VICTORY, not SURVIVAL: Warrior Flow Combatives Part I

By Jack Kerwick

In a previous essay, I noted the inherent deficiencies of all technique-based, real world self-defense combat systems that stress survival as the ultimate aim of a violent confrontation.

A brief recap:

The techniques taught not only tend to be selectively redacted from the intricate constellation of natural movements in which human bodies can and do routinely engage, and the end of “survival,” mere survival that these systems stress fails to convict students of the righteousness of their cause.

Thus, they fail to ready students to the extent that they can and must be prepared in the event that students have to send human predators (HINOs: Human-In-Name-Only) to the Afterworld.

The will—the moral will—is every bit as essential to self-defense as is physical prowess.  This being so, survival, being a base, morally-neutral goal, simply will not and cannot set that will aflame.  Consider:

The world is full of victims who have survived all manner of brutally violent attacks.  Yet while they live, they live forever scarred by the haunting memories of the attacks and their attackers that are seared into their minds.

Fuck survival.  To be more precise, fuck assigning it categorical value when it comes to violence in the cause of self-protection.

Survival?  It is inconceivable that Americans ever regarded their country’s survival as the raison d’etre of any of the wars in which it was involved.  Never.  Support depended upon framing the end of war in terms of nothing less than victory, and always for the sake of some ideal or other.

Cockroaches survive. So too do losers.

Winners don’t seek to merely survive.  Winners are warriors who seek to flourish as they insure that their sword prevails in battle over that of the enemy.

This is the indispensable attitude, the Warrior’s spirit that any system ostensibly designed to make decent human beings comfortable with the prospect of using potentially lethal violence must inculcate within its students.  If the system lacks that spirit, though, it obviously can’t pass it on to others.

There is one system that not only embodies the Warrior’s spirit, but does so categorically, explicitly, and unapologetically.  And it is called, not coincidentally, “Warrior Flow Combatives.”

Founded by retired USMC Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour, Warrior Flow is intended to be an express repudiation of the prevailing Statist paradigm according to which only “the Sheepdog,” commissioned State actors, have the authority and the competency to protect law-abiding citizens, “the Sheep,” from “the Wolf,” those HINOs who prey upon the vulnerable.  Warrior Flow is predicated on the supposition, born out by not just the experience of its founder, but the experience of the human race, that warriors are not born; they are made.  Moreover, it recognizes in all human beings precisely that grand moral truth that Americans have unequivocally affirmed since the birth of their country, the truth that all men and women are the recipients of those divine dispensations that have been characterized as inalienable rights, the most basic of which, obviously, is the right to protect one’s very existence.

In short, from the outset, Warrior Flow affirms in its students both their potential ability and their right to protect themselves. In fact, Warrior Flow underscores as well one’s duty to protect oneself (and one’s own).  As Ridenhour states:

“Let me be very clear here! You and I have every right and moral obligation to not only protect our lives, but those of our loved ones as well, and you are not required to give up that right just because you’re not a cop.”

He adds: “Nor do you give up the right to defend your nation just because you’re not in the military, even if you’ve never served.”

Getting the picture?

Ridenhour—“Master Al,” “Colonel Al,” or just Al, to those who know him—elaborates further:

“Listen, I really don’t like that [Sheepdog] analogy.  I mean I get it and understand what they are saying, but let’s get something straight: The Sheepdog works for the rancher, not the sheep, because he knows that if the wolf kills any of the sheep, he doesn’t eat that evening. Now me?  I prefer to make people into Lions or Lionesses [yes, Warrior Flow assumes that women too can be made into warriors], you know why?  Because neither wolves nor sheepdogs hunt Lions.”

Ridenhour is emphatic:

“In a world of sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves, be a Lion!”

Fucking right.

Yet, as should be obvious to readers, particularly anyone who is so much as remotely familiar with any and every self-styled self-defense system, Warrior Flow’s orientation doesn’t just repudiate the Sheepdog idolatry of Statism.  By extension, it as well repudiates the covert Statism that has surreptitiously slipped into other combative systems, namely all others that stress survival as the supreme end of violence.

As we’ve seen, survival—not one’s God-given right and duty to defeat, by whichever means necessary, any and all attempts made by aggressors to imperil one’s life, but, base, primal, survival—is morally-neutral.  As such, students who train in a system that makes survival the sole, ultimate end of real-world violence do not train in cultivating the moral will to crush the enemy from first to last (to paraphrase the legendary Samurai Warrior, Miyamoto Musashi).

This explains why the founders and instructors of these systems focus on, well, survival, and how, in so doing, they treat human beings in search of the ability and the will to protect themselves and theirs from HINOs more like roaches and rodents and not at all like persons, to say nothing of warriors.

In other words, while students are taught the necessity of unleashing deadly violence in potentially deadly encounters with human predators, it’s hard not to miss the latently apologetic undertone in the messaging: Use violence, yes, but do so with a heavy heart and a sad face.

The tacit idea here is that violence, though necessary, is a necessary evil. 

As long as students, virtually all of whom are otherwise decent people who would prefer not to ever be violent with anyone, and many of whom may have never even been in a fistfight, are being led to suspect, even if subconsciously, that there is something inherently bad about all uses of violence, irrespectively of context or motivation, then this suspicion could function as a clog in their psyches.

And this clog could get them killed.

Memorably, General George Patton remarked to American soldiers during WWII:

“Now, I want you to remember that no son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country.  He won it by making the other poor dumb son of a bitch die for his country.”

There are multiple accounts of Patton’s exact words, and his message was but another variation of a message that military men from the 19^th century had been conveying.

It is, in so many words, the message that Warrior Flow instructors convey to their students, for in training their students, they see themselves as training soldiers for war, the fight for and of their lives.  Can any other self-defense system claim to do the same for their students?  As long as they frame the information they impart in terms of survival, the answer to this question must be a resounding no.

In the next installment of this series, we will begin to delve into how the system of Warrior Flow Combatives makes their students into warriors.