VICTORY, not SURVIVAL: War, not “Fighting”–A Look at Warrior Flow Combatives

By Jack Kerwick

Image of 101 year Old Armenian Woman Protecting Her Home

Legion in the martial arts community are those who spend no small measure of time in venues and on forums of various sorts debating over what, if any, is the superior art.

By “superior,” it’s critical to grasp, is meant something like most conducive to winning against an opponent in a real street fight.

There are undoubtedly some skilled martial artists and seasoned street fighters who make insightful contributions to these conversations.  Yet the fact that they would spend a fraction of a second paying this question the slightest thought exposes a profound, elementary flaw in their training—irrespectively of the art in which it is they happen to train.

Let’s be blunt, for this topic is, quite literally, a matter of life or death:

The topic that commands the attention of these practitioners of the martial and pugilistic arts on their forums of choice is utterly irrelevant to the only question on which they should be focused.  If they are instructors, they do their students a grave disservice by preoccupying themselves with bullshit concerning whose karate and Kung Fu is best. 

“Martial” means of or pertaining to war.  The martial arts, in their historical, truest sense, are the warrior arts.  And warriors don’t “fight” against “opponents” with an eye toward besting them.

Rather, that for which warriors train is nothing more and nothing less than the annihilation of the enemy from the land of the living.

Annihilation. Of. The. Enemy.

So, the ultimate question, that to which all others must be subordinate, is this:

Does my training prepare me, at a millisecond’s notice, to kill, unapologetically, with all of the brutal efficiency that the human imagination can conjure, any and all two-legged predators that wage war on the lawful?   

Talk of besting “opponents” in “fights” is the talk of sport. Implicitly, even if not explicitly, those who engage in such talk are subconsciously conditioning themselves for confrontations on the streets that they continue to conceive as analogous to sporting matches, the adult’s version, say, of the proverbial schoolyard scrap.  Nor can this subconscious conditioning be avoided, for as practitioners of Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (NLP) and other scientists have long established, the language we use shapes and reflects our beliefs, which in turn shape our behaviors, which in turn shape our language, and so forth and so on in a perpetual, self-reinforcing loop.

Hence, those who think in the terms of a sports lexicon will train for sport.

Many of the comments made during the course of these discussions regarding ground grappling, wrist locks, joint manipulations, arm bars, leg sweeps, pressure points, choke holds, and, in general, the virtual infallibility (to judge from their descriptions) of all MMA fighting, boxing, and wrestling techniques make this point in spades.

My thesis regarding the fundamental flaw in the training paradigm within which contributors operate is further supported by the experiences that they share.  They will recount, for example, confrontations in which they were involved that were preceded by either eye fucking, shit-talking, or any number of other signals that should’ve been spotted and addressed so that the confrontation could’ve been preempted.  Or some will refer to the techniques that they applied to some “wise ass” or “tough guy” after the latter did or attempted to do something to them.

The problem here should be obvious:  There is no “fighting” for students of the warrior arts.  As veteran combat instructor Bradley Steiner memorably insisted: “Self-defense is war in microcosm.”

It is worth considering two other quotations from Professor Steiner that are especially germane to the topic at hand:

“Many who resort to violence at the first slight hint of what they think of as ‘disrespect,’ or a challenge to their manhood, or as a need to quickly beat someone—before he beats them, etc. do so because they are not skilled enough to feel the inner confidence that comes from being genuinely prepared” (emphases added)[.]

“…In fact, it is the person who lacks skill and confidence in his abilities who is the most likely to become needlessly volatile, and get into avoidable encounters with others” (emphasis original).

To further make the point, he once shared a quotation (by a Charley Reese) in his monthly newsletter that cut to the heart of the matter:

“The truly dangerous man dresses inconspicuously and is soft-spoken.  He walks away from most confrontations.  The only time you learn that the truly dangerous man is mad at you is a split second before you die, for he never fights.  He only kills. The truly dangerous man knows that fighting is what children do and killing is what men do” (emphases added).

The only justification for real world violence is the protection of self and those innocents within the self’s orbit against the aggressions of predators.  And then—then—when violence is warranted, the use of that violence must be instantaneous, overwhelming, and at least potentially homicidal.  Whether one thinks that the choice to kill the enemy is the best choice will depend upon one’s intuitive assessment of the unique circumstances within which the confrontation unfolds.  If, though, it is the best choice, then by all means the defender, the Warrior, should extinguish the enemy’s existence without further ado.

And if there are multiple enemies? Then, as Master Al Ridenhour, founder of Warrior Flow Combatives, instructs his students: Under no uncertain terms, all attackers must all die.

They. Must. All. Die.

Warrior Flow Combatives, from what I have gathered, is indeed unique among the warrior arts inasmuch as its training modality, in both its physical and, crucially, mental aspects, is predicated upon the assumption that self-defense is war and, thus, those who train for war train to become lethal warriors.

Students in Warrior Flow do not train to fight. They train to reduce predators to prey, to become the incarnation of the enemy’s worst nightmares, to paralyze the enemy with the same terror that the enemy exists to induce in others.  Students train so that, through sheer will, if and when they must, they can, in effect, nuke the enemy to kingdom come. And if they choose to spare his life, he will be forever haunted by the trauma that he suffered at their hands (and their arms, elbows, feet, legs, and/or whatever other extensions of their natural weapons with which they may opt to bludgeon him).

This is the mindset that Warrior Flow Combatives inculcates in students.  It should be the mindset of all students of the martial arts.

Regretfully, those who are fixated upon determining who can kick whose ass in class, in a bar, or even on the streets, and who concern themselves with figuring out whether a guy who trains in Tae Kwon Do can beat a trained Mixed Martial Artist, a boxer, or a student of BJJ have not only got their priorities ass backwards. They are preventing themselves from becoming as good as they can be in order to prevail in the only “fight” that ultimately matters: the “fight” of and for their lives.

This oversight, needless to say, can get them killed.  Worse, if they are instructors, their oversight can get their students killed.

It’s almost incredible that any of this needs to be pointed out.  Those who undertake any martial or pugilistic art do so because they believe that in so doing they will acquire the skills necessary to protect themselves against violent attackers.  This being so, it should go without saying that to achieve this end, they must acquire the physical and psychological virtues necessary to go scorched Earth on the violent.  If the art doesn’t supply these skills, then it is not a genuine martial art, for unless one goes Hiroshima and Nagasaki on predators, predators will do just this to those upon whom they prey.  

This is the governing philosophy of Warrior Flow Combatives.  It restores the martial to the martial arts. More will be said about its training modality in a future article.

For now, though, I end this article by reiterating its thesis, a service announcement to all martial artists: Focus on what matters.