To The Point

A comparison of bayonet training with unarmed combat training

This is the bayonet for the SA80 rifle. He is made of cold, hard steel. When I ask you what he is made of, you will reply "COLD, HARD STEEL!!!" His sole purpose is to kill. He has no friends. No family. He likes nothing more than to spill the blood of his enemies so that it may pour out onto the ground and nourish the earth. When I ask you “What makes the grass grow?” you will reply "BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD!!!" When I ask you what the bayonet is used for, you will reply "KILL, KILL, KILL!!!"

Standing there on the field in the drizzle – faces covered in cam-cream, excited and nervous about what was to come - this was our introduction to the bayonet during basic training.

The entire training session left a lasting impression on me. One reason is that in personifying the bayonet, we were given an example of the correct mindset for being effective in combat. Also, during the physical training, I couldn’t help but notice that training and fighting with the weapon shared many of the same dynamics as the unarmed combat system I teach – in both the delivery and desired training effect.

Thinking more about the bayonet itself, I came to realize that many of the characteristics of the weapon are directly transferable to – what I consider to be – an effective unarmed combat system.

One purpose

Just as the scary corporal stated, the bayonet’s sole purpose is to kill. Not to maim, injure or dissuade an enemy but to neutralize him. While the former may well occur, the weapon was designed with the latter in mind.

In the same way, the unarmed combat system I teach for emergency combat situations revolves around finding the most direct way of achieving one goal; to disable an attacker. The system provides only one option for any given position you may find yourself in during a fight. In this way, we adhere to Hick’s Law – reducing the time it takes to decide on an action and carry out that action by reducing the amount of potential options to choose from and thus avoiding the ‘analysis paralysis’ effect. 

The ‘one purpose’ concept is also representative of the tenacious goal-orientation required for fighting. Nobody can deny that an enemy who has become completely single-minded in his desire to cause his victim harm is a dangerous person indeed and therefore the ability to exercise this same single-mindedness will greatly increase our chances of surviving a violent assault.

‘To-the-point’

Despite having a cutting edge, training with the bayonet does not involve practicing to chop bits off of an enemy or slice him to ribbons. The most important part of the bayonet is the pointy bit – because utilizing this part is the easiest to do and yields the highest results. Using the bayonet isn't an art or a science; you aim the pointy bit at the enemy, stick it in him and repeat as necessary.

The same concept should be applied to designing an unarmed combat system. The key principles here are ‘easy to use’ and ‘yields best results’. Much to the disappointment of many self defence instructors, this doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘looks coolest’ or ‘sells most instructional DVD’s’… quite the opposite in fact.

While a parrying type motion and basic use of the butt-stock of the rifle are taught in bayonet lessons, there truly is nothing fancy about fighting with this weapon. The military has no interest in carrying on fighting ‘traditions’ – they simply want to prepare soldiers to be as effective as possible with as little time spent training as possible. This doesn’t mean training them to the bare minimum standard but instead finding how to get the most out of the time spent training. And so in self defence training, a good syllabus would be designed with the goal of preparing students for the possibility of violence as much as possible, as soon as possible.

Although long-winded belt progression based grading systems are good for retaining students (i.e good for business), these syllabuses are generally designed with the goal of providing a steady flow of overly complex and low-percentage techniques that must be remembered in order to progress to the next belt. Many martial artists take pride in how long it takes to reach the coveted black belt in their art. But if this same training model was used by the military, there’d be hardly any ‘boots on the ground’ as the majority of its members would still be in training (learning techniques and tactics that will largely never be used in actual combat).

Simple to use

Just like a good computer software package, the bayonet/rifle combination weapon is incredibly ‘user friendly’ and ‘intuitive’ to use. Even in the hands of somebody who has never held a rifle before, realizing that the weapon is used in a thrusting type motion would require no training at all in most people.

In the same way, an unarmed combat system should rely on natural movements that are based on instinctive human actions when under acute stress. If a technique feels awkward and unnatural in training there’s a good chance your body will default to a more ergonomic movement when under stress. Likewise, if a particular fighting system requires years of study before the student can become proficient in its use, this should be a clue as to how effective it is as a system overall.

Highly effective

As far as weapons go, you get a lot of ‘bang for your buck’ from the bayonet. Aside from the psychological effect of inducing immense fear in the enemy, the act of simply inserting such a blade into the torso will almost certainly create an instant life-threatening situation for him.

While we aren’t necessarily aiming to kill our attacker in defending ourselves, we are aiming to achieve the same ‘cost-to-benefit’ ratio for our actions. For example, there are plenty of points on the body that if struck, pressed or pinched will induce instant pain for the person on the receiving end. Pain, however, is highly overrated as a means of neutralizing an attacker’s offensive capability.

Seeking to prevail in a physical confrontation by use of inducing pain is essentially a gamble. When fighting in this way, there is an assumption (or a hope) that the opponent’s emotional response to pain will result in a diminished capability to fight or a complete cessation of the desire to continue fighting. And this is without even knowing what his physical interpretation of pain is like in the first place. What is painful one person may not hurt the next person at all. It’s true that everyone has a ‘breaking point’ at which they will succumb to pain, but trying to deliver this level of hurt to somebody when they are actively trying to hurt you is wishful thinking, in my opinion. Consider the single-minded tenacious resolve that we are seeking to use in our effort to defend ourselves, and realize that there is a good chance that homeboy is doing exactly the same thing.

And so instead of trying to create surface-level damage to the body of an attacker – that may or may not have an effect on him - in our system we aim cause a type of damage that has a direct effect on the their ability to physically function and doesn’t rely on causing psychological/emotional repulsion.

Causes internal damage

Being roughly six inches in length, the blade of the SA80 bayonet is more than capable of reaching all internal organs of a human target through penetration, and this is its purpose. While movies depicting the use of bladed weapons in war like to have limbs and heads flying off all over the place, the reality is that the most dangerous injury is an internal one that can often be almost undetectable from observing the victim from the outside.

The bayonet kills by causing catastrophic blood loss, and this is achieved by lacerating internal organs and major blood vessels found in the torso… not by ‘cutting’ the external parts of the body.

In the same way, our unarmed combat system aims to deliver overwhelming shock to an attacker’s central nervous system (CNS) - which is comprised of the brain, brainstem and spinal cord – as a means of directly affecting their state of consciousness. Just as the bayonet can not reach internal organs without first penetrating the outer structures of the body, we aim to target the CNS by delivering blunt trauma to the skull or cervical vertebrae. Contrary to what Hollywood and various self defence instructors may have us believe, making a ‘mess’ of an attacker is not entirely necessary in seeking to incapacitate them. Causing pain through the peripheral nervous system (i.e, the outer-most areas of the body) or ‘breaking’ the joints of the appendicular skeleton may well sound like effective ways to defeat an attacker (and possibly look ‘cool’ on screen, if you’re into that sort of thing), but in real violence outside of sport-fighting are a far lower percentage means of incapacitating somebody than simply delivering concussive blows to their head and/or neck area

No friends

What stood out to me the most of the corporal’s introduction to Mr Stabby, is that it was described as being ‘cold’ and having ‘no friends’; a thing that is incapable of love, compassion and other such fluffy feelings. This is a far cry from the ‘fired up’ feeling that some people feel is necessary for combat. The bayonet, being used as a metaphor for the desired combat mindset, was not described as being crazy, hot tempered and nor were we trained to go berserk when using the weapon. Instead, the personification of the bayonet was more akin to a cold blooded sociopath.

Anybody watching us could be forgiven for thinking we were being taught to lose our temper as we screamed at the targets, stabbed them repeatedly and got ‘beasted’ between phases of the lesson. These ‘beastings’ were essentially repetitive and torturous (for want of a less dramatic word) physical exercises designed to take us to the point of exhaustion each time. The purpose for the high intensity of the training and beastings were, I believe, not to fire us up, but wear us out – to the point that the stabbing of the target came not from emotional effort but eventually from a place of coldness.

One thing is for sure, every single one of us had thousand-yard stares at the end of this session and were given some time (a rare thing in basic training) to come back to earth. Initially, being full of energy, the attacks on the target are fuelled entirely by a conscious effort to give as much as you can. After several rounds of beastings however, while the shouts are louder and the stabbing more furious (and even more accurate), the feeling is more like a form of autopilot – effortless almost. Something I would certainly describe more as being ‘cold’ than ‘fired up’.

Without wanting to go too far into the subject of the combat mindset, this same coldness then, is the desired attitude for emergency combat in self defence. Consider the ways in which this same emotional and physical exhaustion can be achieved (safely) in unarmed combat training. You will find that once a certain state has been reached, the person performing the drill will get into a ‘zone’ in which they are able to perform to their maximum potential by way of switching off and getting on with the task in an almost autonomous fashion rather than ‘pushing’ themselves to make an effort. The ultimate goal of course is for this mindset to be accessible at will, and not only after having been beasted.

Consider also being on the receiving end of such an attack. From the perspective of a criminal who has attempted to assault somebody in order to rob or rape them, imagine being met by a ruthless and cold – but extremely determined – ‘victim’ who has made it their mission to put you down…

Notes

Here I would like to add a few disclaimers…

Firstly, at no point in this article do I advocate the use of blades in self defence or stabbing people in general. This will be pretty obvious to most, but in these days of litigation and with the current 'knife crime culture' we have here in the UK, I feel it wise to make it extra clear!

Also, not wanting to be mistaken for those instructors who base their entire ‘instructor persona’ on their military service (that is often exaggerated beyond belief or completely made up all together!) allow me to be honest in saying that this experience of basic training was quite a recent event (at the time of writing this). I’m certainly no veteran and do not claim to have been taught unarmed combat through my military experience. Having signed up quite ‘late in the game’, I was teaching before I joined. So sorry, but you’ll be getting no ‘Special Forces Secret Fighting Methods’ from me! Especially as I'm not infantry. 

I also acknowledge that use of the bayonet in modern combat is extremely rare. But it does happen (google it!). As a training method, it is extremely effective. As a tool, I’d rather have one and not need it than the other way around.

Lastly, only after writing this was it pointed out to me that the what-makes-the-grass-grow-thing is a famous scene from the film ‘Full Metal Jacket’. I actually have no idea which came first – the movie scene or the training method used by the Armed Forces.

Sharif Haque

Tactical Protection Systems

Self Defence and the Law

Self Defence and the Law 

- use-of-force considerations and the ‘rules of engagement’ -  

There is much to be considered with regards to the legalities of using violent action to defend oneself. The first thing being to acknowledge that self defence is violence. A popular phrase in the martial arts world is “It’s not violence if you are acting in self defence”. Funny, but last time I checked, slamming your fist or elbow into somebody’s face is a pretty violent sort of thing. The context may well be justifiable self defence, but it is still violence and is therefore a serious issue. With the gravity of this seriousness understood, one can then go on to look realistically at the laws surrounding self-protection.
As stated, there is much to be considered – hundreds of ‘what if’ scenarios with a seemingly infinite amount of variables that sway the legal scales towards either ‘justifiable’ or ‘unjustifiable’ with regards to a defender’s actions. It makes sense then, to boil down these what-if’s to find some underlying concepts and principles that the student can understand.



Principle 1 (Pre-fight):


If you chose to engage in violence when you didn't have to, it’s not self defence

You are in a club/bar/pub, somebody accuses you of flirting with his girlfriend and asks you to ‘step outside’.
Your driving has upset a fellow driver on the road, who gets out of his car when you stop at a red light and approaches the driver-side window of your car, hurling abuse at you.
A drunk person on the street has decided he doesn’t like you and starts to get in your face.
In which of the above scenarios are you legally justified in engaging in combat with your aggressor? Answer: none. While you can ‘add’ factors to the above scenarios to alter them in such a way that pre-emptive action could be justified, as they are written, there is no justification. The reason is simply that if you are not in immediate danger, or believe you are about to be put in serious danger, and you have the option of not engaging in combat, then any violence that occurs will be considered mutual or even initiated by YOU.
If you can avoid, escape or de-escalate the situation, then you should do so. Quite simply, fighting must be reserved for ‘emergency’ (remember this word) usage for it to be considered self defence.
For the previous examples to be altered in a way that would justify the use of force, consider the following variations.
You are in a club/bar/pub, somebody accuses you of flirting with their girlfriend, and grabs you to drag you outside.
Your driving has upset a fellow driver, who gets out of his car when you stop at a red light, opens the driver-side door of your car and starts to kick and punch at you while you are essentially tied to the seat by your seatbelt.
A drunk person in the street has decided he doesn’t like you, and starts to punch you in the face.



Principle 2 (Post-fight):


If you continue to inflict violence upon your assailant after they have stopped being an 
immediate threat to you, it’s not self defence

If your hand has been forced, and you have had to inflict violence upon somebody in order to ensure your own safety (or the safety of somebody else), it is important to realize that you are only justified is so doing until the threat has subsided.
When delivering concussive blows to an attacker’s head for example, there is a ladder of force-effect that offers levels of force that may cause an attacker to stop being a threat to you.


1 Attacker chooses to stop their assault as a result of being deterred by being repeatedly hit in the head
2 Attacker becomes disorientated and loses sense of equilibrium as a result of concussion to the brain
3 Attacker starts to lose consciousness as a result of concussion to the brain
4 Attacker loses consciousness completely as a result of concussion to the brain
5 Attacker dies (usually indirectly) due to concussive force on the brain. (To clarify, this usually only happens when a blunt weapon is used or if the person falls to the ground, hitting their head on a surface such as the pavement – hence the notion of indirectly causing death. There are also pre-existing medical conditions to be considered)


I train students to aim for causing full unconsciousness in an attacker, for the reason that in a real violent encounter, your strikes will rarely have the same effect they have in training (for several reasons) and therefore to aim high up on that ladder of force. However, it is also made clear that if the attacker stops being an attacker at any point leading up to this, then you are legally obliged to stop! For example, if the attacker’s offensive capability is suddenly neutralized as they become more concerned with staying on their feet due to them being so overwhelmed by the feeling of disorientation and dizziness imparted by your strikes, then the opportunity for you to escape may have been made available to you. In which case, it would behoove you both legally and tactically to make good your escape. Likewise, if your aggressor turns out to be less of a threat than they originally presented themselves as being, and they choose to cease their offensive actions and make it clear they have done so; you must stop your own violent actions. To clarify, this would be somebody who initiated the fight suddenly asking you to stop hitting them as they try to get away from you! A rare occurrence I’m sure, but one in which you have been made the attacker if you do not stop as soon as you realize that they no longer pose a threat.
With regard to knowing when to ‘stop’ there is of course the panic-factor to be considered. In a life and death situation, the defender will likely be highly emotionally charged and be suffering from diminished brain function due to the effects of adrenaline and other factors. The point being, that after having had to access this emergency survival instinct that has allowed to you fight off an attacker, it will likely be very difficult to stop at the appropriate point. And therefore, this should be addressed in training by using the appropriate drills. But even then, this will always be a factor and one that may simply rely upon the understanding of a jury…

Mid-fight misconceptions


Once, when teaching an eye compression technique where the thumb is pressed against the attacker’s eye, I was asked by one student “Is it illegal to poke people’s eyes?”
The idea that an individual ‘move’ can be considered illegal unto itself in self defence is demonstrative of not only the effect sport fighting has on the general public’s understanding of self defence, but also a desire to micro-manage fighting.
In reality, when you’re life is in danger you will do whatever you can/have to in order to survive. And so attacking people’s eyes, for example, is highly illegal if the person you’re doing it to happens to be sitting at a bus stop minding their own business. But if they happen to be trying to kill you at the time…
Like in any good self defence system, I provide my students with a use-of-force continuum that states quite clearly what level of force is appropriate for any given form of attack. I keep it as broad and general as possible, not wanting to micro-manage. However, if you remove the verbal and body language tactics it can actually be simplified further as we look only at the physical force responses. Essentially I teach two forms of self defence; the high-level force system for surviving serious violence, and a smaller collection of low-force options.
The high-level force system primarily revolves around delivering impact to an attacker’s head region as a means of stopping them from seriously harming or killing you or a third party. Hitting people in the head is serious business (as is pressing your thumb against their eye in order move their head into a better position to facilitate such striking). It is in fact, potentially lethal – much more so than karate chopping people in the throat like some instructors would have you believe - but it is also the most efficient means of stopping an attacker. One may ask then, when is it right to use such force? Well, providing that you’ve followed principles one and two, then the other person should be making it perfectly clear if you should be delivering blunt trauma to his brain. If you’re in doubt as to whether you should be hitting this person, then you probably shouldn’t be. However, if his fists are bouncing off your head or he is reaching for a knife for example, this would be a good time to start hitting him! Quite simply, this is an emergency combat response. ‘Emergency’ being a word that is not used hardly enough in the self defence world, in my opinion. People often forget that what they are training for, what they are preparing for, is what will be the worst day of their life. In a scenario in which your life depends on your ability to inflict violence upon another person, there really is no unarmed technique that in itself can be considered illegal. Any illegality would come about when said technique is used when it did not need to be (see principles 1 & 2!).
The low-force options I offer are for the much more trickier scenario of being presented with somebody who is not yet a serious threat but perhaps has the potential to become one, or is perhaps offering a low level of violence and can not be avoided or stopped by reasoning with the subject. Fortunately, you are more likely to be confronted with such a scenario as opposed to being stabbed or beaten to death. Unfortunately, these situations can be a lot more difficult to deal with – morally and legally speaking. To give an example of when low-force options may be required, imagine somebody (maybe even a friend or family member) who has had too much to drink and has become a danger to themselves and others. Perhaps they have turned their attention to you and have started to get a bit ‘grabby’. You try to gently get them off of you, but they persist further. Can/would you knock this person out? What if you can’t reason with them? What if the environment/situation won’t allow you or others to avoid them? Difficult isn’t it.
It’s for this reason that the low-force options revolve around grappling where as the high-level force system is impact-based. With basic anti- and counter- grappling concepts you can escape the clutches of those who might grab you and even restrain/contain/relocate them in a way that doesn’t cause them serious injury. Try this on somebody who is hell-bent on hurting/killing you, however, and you’ll soon see why this is reserved only for low-level threats and for use against individuals who do not possess a considerable size/strength advantage.
To summarize; don’t be overly concerned with what techniques are appropriate or not with regards to unarmed combat. Consider the bigger picture of whether you are in immediate serious danger or not.

Incident management


Apart from the two basic principles, I offer my students a small collection of tips for compounding their legal high-ground that fall under ‘pre-contact’, ‘mid-fight’, and ‘post-incident’. Consider some things that you should be doing before, during and after having to defend yourself that would make it abundantly clear to any third parties that it is indeed YOU who is the victim – even if it is the other person who may end up in hospital. Think; CCTV, eyewitnesses, police officers who arrive on the scene and possibly a jury who is having the series of events described to them.

Conclusion: take the legalities of what you are training for seriously. Understand and accept that you are training to become proficient at violence – i.e. hurting people. Know that a serious violent encounter will require a high level of force from you. If you are unsuccessful at delivering this, you could be seriously hurt or killed. If you succeed then you have likely seriously hurt somebody else – whether they forced you to do it or not, this is a serious thing and you must be prepared to have your actions questioned. 

Further information and learning


http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/self_defence/
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Self-defence


Also highly recommended is to analyze footage of real incidents on websites such as YouTube or LiveLeak. Based on the two basic principles, see if you can clearly define who the defender is and if any of their actions were justified or not.

Sharif Haque
Tactical Protection Systems

Disclaimer: I haven’t been to any sort of law school and therefore am not qualified to give legal advice in any formal capacity. What I am, is an instructor in the use of force, which involves teaching people of the legalities surrounding the subject – based on my own (humble) research and understanding.