Reportedly, anonymous sources within Kash Patel’s FBI have described as “surreal” and “whacky” his plan to have his agents train in MMA (Mixed Martial Arts).
This comes as no surprise.
The FBI has (until recently) enjoyed the distinction of being the premiere law enforcement agency of the land. Its officers are expected to frustrate the designs of the worst of the worst actors. This being the case, it is imperative that they be grounded in reality. And since exposure to and training in the mastery of the use of hand-to-hand violence is a reality-check second to none, Patel undoubtedly recognizes that his officers would benefit from them developing the skill and the will to stop the bad guys dead in their tracks.
Responsible gun owners, particularly those who are licensed to carry, are more careful than anyone to avoid any and all avoidable confrontations that could result in the use of their weapon.
Similarly, those who train in the arts of war, the martial arts, are just as careful to avoid nonsense, for they take to heart the sage counsel of the great 17th century Japanese Samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi:
“The ultimate aim of martial arts is not having to use them.”
Martial training generally, and martial mastery specifically, facilitate a self-assurance that few other activities can supply. The confidence in one’s ability to fight, to prevail in a potentially mortal conflict, and under the adrenaline-charged conditions of a life-threatening attack on one’s person and/or one’s own, can go a long way toward preempting precisely the sort of panic that can and has made bad situations even worse.
Patel’s idea, however, was almost certain to be met with resistance by some within the FBI—just as similar proposed martial programs would have been and, in fact, have been greeted by opposition by some within the military and other law enforcement agencies. The reason for this is simple:
Many guys do not want to be punched in the face.
More precisely, 21st century Americans (males and females alike) who enter the military or law enforcement have few if any mental obstacles to training to become adept in the use of guns. Indeed, had they not been psychologically disposed to it in advance, they would not have gravitated toward these professions. Yet training to become deadly with a gun is worlds apart from training to become just deadly.
Just as it is far easier to visit mass death and destruction upon the enemy from tens of thousands of feet in the air than it is shoot him down from a few yards away on the ground, so it is easier to shoot the enemy, to say nothing of shooting him from a distance, than it is to stab him, or to bludgeon him to death with an instrument.
And it is easier to bring about the enemy’s demise with artificial weaponry than it is to do so with one’s natural weaponry, one’s own body.
The bottom line is that while people, specifically men, can accept that other men can outshoot them, that they could be dropped by a bullet, they have a far more difficult time conceding the possibility that other men could finish them off without the aid of any artificial weaponry.
Yet because human beings will fight as they train, as Musashi noted, it is only by way of a training methodology that simulates, to as great an extent possible, the real-world dynamics of a potentially deadly confrontation that people can make themselves into the warriors that they need to become in order to surmount this fear. Such a method will necessarily require students to get hit, hit repeatedly, and hit, not just hard, but with an intention on the part of their instructors, or of their training partners, that they’ll know in the very marrow of their being aims to give them a near-death experience.
Only by feeling this intention will they develop their bodies to both evade the incoming strikes as well as to strike with the same authority.
So, all of this being said, while Patel is to be commended for aspiring to implement a training program for his agents, he is mistaken in thinking that MMA is the most conducive means to this end.
And this is because MMA is sport.
Yet there is nothing remotely sportive about a genuine martial art. “Martial” means “of or pertaining to war.” Historically speaking, this didn’t need to be noted for anyone as it was self-evident that the practitioners of the martial arts trained first and foremost for the sake of deploying their skills in war-making on the battlefield. Martial artists were warriors—both by definition and in point of fact.
Or we can put the point even more bluntly: The essence of a true martial art is, ultimately, homicidal in character. It’s practitioners train to transform themselves into weapons of mass destruction. There are many other fruits to reap from the study of a martial art, but the overarching purpose, the telos, of the art is make its students into maximally efficient killing contraptions, peerless combatants.
There are doubtless those, including many a Second Amendment enthusiast as well as those within the martial arts/self-defense world, who would object to this characterization of the martial arts. As to the rational grounds upon which they’d object, it’s not easy to discern any:
Anyone who supports the right of American citizens (and beyond) to use firearms for the defense of themselves and others supports, logically, the right of human beings to, if need be, kill those who would imminently threaten innocents. In other words, since guns are, by design, lethal weapons, they realize that self-defense will sometimes demand that the defender end the life of the assailant, and that until and unless people have the physical and psychological resources to do just this, their chances of successfully defending themselves will never be as good as they otherwise would be.
Similarly, martial arts instructors whose systems are shaped by the paradigm of sport fail to teach their students how best to defend themselves in the event that they or their loved ones face an imminent threat. This is because they don’t teach their students how, with as much quickness, creativity, and brutal efficiency as the situation requires, to remove their attackers from the land of the living.
FBI agents, as well as all decent civilians, should, strictly for purposes of defending themselves and their loved ones against the predations of predators, train in a martial art, an art of war.
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