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Foreword—by Rory Miller

If you fight, you fight for a goal and you fight in an environment. That is almost too obvious to write, but sometimes things need to be put into words or you lose track of obvious truths. When you lose track of obvious truths, you start to believe that a particular system, technique, or strategy is “right” when it is good only in a specific environment and aimed only at one of many possible goals.

I’ll wager that any martial art you might study has a high degree of efficiency, that is, in the environment from which it evolved and when used to achieve the goal the system defined as the win.

Think about this: Modern jujitsu, think Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ), is highly efficient, but doesn’t look much like old, say pre-1650 Japanese jujutsu (JJJ). Old school JJJ doesn’t have a lot of submissions and doesn’t believe in spending much time working an opponent. Those strategies didn’t make sense on a medieval battlefield where two guys grappling on the ground were easy kills for the spearmen on either side.

If the geniuses who founded BJJ (and I’m not talking about the people trying to ret-rofit it to fit the modern law enforcement or military “market”) had lived in a time and place where the battlefield was the testing ground and a spear in the back was the penalty for “delay of game,” the system would have looked much different. I bet it still would have been very efficient.

There are environmental factors in training as well. A system that takes a “lifetime to master” didn’t have much utility to someone who was going into battle as soon as he reached puberty, and did “lifetime to master” mean the same thing, or even get said when the life expectancy was in the low 20s?

Modern systems designed for military recruits—young men full of testosterone and at peak fitness—don’t require the same degree of efficiency as a system designed to protect the old and vulnerable from assault. Further, as battle changed over the centuries from a bloody hand-to-hand melee to a bloody technology-driven firefight, it made less and less sense to spend precious training time on unarmed fighting.

And one more point, from the environmental side: many of our martial arts systems predate the concept of self-defense law. In a world without effective police and courts, vengeance and the destruction of any serious threat made sense. The logical 1800 Okinawan solution to being attacked may risk prison time today. The world has changed.

In this book, Wilder and Kane talk about the other dimension: how goals, what you are fighting for, change every element of how you fight.

In a sport environment you want to win, quickly and decisively, but with solid assurance that your opponent will be able to get back up and play again tomorrow. In a combat situation you want to win quickly and decisively, but with solid assurance that your foe cannot get up and re-engage until you are long gone, if ever.

If you are trying to get the car keys from your drunken uncle or breaking up a family fight, not only do you want zero injury, but you are not dealing with trained competitors and the person you are throwing, locking, or striking may not be capable of protecting him or herself. That puts the responsibility for both the throw AND the fall entirely on you.

Self-defense is the biggest change and the hardest of all—you must make your technique work whatever your goal sometimes to incapacitate the threat, sometimes simply to escape—when you have already taken damage, your structure is compromised and applied against a threat who is bigger, stronger, and has complete tactical advantage. That’s the baseline for surviving assault and it is a world beyond the difference between sport and war.

Simple changes in goals profoundly change how you prioritize your choices (weapons are unacceptable when drunk-wrangling but the first choice in combat) and how you execute your technique (at least one koryu version of osoto gari collapses the trachea, blows out the knees, and dumps the threat on his back).

What the authors have done in this book is simply to give you a taste. Don’t try to memorize the differences in application between a technique used on an enemy and a drunk. Try to understand the differences and then take a hard look at your own training. Knowing that there is a difference between submitting an opponent and disabling an enemy is not the same as practicing the difference, nor is it a guarantee that you can switch to the appropriate mindset at the right time.

If you are preserving a quick-killing soldier’s art from the old days, what must be modified to handle someone you don’t wish to hurt? What must you learn to bring it in line with a legal environment the founders never imagined?

Studying one thing is not, and never can be, studying everything.

Train hard. Pay attention. Ask questions. Do your best to always be clear about what you are really doing and why.

Rory Miller is the author of Meditations on Violence, Violence: A Writer’s Guide, Facing Violence, and Force Decisions, among others, and co-author (with Lawrence Kane) of Scaling Force. His writings have also been featured in Loren Christensen’s Fighter’s Fact Book 2, Kane/Wilder’s The Little Black Book of Violence, and The Way to Black Belt. He has been studying martial arts since 1981. Though he started in competitive martial sports, earning college varsities in judo and fencing, he found his martial “home” in the early Tokugawa-era battlefield system of Sosuishi-ryu kumi uchi (jujutsu).

A veteran corrections officer and Corrections Emergency Response Team (CERT) leader, Rory has hands-on experience in hundreds of violent altercations. He has designed and taught courses for law enforcement agencies including confrontational simulations, uncontrolled environments, crisis communications with the mentally ill, CERT operations and planning, defensive tactics, and use of force policy. His training also includes witness protection, close-quarters handgun, Americans for Effective Law Enforcement (AELE) discipline and internal investigations, hostage negotiations, and survival and integrated use of force.

He recently spent a year in Iraq helping the government there develop its prison management system. Rory currently teaches seminars on violence internationally, and in partnership with Marc MacYoung has developed Conflict Communications, a definitive resource for understanding and controlling conflict. Rory’s website is www.chirontraining.com. He lives near Portland, Oregon.