you will be a VICTIM.  Despite what your granola-loving hippy kindergarten teacher told you, violence itself is not the enemy; in a near ambush, violence is the only way to defeat the enemy.  Make America Violent Again.