I grew up with an understanding of faith that I suspect is familiar to many modern Christians. God was conceived, more or less, as a person, an enormously powerful, invisible, supernatural person who existed somewhere beyond the physical world, who had created it, watched over it, and occasionally intervened in it. To have faith meant believing that this God existed even though His existence could not be demonstrated in the ordinary way we demonstrate other facts. Faith occupied the space left by evidence. Where knowledge ended, faith began. That understanding creates an obvious place for doubt. Does this invisible being actually exist? Is there sufficient evidence for Him? Are the stories about Him true? The believer answers yes, the atheist answers no, and the agnostic remains unconvinced. Faith becomes primarily an argument about whether a particular being belongs on the inventory of things that exist.

But that is not how one of Christianity’s greatest theologians understood God. Thomas Aquinas described God as actus purus, “pure act”, and ipsum esse subsistens, roughly, “subsistent Being itself.” Those phrases can sound impenetrable until we understand the problem Aquinas was trying to solve. Everything we encounter exists and changes. An acorn can become an oak. A child can become an adult. Cold water can become hot. Something that is merely possible becomes real. Drawing upon Aristotle, Aquinas called the unrealized capacity potential, and its realization act. “Actuality,” in this older philosophical vocabulary, does not simply mean that something is real. It describes potential brought into realized existence.

Aquinas then asks us to follow the problem all the way down. Everything we observe depends upon something else for its existence, its change, or its becoming. What ultimately accounts for there being anything at all? What accounts for a reality in which potential can become actual? His answer is God, not simply another object somewhere beyond the universe possessing greater powers than the objects within it, but the ultimate ground of existence and becoming, the source that does not itself require some still deeper source to make it actual. This is what Aquinas means by actus purus. And when he says that God’s essence and existence are identical, he makes the even more radical claim that God does not merely have existence as we do. God is, at the deepest level, Being itself. This is a very different God from the anthropomorphic figure I imagined as a child. And strangely enough, when we move backward from medieval theology into the oldest biblical language, Aquinas begins to seem less strange.

I Am

When Moses asks the name of the God speaking to him from the burning bush, Exodus 3:14 gives one of the most extraordinary answers in Scripture:

אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה

Ehyeh asher ehyeh.

Conventionally:

“I AM WHO I AM.”

The Hebrew ehyeh comes from the verb hayah: to be, to become, to happen, to come to pass. Because of the nature of the Hebrew verb, the phrase can also carry a future sense: “I will be what I will be.” We should be careful not to force later philosophy into ancient Hebrew. Exodus does not contain a treatise on Thomistic metaphysics. But neither does God answer Moses by describing what sort of creature He is. The divine name is mysteriously entangled with being itself, and that connection was not lost on Aquinas.

The opening of Genesis adds another dimension:

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים

Bereshit bara Elohim.

“In the beginning God created…”

God is associated not merely with Being, but with bringing into being. Then, almost immediately:

רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים

Ruach Elohim.

The ruach of God moves over the waters. Ruach can mean wind, breath, or spirit. That same conceptual association appears later in Greek pneuma and Latin spiritus: wind, breath, spirit. Even our word animate descends from Latin anima: breath, life, soul. The ancient languages repeatedly reach toward the mystery of life through the image of breath, something invisible but perceptible through what it does. Then God speaks, and order emerges. Light and darkness separate. Waters divide. Land appears. Life emerges. Eventually human consciousness appears. Whether we approach Genesis as history, theology, poetry, or some combination of them, its conceptual movement is unmistakable: Being. Action. Order. Life.

In the Beginning Was the Logos

Centuries later, the Gospel of John deliberately begins by echoing Genesis:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος

En archē ēn ho Logos.

Usually:

“In the beginning was the Word.”

But Word is an impoverished English translation if we hear it merely as a spoken word. Greek logos carried a remarkable range of meanings: word, account, explanation, reason, rational expression, principle. Greek philosophers had already used Logos in thinking about the intelligible order of reality long before John wrote his Gospel. And John immediately tells us what this Logos does:

πάντα δι᾽ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο

panta di’ autou egeneto.

“All things came into being through him.”

The verb egeneto, from ginomai, means to become, arise, happen, come into being. Then John says:

ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν

en autō zōē ēn.

“In him was life.”

Once again we encounter Being. Becoming. Order. Life. The word force seems inadequate for what these writers are trying to describe. In modern usage, especially after physics gave it a technical meaning, a force is something that acts upon something else that already exists. But we are asking a deeper question: What accounts for existence itself, for becoming, for the intelligible order through which existence develops, and ultimately for the emergence of life and consciousness? “Principle” seems too passive. “Force” seems too mechanical. “Being” alone seems too static. Perhaps that difficulty is itself instructive. We are attempting to name something our language cannot contain in a single word. Our ancestors called it God.

What Would We Doubt?

This changes the problem of faith. If God is imagined as an invisible anthropomorphic being, asking “Does God exist?” makes perfect sense. God becomes a hypothesis. Faith then becomes believing the hypothesis despite whatever evidentiary uncertainty remains. But if God is our name for the ultimate ground of Being and becoming, for whatever ultimately accounts for the fact that there is existence, order, becoming, life, and consciousness, then the question changes categories. What exactly are we doubting?

We can doubt what God is. We can doubt whether God possesses anything analogous to human personality. We can question whether our theology describes God accurately. We can question particular interpretations of Scripture. We can question whether our ancestors understood correctly what they experienced. We can question whether some inherited religious rule expresses something fundamental about reality or merely the circumstances of an ancient society. There is enormous room for uncertainty. But there is no reasonable uncertainty that there is something to understand. Reality is. Things become. The universe exhibits sufficient regularity for stars and planets to form, chemistry to operate, organisms to live, nervous systems to evolve, consciousness to emerge, and minds produced by that process to discover mathematical regularities in the universe that produced them. The mystery is not whether reality exists. The mystery is what it ultimately is. That is a very different place from which to approach faith.

What Did “Faith” Originally Mean?

The English word faith comes through Old French from Latin fides. Fides did not principally mean accepting a proposition without evidence. It meant trust, confidence, fidelity, reliability, good faith, faithfulness. We still preserve this meaning in words such as fidelity, confide, confidence, fiduciary, and bona fide. The Greek word most commonly translated as faith in the New Testament is πίστις, pistis, whose semantic field includes faith, trust, confidence, fidelity, faithfulness, reliability. Its related adjective, pistos, can mean faithful or trustworthy.

The Hebrew background takes us deeper still. One of the central Hebrew roots is אמן , ʾ-M-N. From this family comes אֱמוּנָה, emunah, meaning firmness, steadfastness, fidelity, faithfulness, trustworthiness. And from the same root comes a word almost every Christian knows: אָמֵן, amen. The underlying cluster of ideas is not irrational belief. It is firmness, reliability, trustworthiness, and therefore trust. This gives us an extraordinary historical progression: emunah → pistis → fides → faith. And somewhere along the way, particularly in modern usage, faith came increasingly to be heard as believing something that cannot be proven. Something important was lost.

Abraham Did Not Merely Believe a Proposition

Genesis 15:6 tells us of Abraham:

וְהֶאֱמִן בַּיהוָה

wehe’emin ba-YHWH.

Usually:

“And he believed in the LORD.”

But he’emin comes from that same Hebrew root, אמן. Abraham isn’t simply checking YES beside the proposition God exists. He places his trust in God. He treats God as trustworthy. That distinction becomes enormously important when the idea passes into Greek Christianity. Faith isn’t primarily intellectual assent concerning whether God exists. It is trust in and fidelity toward that which is trustworthy. And if fidelity is the concept, conduct cannot be separated from it.

You cannot coherently say, “I am completely faithful to my wife, but I never behave faithfully.” Nor can I meaningfully claim complete trust in a bridge while refusing under any circumstances to place my weight upon it. Trust becomes visible through action. Fidelity exists through conduct. Perhaps this is why James writes, “I will show you my pistis by my works,” and then makes the devastating observation that mere belief cannot be enough: even the demons believe. If faith means intellectual acceptance of God’s existence, the demons qualify. If pistis means trust, fidelity, and faithful orientation toward God, obviously they do not. James’s famous declaration that “faith without works is dead” then becomes considerably less mysterious. Faith without works is dead because fidelity without faithful conduct is almost a contradiction in terms.

Peterson’s “As If”

Jordan Peterson has approached this problem from an interesting direction. Rather than simply declaring belief in God, he has famously preferred formulations along the lines of acting as if God exists. His deeper insight is important: what someone genuinely believes should ultimately appear in his behavior. But “as if God exists” preserves the very problem we have been examining. It still imagines God’s existence as an unresolved proposition: Perhaps God exists. Perhaps God does not. I will behave as though He does.

But if God is understood in something closer to Aquinas’s sense, as the ultimate ground of Being and becoming, what would it mean to behave as if God exists? What is the alternative? To behave as if Being is not? We do not need to act as if reality exists. We are already within it. The question is not whether we can convince ourselves that God exists. The question becomes: Can we live faithfully within the reality for which God is our inherited name? And this brings us back to Jesus.

Consider the Lilies

In Matthew 6, Jesus addresses human anxiety about food, clothing, and tomorrow. His method is fascinating: he tells his listeners to look. “Look at the birds of the heavens.” Then:

καταμάθετε τὰ κρίνα τοῦ ἀγροῦ πῶς αὐξάνουσιν

katamathete ta krina tou agrou pōs auxanousin.

Usually:

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.”

But katamathete carries the sense of observe carefully, examine, learn from. Look at them. Study them. Learn from how they grow. That is hardly a rejection of evidence; it is an appeal to observation. Jesus points his followers toward the natural world and says, in effect, pay attention to what reality is showing you. The lilies do not possess theology. They do not struggle intellectually with whether God exists. They grow. They become what their nature makes possible.

Then Jesus reaches his conclusion:

ζητεῖτε δὲ πρῶτον τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ

Zēteite de prōton tēn basileian tou theou kai tēn dikaiosynēn autou.

“Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.”

Basileia can mean not merely a geographical kingdom but kingship, reign, or rule, while dikaiosynē carries the ideas of righteousness, justice, rightness. Look at reality. Learn from it. Then seek first to live under God’s rule and in right relationship with it. That is an extraordinarily different picture of faith from closing one’s eyes and believing without evidence.

Faith Like a Mustard Seed

This also changes one of Jesus’ most familiar sayings. Matthew 17:20 gives us:

ἐὰν ἔχητε πίστιν ὡς κόκκον σινάπεως

ean echēte pistin hōs kokkon sinapeōs.

Usually understood as:

“If you have faith the size of a mustard seed…”

But the Greek literally gives us pistin hōs kokkon sinapeōs: faith/trust like a mustard seed. The smallness of the mustard seed clearly matters in Jesus’ teaching, so we should not simply discard the traditional interpretation. But perhaps its size isn’t everything the image has to teach us. What does a mustard seed actually do? It becomes. The seed contains potential. Placed into the order appropriate to its nature, that potential becomes actual. It grows into what it is capable of becoming. The mustard seed doesn’t understand the Logos. It doesn’t need to. It participates in it.

That creates a striking connection with the lilies. A lily cannot decide not to be faithful to its nature. A mustard seed cannot decide that it knows better. Human beings can. Our consciousness gives us extraordinary power precisely because it allows us to imagine things that do not yet exist, choose among possible futures, and reshape the world. But that same capacity allows us to deceive ourselves, rationalize our desires, violate what we know to be true, and behave contrary to the order upon which our own flourishing depends. Perhaps that is why we require faith, not because we must convince ourselves that reality exists, but because we possess the unique capacity to be unfaithful to it.

The Faith of Our Fathers

And that brings us to tradition. Every generation begins life knowing almost nothing, yet none of us actually begins from nothing. We inherit language, morality, family structures, customs, prohibitions, stories, rituals, institutions, virtues, and expectations from people who lived before us. Those traditions are not infallible. Our ancestors could be wrong. They could misunderstand. They could preserve customs whose original circumstances disappeared centuries ago. Institutions can become corrupt. Powerful people can transform useful traditions into instruments of their own interests. Tradition therefore cannot be immune from examination, but neither should it be treated as arbitrary merely because we do not immediately understand it.

Our ancestors were wrestling with the same fundamental realities we are: birth, death, sex, children, love, jealousy, violence, cooperation, betrayal, sacrifice, courage, cowardice, hierarchy, envy, forgiveness, war, suffering, and meaning. They accumulated observations about what allowed families and communities to survive and what destroyed them. Some of that knowledge became explicit philosophy. Much of it was encoded instead in stories, rituals, commandments, taboos, virtues, and institutions. Tradition can therefore contain knowledge whose explanation has been forgotten.

Seen this way, faith toward our inherited traditions need not mean unquestioning obedience. It means granting them a presumption of accumulated wisdom. We should ask why something survived before assuming that its survival proves only the ignorance of those who came before us. That too is fides: trust, without surrendering reason; fidelity, without abandoning inquiry; humility toward knowledge purchased across generations.

Faith After Belief

Perhaps, then, the modern opposition between faith and reason begins with a misunderstanding of both God and faith. If God is imagined as an invisible supernatural person, faith becomes belief that this person exists despite our inability to demonstrate Him. But that is not the only conception Christianity inherited. Aquinas speaks of the ultimate ground of Being and becoming. Exodus gives us “I AM.” Genesis gives us creation, ruach, speech, order, and life. John gives us the Logos through whom all things came to be and in whom was life. And the ancient vocabulary of faith gives us not credulity but trust, fidelity, steadfastness, and faithfulness.

Under that conception, doubt does not disappear. It moves. We should doubt our explanations. We should question our interpretations. We should test our traditions against reality. We should remain profoundly humble about our ability to comprehend whatever ultimately accounts for existence itself. But we are not required to manufacture belief that reality exists. We are confronted by it. The religious question therefore becomes something much more demanding than Do you believe in God? It becomes: How faithfully are you living within the reality God names?

Jesus tells us to look at the birds, study the lilies, consider the seed, and seek first the rule of God and what is right. Perhaps faith was never intended to mean closing our eyes to the evidence and believing anyway. Perhaps it means opening our eyes, looking as deeply as we can at the order into which we were born, listening humbly to what generations before us learned from doing the same, and then having enough trust in what we discover to live accordingly.

The mustard seed does not need to profess its faith.

It grows.

Spend a few minutes watching martial-arts videos online and you will eventually find something impressive. A boxer stands in front of a trainer holding focus mitts while executing an extraordinarily complicated sequence: jab, cross, hook, roll, cross, uppercut, pivot, slip, another combination. The mitts flash from place to place. The trainer occasionally swats at the boxer’s head and the boxer ducks or slips without breaking rhythm. It looks like fighting. More precisely, it looks like extraordinary fighting skill. But watch closely and ask a simple question: Who decided what movement came next?

In much of this kind of training, the trainer did. The boxer may have demonstrated speed, coordination, balance, conditioning, punching mechanics and the ability to execute a complicated sequence. All of those things have value. Mitt work is an excellent tool for developing many of them. But one of the essential elements of fighting has been removed: the fighter did not have to perceive what his opponent was doing and decide what to do about it. He was training the movement without necessarily training the decision that calls forth the movement.

The central problem in learning to fight is not simply learning how to perform movements. It is learning what to do in response to what another human being does. An opponent attacks, moves, resists, changes his base, creates distance, closes distance or attempts to prevent what I am doing. Each action changes the problem I am trying to solve. The fighter must perceive that change and produce an appropriate response.

That does not mean the student should be required to discover the techniques themselves. We already know effective ways to punch, escape, throw, pass and control another human being. Those solutions should be taught. What the student must discover is when each solution applies. The instructor can teach me how to bridge and roll. My opponent must eventually teach me when the bridge and roll will work.

That distinction, between teaching the movement and discovering when to use it, is the organizing principle for everything that follows.

That distinction provides a useful starting point for thinking about how adults should actually be taught to fight.

Fighting Is a Movement Pattern

The deepest mistake may be thinking of fighting primarily as a collection of techniques. Fighting ability is better understood as a single, enormously complicated movement pattern: how one human being moves in relationship to another human being in order to dominate and physically subdue him while the other person is simultaneously attempting to do the same. What we call techniques are small portions of that larger pattern. We have to isolate them because the whole problem is much too complicated to teach at once. A jab, bridge-and-roll escape, guard pass, hip throw or rear naked choke can be named, demonstrated, repeated and corrected. The boundaries between those techniques, however, exist largely because instructors need them. The fight itself contains no such boundaries.

You can actually watch beginners demonstrate the imaginary boundaries created by the teaching process. Teach a new ground grappler an escape, a reversal and a guard pass. When he begins rolling, he will often complete one of those movements and stop. The fight hasn’t stopped. The student has. He has reached the end of a movement as it was presented during instruction. He now has to recognize his new position, consciously orient himself, retrieve another technique and begin again. Watch experienced grapplers and those pauses largely disappear. The escape is already becoming the reversal. The reversal becomes the pass. The pass becomes control. The opponent’s attempt to escape creates the next movement. What instruction had to separate has been reintegrated by the nervous system into a continuous pattern.

In that sense, expertise is partly the disappearance of the boundaries we had to create in order to teach the skill in the first place. Good fighting instruction therefore presents an unusual problem: we must break fighting apart enough to make it learnable while continually putting those pieces back together so that the student eventually learns the whole.

Early learning necessarily involves conscious instruction. The instructor says: bridge, move your hips, throw the jab, turn the corner. The student consciously attempts to reproduce the movement. But that cannot be the finished product. A fighter cannot operate effectively by consciously searching a catalog: He has done A. What technique did my instructor tell me to use against A? By the time that process is completed, the opportunity may have disappeared. The ultimate objective is for the nervous system to digest enough of the larger movement pattern that changes in the opponent increasingly call forth appropriate movement without conscious deliberation.

At first, the instructor tells me what to do. Then the drill tells me what to do. Later, I consciously recognize what my opponent has done and select a response.

Eventually, my opponent moves, and I move.

Research on perceptual expertise in combat sports supports the importance of this transition. Experienced fighters do not merely possess better physical movements; they become better at extracting useful information from opponents and anticipating what is about to happen (Zhang et al., 2022). The movement and the perception that calls forth the movement become increasingly coupled. That, not merely the ability to demonstrate techniques, should be the objective of training.

Why Ground Grappling Is the Easiest Place to Begin

For an adult beginning from scratch, ground grappling provides an unusually favorable environment for learning the fundamental relationship between two resisting human bodies. This does not mean ground fighting is simple. Advanced grappling is extraordinarily complex. It means that the initial learning problem is easier to constrain. Two grapplers on the ground are physically connected much of the time. The ground eliminates many possible directions of movement. Gravity further constrains what the bodies can do. Positions tend to persist long enough to be recognized, and enormous amounts of information about the opponent arrive directly through physical contact.

A boxer standing several feet away has to visually determine distance, direction, rhythm, attack, feint, trajectory and timing. A grappler underneath another person can often simply feel where his weight is. Pressure changes. A hip moves. An arm posts. Muscular tension changes. A space opens. The opponent’s body continuously provides information through touch, pressure and proprioception. Ground grappling therefore reduces both the number of movement possibilities and the difficulty of perceiving what the opponent is doing.

There is another enormous advantage. Ground grappling can be practiced against substantial resistance very early without requiring the repeated head impacts that make equivalent striking practice costly. A beginner can be placed underneath mount and told to escape while another beginner genuinely tries to keep him there. Both can work extremely hard. Success and failure are real. Resistance is real. The perceptual information is real. Yet neither needs to be repeatedly struck in the head. The beginner can therefore accumulate enormous numbers of genuine perception–decision–action cycles.

This is where some versions of ecological skill acquisition go too far. The discovery that representative practice and perception–action coupling matter does not imply that instructors should refuse to teach proven techniques. Putting two completely untrained people on the mat and saying, “Figure it out,” is not sophisticated pedagogy. Humans have already conducted the experiment. Generations of fighters have discovered effective ways of moving human bodies. There is no reason to require every novice to independently rediscover the bridge-and-roll escape. Teach him. Show him where his hands go. Show him what his hips do. Let him perform enough repetitions to acquire the gross movement. The technique gives him a proven candidate solution to a recurring physical problem.

The mistake comes when instruction stops there.

We do not need the student to rediscover the technique. We need him to discover when the technique is called for.

Building the Schema First

The first things we teach in Army Combatives are the Fundamental Drills. Each drill is made up of individual techniques, so those techniques obviously have to be taught first. But at this stage the objective is not technical mastery. The student needs enough instruction to reproduce the gross movements and connect them together. A bridge-and-roll escape, elbow escape, guard pass or submission is initially taught as a manageable piece. Those pieces are then immediately assembled into Drills 1–3.

Something important begins happening before the student becomes particularly good at any of the individual techniques: he begins acquiring a map of ground fighting. Each technique moves him toward a superior position, maintains an advantageous position or provides a means of finishing the fight. By repeatedly moving through those relationships in the Fundamental Drills, the student begins learning the positional hierarchy.

He therefore begins developing the basic schema of ground grappling remarkably early in the training process. He learns, often without needing it explained abstractly, that some positions are better than others. He begins developing intuitive answers to three fundamental questions: Where am I? Is this position better or worse? Which direction should I be trying to go?

That schema is more important initially than technical precision. A beginner whose elbow escape is crude but who understands that being mounted is bad, guard is better, top position is better still, and greater control is the objective already possesses something enormously useful. Even when he does not know the correct answer to a particular problem, he has begun to understand what kind of answer he is looking for.

The individual techniques provide the vocabulary. The drills provide the grammar. The positional hierarchy becomes the schema.

There is another reason not to overload the initial teaching of a technique with technical detail. When students first encounter an unfamiliar movement, they generally do not absorb everything the instructor shows them. They are trying to understand the gross pattern: where the hands go, where the body moves, what happens first, and what the movement is supposed to accomplish. An instructor can spend several minutes explaining precise hand position, hip angle, pressure, head position, foot placement and half a dozen other refinements, but much of that information has nowhere to go yet. The student is still trying to remember the basic shape of the movement. Giving him more information does not necessarily produce more learning.

A better approach is to teach enough detail for the student to reproduce the gross movement successfully, let him practice it, and then return to it repeatedly over subsequent training sessions. If Drill 1 is taught during one class, for example, it can become part of the warm-up in the next. Now the students are no longer seeing the movements for the first time. They retrieve something they learned previously, perform it again, and strengthen the developing movement pattern. Returning to the drill after time away also requires retrieval rather than merely continuing short-term repetition within the same practice session, helping stabilize what was learned and making it increasingly available in later training (McDermott, 2021; Trumble et al., 2024).

Those subsequent repetitions also provide a much better opportunity to teach technical detail. Instead of trying to give the student ten points to remember during the first demonstration, the instructor can give him one or two things to concentrate on each time the drill returns. The first time through, perhaps the emphasis is hip movement. The next time, hand position. Later, pressure, posture, base, head position or some other important detail. Over successive exposures, the instructor can work his way around the technique, progressively refining it while the underlying movement becomes increasingly familiar.

This changes the purpose of repetition. The student is not simply doing the same drill again and again. Each return to the drill is another pass through the movement with greater resolution. The first exposure establishes the rough outline. Subsequent practice strengthens recall and coordination while allowing additional details to be incorporated into an already recognizable pattern. Instead of demanding technical precision before the student possesses the basic movement, precision is progressively layered onto a movement he increasingly owns.

This is one reason drills make such useful warm-ups. A warm-up does not have to be wasted on movements unrelated to the skill being developed. Returning to previously learned drills gets students physically moving while simultaneously providing spaced retrieval and additional technical practice. Over weeks of training, the same drill may therefore serve several functions at once: it warms the body, strengthens previously learned movements, provides opportunities for technical refinement, reinforces the relationships among techniques, and repeatedly carries the student through the positional structure of the fight.

The teaching sequence is therefore not:

Explain everything → practice until perfect → move on.

It is closer to:

Show the gross movement → practice → leave it → retrieve it later → add detail → practice again → add another detail → progressively refine.

That distinction matters because technical instruction and memory consolidation are occurring together. The student does not have to digest the entire technique in a single lesson. The curriculum deliberately gives his nervous system repeated opportunities to return to the movement, strengthen it, refine it and connect it to everything else he is learning.

By the time the student has performed Drill 1 as a warm-up across many subsequent classes, he may have accumulated hundreds of repetitions without ever spending an entire training period mindlessly repeating it. More importantly, those repetitions have been distributed across time and accompanied by progressively more sophisticated coaching. What began as a crude approximation can gradually become precise and efficient.

Teach the outline first. Add resolution as the student becomes capable of seeing, and feeling, the details.

Once the student possesses a few movements and the beginnings of that schema, situational sparring becomes enormously powerful. Consider a beginner underneath mount. Two of the first movements he has learned are the bridge-and-roll escape and the elbow escape. The bridge-and-roll teaches him to control an arm, eliminate the opponent’s ability to post on that side, bridge with his hips and roll toward the direction where the opponent lacks base. The elbow escape teaches him to create structure and space, move his hips and recover guard. Initially both movements are practiced several times so that the beginner has some command of their gross mechanics.

Then the teaching changes. Put the student underneath mount. Tell the top fighter, Stay on top. Tell the bottom fighter, Improve your position. The bottom fighter attempts to gain control of an arm. If the top fighter leaves the arm available and lacks base in that direction, the bridge-and-roll becomes available. But the top fighter quickly learns to spread his legs and widen his base. That prevents the roll, but in solving that problem he creates the conditions for the elbow escape. The bottom fighter does not need to see this happen; he can feel the opponent’s base change through their connected bodies.

Now give the top fighter another option. When the bottom fighter reaches for his arm, the top fighter can lean backward and remove the arm from reach. Again, he has solved one problem by creating another. His center of mass shifts backward and his base changes. The bottom fighter can push him backward and diagonally—roughly 45 degrees—toward the direction in which he has surrendered support, with the lower leg or shin becoming a hinge around which he can be tipped. The beginner now appears to have three techniques: bridge and roll when the arm and base permit it, elbow escape when the opponent widens his base, and push him diagonally backward when he leans away.

But the real lesson is not three techniques.

The lesson is: move him where he does not have base.

That is part of the larger schema. The student’s opponent is no longer merely a body upon which techniques are performed. His attempts to prevent one movement alter pressure, base, posture, space and connection, and those changes create opportunities for other movements. The student begins learning the relationship between the two bodies rather than merely memorizing a sequence.

The Opponent Becomes the Teacher

This distinction is critical. We do not ultimately want the nervous system to memorize a decision tree in which A means Technique 1, B means Technique 2 and C means Technique 3. The branching drill is merely an instructional device. What the student is actually learning is a continuous relationship: opponent movement → opportunity → my movement → opponent response → new opportunity → adapted movement.

At first the student may consciously think, He’s widening his base; I should elbow escape. Later, I feel his base widening. Eventually neither sentence is necessary. The change in pressure itself begins calling forth the movement. The nervous system has digested a small portion of the larger fighting pattern.

There is, however, another step in this progression. Fighting cannot be understood entirely as learning to respond correctly to what the opponent does. That formulation still gives the opponent the initiative. The more advanced objective is to act in ways that force the opponent to respond to us.

This is an important distinction between learning to fight and many approaches to “self-defense.” Self-defense instruction often begins with the other person as the actor: He grabs me. He punches me. He attempts a takedown. What should I do? Those are legitimate problems and must be trained, particularly because violence may begin with surprise. But if that becomes the organizing model, the student is implicitly taught to surrender the initiative. The opponent acts; I react.

A fighter should instead learn to seize the initiative whenever possible. An action does more than attempt to accomplish something directly. It forces the opponent to solve a problem. I move him and he must recover his base. I attack and he must defend. I take inside position and he must fight to recover it. I threaten a submission and he must address the threat. His response is not merely an obstacle to my original action; it is something I have caused him to do.

This changes the perception–action relationship in an important way. The opponent still provides information, but increasingly I am creating the conditions that produce that information. Instead of waiting to discover what he intends to do, I give him a problem with a limited number of useful responses and read the response he chooses. My action narrows his options. His reaction tells me what has become available next.

The initiative therefore creates a powerful asymmetry. The fighter who is acting poses problems; the fighter who is reacting must solve them. The objective is not reckless aggression or simply moving first. It is to gain enough control of the interaction that my actions increasingly determine the opponent’s responses and his responses increasingly create my next opportunity.

This suggests a practical structure for individual training sessions. Take a small portion of the overall fight and teach one useful movement. Repeat it enough for the student to reproduce its gross form. Then introduce the opponent movement that normally creates the opportunity for it. Next, allow the opponent two or three common responses. Each response should change the physical relationship in a recognizable way and open a different movement or direction. The student is no longer merely reproducing techniques; he is learning the connections between them. Over successive sessions those branches overlap, separate fragments begin linking together, and eventually the fighter no longer experiences Technique 17 followed by Technique 23. He simply moves through the fight.

This is where ecological dynamics and constraints-led approaches have made an important contribution to sports pedagogy. Skill exists in the relationship between perception and action, and practice should preserve important information present in actual performance (Woods et al., 2020; Huesmann & Loffing, 2024). If I practice parrying a predetermined jab fifty times, I have practiced the movement of parrying a jab. I have not practiced deciding whether a jab is actually coming. Allow the attacker to jab, feint or do nothing and the physical movement of the parry may remain unchanged, but the skill being learned has changed fundamentally. The student must now discriminate. He must now extract information from his opponent, determine whether the problem actually exists, and only then produce the movement he has already learned.

The ecological correction can itself become doctrine, however. If discovery is useful, some conclude that explicit instruction must be harmful. If variability is useful, repetition must be bad. If the environment can teach, demonstration must be unnecessary. None of those conclusions follows. A beginner possesses neither the technical vocabulary nor the organizing schema of the expert. Unconstrained discovery can therefore produce terrible solutions just as easily as good ones. The coach’s job is not to create chaos and wait for useful movement to emerge. The instructor possesses accumulated knowledge. Use it. Demonstrate an efficient movement. Explain what matters. Allow enough repetitions to establish it. Then put the movement back into the environment in which it must function.

Teach the solution. Then teach the student to perceive the problem that requires it.

Repetition remains essential for the same reason. A beginner needs repetitions to establish basic coordination. The mistake is not repetition; the mistake is allowing those repetitions to remain identical after the basic movement exists. Motor-learning research on contextual interference generally finds that greater variability can improve later retention and transfer compared with entirely blocked repetition, although the effects are more complicated in applied sports than laboratory experiments sometimes suggest (Brady, 2004; Czyż et al., 2024a, 2024b). The practical progression is straightforward: repeat the movement, vary the conditions, require discrimination, introduce competition.

Two Foundations: Grappling and Striking

Ground grappling should not be completed before striking begins. The two should develop in parallel because they represent the two fundamental perceptual environments of fighting. Ground grappling teaches the fighter to feel and move in relationship to another human body. Striking teaches him to see and move in relationship to another human body. The underlying fighting problem is the same; the information available to solve it is different.

Striking is the more difficult initial perceptual problem. The fighters are no longer continuously connected. The opponent can move freely through space. Distance itself becomes a variable. Nothing may happen. An opponent can attack, retreat, change angle, feint or deliberately provide misleading information. Events occur much faster, and the cost of a perceptual mistake can be a punch to the head. Expertise research in combat sports consistently points toward improved perceptual anticipation among experienced performers. Skilled fighters do not simply punch better; they become better at detecting the information that tells them when punching, defending or moving is appropriate (Zhang et al., 2022).

The difficulty becomes clearer if we slow the process down and consider what the nervous system actually has to accomplish. At striking distance, information about the opponent must first enter primarily through the eyes. Light reflected from his movement reaches the retina and is converted into neural signals. Those signals travel through the visual system, where the brain must extract useful information from an enormous amount of sensory input. Is his shoulder beginning to move? Is his weight shifting? Is the hand actually coming forward or is this a feint? How fast is it moving? In what direction? How far away is he? What is likely to happen next?

Only then can that information contribute to an appropriate motor response. The nervous system must select an action, generate the motor command, send signals down through the spinal cord and peripheral nerves, recruit the appropriate muscles, and finally produce movement. None of this is instantaneous. Signals propagate electrically along neurons, while communication across most synapses is chemical: neurotransmitters are released from the presynaptic neuron, cross the synaptic cleft, bind to receptors and influence the next neuron (Purves et al., 2001; Pereda, 2014). Individual synaptic delays are tiny, but the complete process of visual perception, discrimination, response selection and motor execution consumes time (Töllner et al., 2012).

That matters enormously when another human being is trying to punch you in the face.

A beginner tends to experience the problem sequentially: I see the punch. I recognize that it is a punch. I decide what defense I should use. I attempt to perform the defense. By the time he completes that process, the punch may already have arrived. Expertise cannot simply mean performing the defensive movement faster. The perceptual side of the problem must change as well.

The experienced fighter increasingly learns which information matters and detects it earlier. He does not need to wait until the fist is halfway to his face before determining that a punch is coming. Changes in distance, posture, weight distribution, shoulder movement, rhythm and other preparatory information can begin predicting the attack before its most obvious manifestation. With enough representative practice, perception and action become increasingly coupled. What initially required conscious recognition and deliberate selection can increasingly become a rapid response to information arriving from the opponent (Zhang et al., 2022).

This is why striking instruction that removes the decision can be deceptive. If the student knows that the next action will be a jab, much of the perceptual problem has already been solved for him. He can begin preparing the response before the relevant information appears. If he knows the mitt will appear on his right and that he is supposed to throw the cross, he is not solving the same problem he must solve in a fight. The instructor has eliminated much of the neurological journey between seeing what the opponent does and producing the movement that answers it.

The objective of training is therefore not merely to make the movement faster. It is to progressively shorten and automate the entire perception → discrimination → decision → action process—and, eventually, to teach the fighter to recognize information early enough that he is responding to what the opponent is beginning to do rather than reacting only after the action has become obvious.

That means teaching punches alone cannot create boxing ability. A student can possess a beautiful right hand without knowing when the right hand is available. Once again, the movement is not the entire skill.

Once the student can throw a jab and perform a basic defense against one, the next step is not yet jab sparring. First introduce the smallest possible decision. Give the attacker two choices: jab or feint. The defender now has a single question to answer: Is he actually throwing the jab?

That seemingly simple distinction is the student’s first introduction to the perceptual decision-making problem of striking. Until this point, he knew the jab was coming. He could concentrate entirely on performing the defensive movement correctly. Now the same visual information that begins a real jab may also begin a feint. If he automatically performs his defense whenever he sees the initial movement, he can be made to react to an attack that never comes. He must begin learning which information actually predicts the attack and which does not.

Only after the student can begin solving that problem do we expand the environment into jab sparring. Now either fighter can move, manage distance, attack, defend or feint. The question is no longer merely Is that a jab? It becomes Is he attacking? Am I in range? Is he in range? Should I attack first? Should I defend? Did his reaction to my feint create an opening? The physical vocabulary remains extremely small, but the perceptual and decision-making problem has become considerably richer.

This progression is deliberate. We increase the number of decisions before we increase the number of techniques. The student does not need five punches and five defenses to begin learning to box. He needs a small number of movements he can perform reliably and an opponent whose behavior progressively forces him to discover when those movements are appropriate.

From there, the problem can progressively expand. Add the rear straight. Add another defense. Allow jab or cross, attack or feint, attack while moving, and eventually counterattack and increasingly open light sparring. Difficulty grows through informational complexity, not simply through harder contact.

This brings us back to elaborate mitt work. Mitts can be extremely useful for developing accuracy, rhythm, combinations, conditioning and movement fluency. The mistake is confusing those qualities with the entire skill of fighting. When the mitt appears because it is time to punch it, or the trainer swats because the boxer is supposed to slip, the next action has already been selected. The exercise may train a movement exceptionally well without training the fighter to recognize when that movement should occur.

The simplest diagnostic question remains:

Who decided what happened next?

If the answer is the instructor, we are still primarily training a piece. If the answer increasingly becomes the opponent, we are developing fighting ability.

Bringing the Two Foundations Together

Ground grappling and striking should therefore develop simultaneously. Clinch fighting, throws and takedowns bring them together. The clinch occupies an intermediate perceptual environment. The fighters are standing and therefore possess far more freedom of movement than they do on the ground. Balance is dynamic, their centers of mass move over relatively small bases, and gravity can rapidly turn a small error into a fall. But unlike at striking distance, the fighters are touching. Vision remains useful, but haptic information returns: pressure, pulling, pushing, head position, muscular tension, weight distribution, changes of level and shifts in base.

The clinch is therefore not merely another range. It is the place where the two perceptual systems overlap. Vision brings me to you. Touch increasingly tells me what to do once I arrive.

This is also why I prefer to begin standing grappling with neck wrestling and pummeling of the sort found in Muay Thai and wrestling before asking beginners to learn the complete entries characteristic of wrestling or judo. Closing distance against another person is difficult even within those sports, and in an actual fight the problem is harder because the space through which you must enter contains strikes. Fitting in for a throw while another human being can punch you requires not only technical ability and timing but commitment and courage.

There is no reason to make a beginner solve all of those problems simultaneously. Start him already connected. Let him learn posture, base, head position, inside position, pulling, pushing, turning and off-balancing. Once he can fight from the clinch, introduce throws and takedowns from established contact. Teach a throw or takedown, repeat its gross movement and then allow the opponent to begin responding realistically. He pushes, pulls, circles, changes his base or resists in one direction. Each response changes the available movement.

This is the beginning of what wrestlers call chain wrestling. A good wrestler does not simply attempt a takedown, discover that it failed, disengage and select another technique from his memory. His first attack produces a response. That response changes the opponent’s posture, balance, position or pressure and creates the conditions for the next attack. A single-leg attempt may cause the opponent to sprawl. The sprawl does not simply mean the single-leg failed; it creates a new physical relationship from which another movement becomes available. The opponent defends that movement, and his defense creates still another relationship. The attacks become a chain because each attempt elicits the information that determines what comes next.

This is the same process the student has already encountered elsewhere. Underneath mount, the opponent’s changing base determines which escape becomes available. At striking distance, the student learns to distinguish the jab from the feint and eventually to attack or defend according to visually perceived information. In the clinch, the information is again increasingly tactile. Pressure, posture, base and resistance tell the fighter where the opponent can be moved.

The important lesson is therefore not simply to accumulate more throws and takedowns. It is to connect a small number of reliable attacks through the opponent’s predictable responses. The first attack creates the reaction. The reaction creates the next attack. This is initiative made physical: instead of waiting to discover what the opponent will do, the fighter acts to force him into a smaller set of predictable responses. Once again, the opponent’s attempt to prevent one solution creates another opportunity.

Only after the student has begun developing both striking competence and clinch competence do we restore the problem we deliberately removed. Now begin outside. The student must get from striking distance into controlling contact against someone capable of hitting him. But his psychological situation is very different from what it would have been on his first day. He already knows how to strike and he already knows what to do when he reaches the clinch. He isn’t charging through strikes toward an unknown problem. He is crossing dangerous space to reach an environment in which he already possesses competence.

Striking can now create the entry. A punch forces a cover. The cover creates an opportunity to close. Closing creates contact. Contact changes the available perceptual information. Pressure in the clinch creates the throw. The throw produces a ground position. The positional hierarchy supplies the next objective. What wrestlers call chain wrestling now expands into the entire fight: each action creates a reaction, each reaction changes the available information, and that information calls forth the next movement.

The separately developed systems begin becoming one.

Erasing the Boundaries

At first, students will reveal the artificial boundaries of their instruction just as clearly here as they did between individual grappling techniques. They strike, then pause. Now they’re clinching. They clinch, then pause. Now they’re throwing. They throw, then pause. Now they’re ground fighting. Those pauses exist because the categories exist in the student’s mind. We created them because we needed manageable pieces with which to teach.

The fight itself contains none of them.

Training should progressively erase those boundaries. Eventually strike → reaction → entry → clinch → off-balance → throw → ground position → control is not experienced as seven different skills. It is one continuous interaction with another human being. The sensory information changes as distance changes. At striking range, vision predominates. As distance closes, vision and touch overlap. In the clinch, haptic information becomes increasingly important. On the ground, continuous physical contact provides a dense stream of information about pressure, base, posture and movement. But the underlying rule never changes: each movement changes the relationship between the two bodies. Sometimes the opponent acts and the trained fighter perceives and exploits the change. Increasingly, however, the fighter acts deliberately to create the change himself, to take the initiative, constrain the opponent's available responses, and use those responses to move toward greater control.

The same principle applies to the coach’s role. Calling out combinations is easy. Designing an environment that presents exactly the problem a student is ready to learn is harder. The coach must decide which movement should be taught, how many repetitions are enough, which opponent behavior should be introduced first, how many alternatives the student can discriminate among, when resistance should increase, when the problem should become less constrained, when an explanation is needed and when the instructor should simply stop talking and let the student solve it.

Motor-learning research has long warned that excessive external guidance can produce impressive performance during practice while creating dependence that becomes apparent when the guidance disappears (Schmidt et al., 1989; Winstein et al., 1994). That gives us another useful standard for judging instruction. The ultimate measure of coaching is not how well students perform while the instructor is telling them what to do.

It is what happens when he stops.

Teaching the Nervous System to Fight

The entire process can therefore be reduced to a coherent pedagogy. Teach useful techniques consciously, because the accumulated knowledge of fighting gives beginners better starting solutions than unguided discovery. Connect those techniques into drills, because the relationships among movements allow the student to begin acquiring a schema of the larger fight. Introduce constrained resistance so that genuine opponent behavior determines which known movement is appropriate. Give the opponent several realistic responses so that the student must discriminate rather than execute a script. Increase informational complexity progressively, developing ground grappling and striking in parallel and using clinch fighting, throws and takedowns to connect them. Finally, progressively erase the artificial boundaries created by instruction.

The objective is not to fill an adult’s memory with techniques. Nor is it to throw him into unconstrained fighting and hope that useful behavior spontaneously emerges. We know too much for the first approach, and humanity has already learned too much for the second.

We consciously teach manageable pieces of a larger movement pattern. We organize those pieces so that the student develops a schema of the whole. We then expose him to carefully designed situations in which another human being’s genuine attempts to dominate him provide the information determining what he should do next. As competence grows, we give the opponent more options, increase variability, remove constraints and connect previously separated domains. Relationships that once required conscious thought gradually become increasingly automatic responses.

The process begins deliberately.

It ends autonomically.

The techniques disappear into the larger pattern. The pauses disappear. The boundaries between striking, clinching, throwing and grappling disappear. Eventually the fighter no longer waits for the instructor—or even conscious deliberation—to tell him when to move.

The technique is the piece. The schema is the map. The opponent provides the information. The nervous system learns the fight.

References

Brady, F. (2004). Contextual interference: A meta-analytic study. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 99(1), 116–126. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.99.1.116-126

Czyż, S. H., Wójcik, A. M., Solarská, P., & Kiper, P. (2024a). High contextual interference improves retention in motor learning: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Scientific Reports, 14, 15974. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-65753-3

Czyż, S. H., Wójcik, A. M., & Solarská, P. (2024b). The effect of contextual interference on transfer in motor learning—A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1377122. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1377122

Huesmann, K., & Loffing, F. (2024). Perception-action coupling in anticipation research: A classification and its application to racket sports. Psychology of Sport and Exercise.

McDermott, K. B. (2021). Practicing retrieval facilitates learning. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 609–633. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-051019

Pereda, A. E. (2014). Electrical synapses and their functional interactions with chemical synapses. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(4), 250–263. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3708

Purves, D., Augustine, G. J., Fitzpatrick, D., et al. (Eds.). (2001). Chemical synapses. In Neuroscience (2nd ed.). Sinauer Associates.

Schmidt, R. A., Young, D. E., Swinnen, S., & Shapiro, D. C. (1989). Summary knowledge of results for skill acquisition: Support for the guidance hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15(2), 352–359. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.15.2.352

Trumble, E., Lodge, J., Mandrusiak, A., & Forbes, R. (2024). Systematic review of distributed practice and retrieval practice in health professions education. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 29(2), 689–714. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-023-10274-3

Winstein, C. J., Pohl, P. S., & Lewthwaite, R. (1994). Effects of physical guidance and knowledge of results on motor learning: Support for the guidance hypothesis. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 65(4), 316–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/02701367.1994.10607635

Woods, C. T., McKeown, I., Rothwell, M., Araújo, D., Robertson, S., & Davids, K. (2020). Sport practitioners as sport ecology designers: How ecological dynamics has progressively changed perceptions of skill “acquisition” in the sporting habitat. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 654. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00654

Zhang, Z., Piras, A., Chen, C., Kong, B., & Wang, D. (2022). A comparison of perceptual anticipation in combat sports between experts and non-experts: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 961960. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.961960

For generations of psychology students, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has provided an intuitive way to think about human motivation. The model is simple and memorable. At the base of the pyramid sit physiological needs such as food, water, and sleep. Above them come safety needs, then belonging, esteem, and finally self-actualization. The implication is that human beings gradually move upward through these levels, addressing more basic concerns before pursuing higher aspirations (Maslow, 1943).

At first glance, the model appears self-evidently true. A starving man is unlikely to spend much time contemplating personal fulfillment, and someone living in constant danger may be more concerned with safety than artistic expression. The hierarchy seems to reflect common sense. Yet there is a problem: human beings routinely violate it. Throughout history, people have willingly sacrificed safety for status, comfort for duty, wealth for principle, and even life itself for causes they considered important. A soldier charges into machine-gun fire to save a comrade. A parent runs into a burning building to rescue a child. A scientist devotes decades to a problem that may never bring recognition or financial reward. A young man risks injury, embarrassment, and rejection in pursuit of status among his peers.

If Maslow’s hierarchy accurately describes how motivation works, these behaviors should be unusual exceptions. Instead, they are among the most recognizable features of human behavior. The problem may not be that Maslow identified the wrong motivations. The problem may be that he arranged them in the wrong way. Viewed through an evolutionary lens, human motivation appears far less like a pyramid and far more like a network of competing and cooperating systems that evolved to solve the recurring problems faced by our ancestors.

To understand why, it is useful to begin with a simple question: What exactly was evolution trying to accomplish?

The Goal That Evolution Never Had

From an evolutionary perspective, food, safety, belonging, status, mating, parenting, and mastery are not steps on a ladder. They are solutions to different adaptive problems. Although they appear separate, they are connected by a common thread. Throughout evolutionary history, individuals who successfully acquired resources, maintained alliances, achieved status, attracted mates, protected offspring, and developed useful skills tended to leave more descendants than those who did not. Natural selection therefore favored neural and emotional systems that motivated these behaviors. What we experience as needs are often the proximate mechanisms through which evolution pursued its ultimate objective: reproductive success.

This observation leads to an uncomfortable realization. Evolution does not appear to have selected for happiness. Most people intuitively assume that happiness, fulfillment, and psychological well-being are the ultimate goals toward which human beings are striving. Yet from the perspective of natural selection, these outcomes matter only insofar as they influence behavior.

Happiness is not the goal. Happiness is a tool.

Like fear, anger, loneliness, love, pride, guilt, or shame, happiness is an emotional state that influences behavior in ways that were adaptive in ancestral environments. When happiness encouraged behaviors associated with survival and reproduction, natural selection favored it. When anxiety, dissatisfaction, jealousy, ambition, or even chronic worry encouraged behaviors associated with survival and reproduction, natural selection could favor those as well (Nesse, 2004; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). This means that evolution can produce individuals who are extraordinarily successful in evolutionary terms while being deeply unhappy in psychological terms.

Imagine two men. One is content, relaxed, and largely satisfied with his life. The other is chronically dissatisfied, ambitious, anxious about his status, and driven to achieve. From the perspective of subjective well-being, the first man may be better off. Yet throughout evolutionary history, the second man may often have acquired more resources, achieved greater status, attracted more mates, and produced more descendants.

Evolution does not reward happiness. It rewards outcomes.

A highly anxious individual may work relentlessly to accumulate resources. A status-conscious individual may sacrifice comfort and peace of mind to achieve influence. A parent may endure years of exhaustion and hardship while successfully raising multiple children. A person burdened by chronic insecurity may spend a lifetime striving for achievements that increase status and reproductive opportunities. From the perspective of natural selection, the relevant question is not whether these individuals were happy. The relevant question is whether they left descendants.

Indeed, some traits that reduce subjective well-being may persist precisely because they promote behaviors that increase reproductive success. Anxiety can increase vigilance. Jealousy can protect pair bonds. Status concerns can motivate achievement. Dissatisfaction can motivate effort and improvement. The fact that a psychological trait produces suffering does not mean evolution will remove it from the population. If anything, some degree of dissatisfaction may be expected in a system designed to motivate action rather than contentment. A human being who is completely satisfied with life has little reason to strive for additional resources, status, mates, knowledge, or achievements. Natural selection may therefore favor organisms that remain motivated more than organisms that remain happy (Nesse, 2004).

This may help explain one of the enduring paradoxes of modern life. Many people achieve levels of comfort, safety, and prosperity that would have been unimaginable for most of human history, yet continue to experience anxiety, dissatisfaction, loneliness, and unhappiness. The emotional systems operating within the human brain were not designed to maximize contentment. They were designed to influence behavior in ways that tended to increase reproductive success in ancestral environments.

The two goals are not always the same.

Understanding this distinction is essential because it changes how we think about human motivation. If evolution did not design the human mind to maximize happiness, what exactly did it design it to do? Throughout evolutionary history, our ancestors faced a series of recurring challenges. They needed to acquire resources, avoid threats, maintain alliances, attract mates, protect offspring, and develop useful skills. Individuals who successfully solved these problems were more likely to survive and pass their genes into future generations. Natural selection therefore favored emotional and motivational systems that encouraged behaviors associated with solving these challenges.

The first of these challenges was survival itself.

Survival Is Important, But It Is Not Supreme

Maslow began his hierarchy with physiological needs, and there is good reason for that. An organism that cannot acquire food, water, shelter, and rest is unlikely to survive long enough to do anything else. Yet evolution reveals something interesting: survival itself is not the ultimate objective. It is a means to an end. Throughout the natural world, animals routinely accept risks that reduce their chances of survival while increasing their chances of reproduction. Male elephant seals engage in brutal battles over access to females. Male deer exhaust themselves during the rut. Countless species expend enormous energy and accept significant danger in pursuit of mating opportunities.

Humans are no different. History is filled with individuals who knowingly accepted extraordinary risks in pursuit of status, mates, prestige, or duty. The willingness of young men to engage in dangerous competitions, volunteer for military service, or attempt difficult feats has puzzled observers for centuries. From an evolutionary perspective, however, such behavior is not particularly mysterious. Throughout much of human history, status often translated into access to resources, allies, and reproductive opportunities.

Survival matters, but it has never been the only game being played.

The Social Animal

If there is one portion of Maslow’s hierarchy that aligns closely with evolutionary theory, it is the need for belonging. Human beings evolved as an intensely social species (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). For most of our evolutionary history, exclusion from the group was not merely unpleasant. It could be fatal. A solitary human was less capable of hunting, defending territory, raising children, and resisting rivals than a member of a functioning coalition. The emotional pain associated with rejection appears to reflect this reality. Research has shown that social exclusion activates some of the same neural systems involved in physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003).

This is exactly what we would expect if belonging evolved as a survival mechanism. Loneliness is not merely a feeling. It is a signal. Just as hunger motivates eating and thirst motivates drinking, loneliness motivates reconnection. The emotion exists because social connection mattered to survival and reproduction throughout human evolutionary history (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).

Importantly, loneliness does not simply motivate social connection. It often motivates reconciliation. Throughout most of human history, exclusion from a coalition could carry severe costs. A person cast out from the group faced reduced access to protection, resources, mates, and cooperative partners. Under such circumstances, regaining membership was often more advantageous than remaining isolated, even if doing so required accepting a lower position within the group. Seen from this perspective, loneliness may help explain behaviors that often appear irrational. An individual may return to a social group that previously rejected them. A subordinate may tolerate humiliation in order to remain part of a coalition. A person may remain in an unhealthy relationship despite obvious emotional costs.

This does not mean such decisions are necessarily beneficial in the modern world. It simply suggests that the emotional systems influencing these decisions evolved under conditions where social isolation was often more dangerous than accepting an unfavorable position within a group. The modern tendency to ask, “Why didn’t they just leave?” may therefore overlook the power of psychological mechanisms that evolved long before modern legal systems, social services, economic independence, and online social networks existed. The emotional pain of loneliness is not merely suffering. It is part of an evolved system designed to pull individuals back toward social connection, even when that connection comes at a cost.

Status and the Pursuit of Esteem

Maslow placed esteem above belonging, treating it as a higher-order psychological need. Evolutionary theory suggests a somewhat different interpretation. Across cultures and throughout history, status has provided tangible advantages. The respected hunter acquired influence. The successful warrior gained prestige. The effective leader attracted followers. The skilled craftsman became valuable to the community. These advantages were not simply psychological. They often translated into better access to resources, mates, and cooperative partners (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001).

What Maslow described as esteem may therefore be the subjective experience of mechanisms designed to pursue status. People seek recognition because recognition historically mattered. The satisfaction associated with achievement is not arbitrary. It reflects neural reward systems that evolved because certain forms of success tended to improve outcomes for individuals and their descendants.

Consider a young man willing to work eighty-hour weeks, endure chronic stress, sacrifice leisure, and risk financial ruin to build a successful business. From the perspective of happiness, the behavior may seem irrational. From the perspective of status acquisition, it makes perfect sense. Throughout much of human history, status translated into influence, resources, coalition support, and reproductive opportunities. The emotional satisfaction associated with achievement may therefore reflect ancient motivational systems operating in a modern environment (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001).

The Missing Motivations

While Maslow included belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, two evolutionary priorities receive surprisingly little attention in his framework. The first is reproduction. This omission is striking because reproduction is the process through which natural selection operates. Much of human behavior revolves around acquiring, retaining, and investing in mates (Trivers, 1972). Status displays, resource acquisition, artistic achievement, athletic accomplishment, and acts of courage often influence reproductive success.

The second omission is kinship. Parents sacrifice for children in ways that would be difficult to explain if self-preservation occupied the top position in a motivational hierarchy (Hamilton, 1964; Trivers, 1972). Grandparents invest in grandchildren. Siblings assist one another despite personal costs. These behaviors are not anomalies. They are exactly what evolutionary theory predicts through kin selection and inclusive fitness (Hamilton, 1964).

The pyramid begins to look increasingly incomplete.

From Needs to Behavior

A deeper problem emerges when we ask how needs actually become actions. Maslow described what motivates people, but he devoted less attention to the mechanisms through which motivation influences behavior.

The question is often not whether an emotion makes us happy. The question is what behavior the emotion is attempting to produce.

From an evolutionary perspective, emotions are not simply feelings. They are behavioral guidance systems shaped by natural selection (Nesse, 2004; Panksepp, 1998). Fear motivates avoidance. Anger motivates confrontation. Loneliness motivates reconnection. Pride motivates status-seeking. Guilt motivates reconciliation. This is where evolutionary psychology and neuroscience provide important insights.

Natural selection cannot directly select thoughts. It can only select behaviors. A predator catches prey because of what it does, not what it believes. An animal survives because of its actions, not because it holds correct philosophical opinions. The human brain evolved under the same constraints. Over millions of years, neural systems developed that encouraged behaviors likely to solve recurring adaptive problems: avoid predators, acquire food, maintain coalition membership, protect offspring, seek status, and secure mates.

What we experience as emotions are, in large part, the subjective experience of these motivational systems operating within the brain. Fear motivates avoidance. Anger motivates confrontation. Disgust motivates avoidance of contamination. Love motivates attachment. Loneliness motivates social reconnection. Pride motivates status-seeking. Guilt motivates reconciliation. Seen in this light, emotions are not obstacles to rational thought. They are among the primary mechanisms through which evolution guides behavior (Damasio, 1994; Panksepp, 1998).

The Layered Brain

Neuroscience further complicates the idea of a neat motivational hierarchy. The brain did not evolve all at once. New systems emerged on top of older systems, creating a layered architecture in which ancient emotional and motivational circuits interact continuously with newer regions involved in planning and abstract thought (LeDoux, 1996; Panksepp, 1998).

When a person hears an unexpected noise in the darkness, physiological responses often begin before conscious analysis is complete. When a parent hears a child cry, caregiving systems activate almost automatically. When an individual experiences humiliation, anger, shame, or embarrassment may arise long before a deliberate evaluation of the situation occurs. The brain’s motivational systems are often already at work before conscious reasoning enters the conversation.

This observation has important implications. Traditional views frequently portray reason as the commander of human behavior and emotion as an unruly subordinate. Modern neuroscience suggests a more complicated relationship. Patients with damage to emotional processing systems often struggle to make effective decisions despite retaining normal intelligence (Damasio, 1994). Reason without emotion turns out to be surprisingly ineffective. The two systems evolved together and function together.

A Network of Evolved Motivational Systems

This brings us back to Maslow’s pyramid. The hierarchy suggests that motivations are stacked neatly on top of one another, each becoming important only after the level below it has been satisfied. Real life rarely works that way. Consider a soldier in combat. At the same moment he may experience fear, loyalty, anger, duty, pride, and concern for his comrades. A parent caring for a sick child may simultaneously experience exhaustion, love, anxiety, and protectiveness. A scientist pursuing a difficult problem may sacrifice comfort, wealth, and social opportunities in pursuit of discovery. These motivations do not wait politely for one another to finish. They operate simultaneously. Sometimes they cooperate. Sometimes they conflict.

Imagine a soldier pinned down by enemy fire while a wounded friend lies exposed in the open. Part of him wants to stay behind cover. Fear exists for a reason, and survival is one of the oldest adaptive problems any organism must solve. At the same time, loyalty pulls him toward his comrade. Compassion pushes him to help. Shame warns him of what it would mean to abandon a friend. Duty reminds him of obligations that may matter more to him than his own safety.

No hierarchy determines the outcome in advance. The behavior that ultimately emerges reflects the interaction of all of these motivational systems operating at the same time.

The same pattern appears throughout human life. People often desire safety and adventure, acceptance and status, comfort and achievement. These competing motivations are not evidence of irrationality. They reflect the fact that the human mind evolved to solve multiple adaptive problems, many of which pull behavior in different directions. The role of the intellect is not to create these motivations but to manage them. It evaluates circumstances, predicts consequences, develops plans, and attempts to coordinate competing pressures into coherent action.

In this sense, reason resembles a staff officer more than a king. It advises, organizes, and coordinates, but it does not issue orders to an otherwise empty mind.

Viewed in this way, the central question is no longer which need occupies the highest position in a pyramid. The more useful question is which motivational systems are active, how strongly they are operating, and how they interact to shape behavior in a particular situation. The outcome is not determined by a hierarchy. It emerges from a network of evolved motivational systems, each attempting to solve problems that mattered repeatedly throughout human evolutionary history.

Conclusion

Maslow correctly recognized that human beings possess multiple forms of motivation. That insight remains valuable. The difficulty lies in imagining those motivations as a simple hierarchy. Evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience increasingly suggest a different picture. Human beings are not driven by a ladder of ascending needs. We are guided by a network of evolved motivational systems that developed to solve recurring adaptive challenges throughout our evolutionary history.

Some systems promote survival. Others promote status, coalition membership, mating success, kin protection, learning, or mastery. The relative influence of these systems changes constantly according to circumstances. The result is not a pyramid but a dynamic network of competing and cooperating motivations operating within a layered brain.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that emotions are not obstacles to human behavior. They are among its primary architects. Fear, loneliness, pride, shame, love, guilt, and even happiness did not evolve simply to make us feel something. They evolved because they influenced behavior in ways that tended to solve problems our ancestors encountered repeatedly.

Maslow gave us a useful map. Evolution and neuroscience suggest the terrain is far more complex. Beneath our philosophies, ideologies, and conscious beliefs lies an older architecture shaped by countless generations confronting the same fundamental challenges: avoiding danger, acquiring resources, maintaining alliances, competing for status, attracting mates, and protecting offspring.

The question is often not whether an emotion makes us happy. The question is what behavior it is attempting to produce.

Maslow asked what people need. Evolution asks what problems their ancestors had to solve.

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497

Buss, D. M. (2019). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind (6th ed.). Routledge.

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. Putnam.

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290–292. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1089134

Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4

Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00071-4

LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. Simon & Schuster.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346

Nesse, R. M. (2004). Why we get sick: The new science of Darwinian medicine. Vintage.

Nesse, R. M. (2019). Good reasons for bad feelings: Insights from the frontier of evolutionary psychiatry. Dutton.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11(4–5), 375–424.

Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871–1971 (pp. 136–179). Aldine.

Imagine a sniper competition that measured physical fitness, land navigation, camouflage, stalking, range estimation, fieldcraft, and marksmanship fundamentals, but never required competitors to fire the decisive shot.

No one would consider that a true sniper competition.

Every skill a sniper develops exists for one purpose: to place himself in a position where he can make the shot. Fitness gets him there. Land navigation gets him there. Camouflage keeps him hidden. Fieldcraft allows him to survive undetected. Range estimation and wind reading prepare him for the moment of truth. None of those skills is the objective. They are measured because they contribute to the one task that matters.

The shot.

The Army’s current emphasis is lethality. Every new weapon, training program, and modernization initiative is justified by one question: Does it make Soldiers and units more lethal?

Military competitions should be judged by the same standard.

Do they identify the Army’s most lethal Soldiers and units?

Lethality is the ability to close with and defeat the enemy.

Every event in a military competition should answer one of two questions.

Does it create an advantage?

Or does it determine who wins the fight?

Everything we measure in a Soldier, physical fitness, endurance, land navigation, obstacle negotiation, small-unit tactics, teamwork, marksmanship, and the employment of supporting fires, contributes to lethality. Each measures a different component of a Soldier’s ability to accomplish the mission. Together, they create advantages over the enemy.

For years I have thought military competitions should reflect that reality.

The idea first occurred to me while watching the Best Ranger Competition. After a helocast into Victory Pond, a combat water survival event, and the final 2.75-mile buddy run, the competition ends. It is an outstanding sequence of military tasks that tests endurance, determination, and teamwork. But it has always seemed to me that it ends one step too soon.

Every Ranger knows the words of the Ranger Creed: “My country expects me to move further, faster and fight harder than any other Soldier.”

The Best Ranger Competition measures the first two exceptionally well.

It should culminate by measuring the third.

In the Army, movement is never the end of the mission.

We do not march simply to complete a march. We do not ruck simply to reach a finish line.

We are not running from the enemy.

We are moving to close with and destroy the enemy.

Sometimes the next task is actions on the objective. Other times it is establishing a defense after seizing key terrain. Either way, movement is only one phase of the operation, and not the decisive one.

It exists to place the unit in the best possible position to win the fight.

A finish line is an appropriate ending for an athletic competition.

It is not an appropriate ending for a military one.

In Ranger operations, movement is followed by actions on the objective. Movement creates the opportunity.

At the end of the movement, there is a fight.

Ranger competitions should be designed the same way.

Recently, I had the opportunity to test a version of this idea during the culminating squad competition at Cadet Field Training at West Point. The competition consisted of a series of stations testing fundamental Soldier tasks, much like Ranger Stakes. The final event was a ruck race. As each squad crossed the finish line, they lined up in order of arrival. Once every squad had finished, they dropped their rucks and sent a two-man team into the arena.

The close combat portion of the event was submission grappling only. The last-place squad faced the second-to-last squad. The winner remained in the arena to face the next squad in reverse order of finish, continuing until only one team remained. The first-place squad, having earned the advantage through superior performance throughout the competition, fought only a single match. The last-place squad had to defeat every team ahead of it.

The format worked exactly as intended.

Every event before the finish line still mattered. The first squad to arrive still earned a significant tactical advantage. Nothing that had been measured was discarded.

What changed was what determined the winner.

Crossing the finish line no longer ended the competition.

It determined who had earned the advantage when the fighting began.

More importantly, it answered the one question the competition had never asked before.

Did superior endurance produce a more lethal Soldier?

Did greater strength produce a more lethal Soldier?

Did all of those advantages, taken together, produce a Soldier capable of winning the fight?

That experience convinced me the concept belongs in competitions like the Best Ranger Competition.

The adaptation is straightforward. After completing the final buddy run, teams would report directly to an arena, remove their rucks, don gloves and protective equipment, and prepare to defend or challenge their position. Instead of submission grappling, the competition would culminate in a two-on-two close combat match conducted under an amateur mixed martial arts ruleset. The last-place team would begin the ladder, fighting each successive team until reaching the first-place finishers, who would have earned the advantage of needing to win only a single final match.

If the first-place team defeats the final challenger, it has validated every advantage it earned throughout the competition.

But if another team fights its way through the field, defeats every challenger placed before it, and then defeats the first-place finishers, the conclusion is unavoidable.

The first team reached the objective first.

They earned every advantage.

Then they lost the fight.

They are not the Best Rangers.

There is a reason every warrior culture has regarded close combat as the ultimate test. It is not because wars are primarily won with swords, bayonets, or empty hands. They are not.

Wars are won primarily through the effective employment of weapons, supporting fires, maneuver, and logistics.

But the defining characteristic of a warrior has always been the willingness to close with the enemy.

Close combat is the point at which courage, skill, aggression, endurance, and teamwork can no longer be separated from one another. Every advantage earned beforehand is either converted into victory, or proves insufficient.

The purpose of the culminating event is not to measure another component of lethality.

It is to validate that everything measured beforehand actually produced a more lethal Soldier.

A sniper competition culminates with the shot because the shot is the purpose of everything that came before it.

Military competitions should be no different.

Movement to the objective earns the opportunity.

Actions on the objective determine the winner.

Every military competition should culminate by asking the same question commanders ask before every assault:

Can we win the fight.

Part II of a two-part series

The first article established the evolutionary framework underlying this paper, arguing that martial systems are best understood by the adaptive problems they evolved to solve rather than by their techniques or historical lineage.

You can read Part I here: From Predator and Prey to the Warrior

This article applies that framework to develop a functional classification of the martial arts and explores its implications for military combatives and modern martial practice.

A Functional Classification of the Martial Arts

Draeger’s classification was fundamentally historical. It explained how the Japanese martial traditions evolved as the circumstances that had originally produced them gradually changed. That historical perspective remains extremely valuable because it reveals a process that occurred with unusual clarity in Japan. It does not, however, provide a complete framework for understanding the enormous diversity of martial systems that exist today. Modern martial arts no longer differ primarily because of their historical lineage. They differ because they have evolved to solve different problems (Draeger, 1973–1975; Friday, 1997; Bennett, 2015).

The evolutionary framework developed throughout Part I suggests that martial systems are most clearly understood by the adaptive problems they are intended to solve rather than by the historical traditions from which they descend. Techniques, equipment, and methods may often appear similar, yet the purpose for which they are practiced fundamentally shapes both the culture of the system and the criteria by which success is judged. A classification based upon function therefore provides a more useful framework for understanding modern martial practice than one based solely upon historical development.

Viewed in this way, contemporary martial systems naturally fall into three broad categories. The first consists of warrior arts, whose purpose is to prepare individuals to fight effectively as members of a coalition. The second consists of individual fighting arts, whose purpose is to prepare individuals to prevail in interpersonal violence, whether in genuine combat or in regulated competitive contests. The third consists of developmental arts, in which martial practice serves primarily as a means of physical development, character formation, recreation, cultural preservation, or personal identity.

These categories should not be understood as rigid or mutually exclusive. Most martial systems contain elements of more than one. A military combatives program inevitably develops individual fighting ability. A competitive fighting system may cultivate discipline and character. A developmental art often preserves techniques originally developed for warfare. The categories instead describe the principal adaptive problem around which the system is organized. That central purpose shapes its methods, instructional priorities, standards of excellence, and ultimately its culture.

The distinction is particularly important because techniques themselves frequently migrate from one category to another while their purpose changes completely. A grappling technique developed for the the battlefield may later become part of a civilian self-defense system, a competitive sport, or a vehicle for personal development. The technique remains recognizable, but the adaptive problem it is intended to solve has changed. Understanding that change requires looking beyond the technique itself to the function it serves.

The chapters that follow examine each of these functional categories in turn. Although they share a common ancestry in the warrior arts, they have diverged because they now solve different problems. Appreciating those differences is essential for understanding both the strengths and the limitations of each, and for understanding why Modern Army Combatives represents not simply another martial art, but an attempt to return martial training to its original coalitionary purpose.

Warrior Arts

The warrior arts are the original martial arts. They emerged to solve a specific problem: preparing individuals to fight effectively as members of a coalition engaged in violent conflict with another coalition. Every aspect of their instruction was judged according to that purpose. Techniques were retained because they contributed to success in war and discarded when they no longer did. The measure of excellence was never individual victory alone, but the effectiveness of the fighting group.

This distinction has profound implications for how warrior arts are organized. Individual fighting skill is necessary, but it is never sufficient. A warrior must be proficient with the weapons of his time, capable of moving and communicating with other members of the formation, physically prepared for the demands of campaign and battle, and psychologically capable of functioning under conditions of fear, exhaustion, and uncertainty. He must understand tactics, discipline, and leadership. He must also possess the personal qualities required by the warrior culture from which the art emerged. Technical skill therefore occupies only one part of a much larger system designed to produce effective warriors rather than merely effective fighters.

Throughout history, this pattern appears with remarkable consistency. The Greek hoplite did not simply learn to use spear and shield; he learned to fight as one part of a phalanx. Roman legionaries mastered engineering, marching, logistics, weapons, discipline, and coordinated maneuver because all were necessary to the effectiveness of the legion. Medieval knights trained not only with sword and lance but also in horsemanship, leadership, and the obligations of their social position. Steppe horsemen developed extraordinary riding and archery skills because those abilities formed the foundation of mounted warfare. Although the techniques differed enormously, the organizing principle remained the same. Every element of training ultimately served the effectiveness of the coalition (du Picq, 1880/1947; Keegan, 1976).

This explains why warrior arts are inherently broad. They cannot be reduced to hand-to-hand combat, swordsmanship, marksmanship, or any other individual skill. Those are components of the larger system, not the system itself. A soldier who is an exceptional marksman but cannot move with his unit, communicate effectively, or maintain discipline under fire is not fully prepared for war. Likewise, an outstanding grappler who possesses no understanding of weapons, tactics, or coordinated action has mastered only a fragment of the warrior art.

The distinction becomes particularly important in modern discussions of military combatives. Civilian martial arts often begin with an individual discipline and then build outward according to the interests of individual practitioners. Warrior arts proceed in the opposite direction. They begin with the mission of the coalition and determine what individual skills must be developed to accomplish it. The direction of development is therefore fundamentally different.

This broader perspective also explains why warrior arts inevitably include subjects that many modern practitioners would not recognize as martial at all. Land navigation, battlefield medicine, communications, engineering, logistics, physical conditioning, fieldcraft, and leadership all contribute directly to success in war. They belong within the warrior art for the same reason that weapons training belongs within it: each prepares the individual to function more effectively as a member of the fighting coalition. Hand-to-hand combat remains an important component of the warrior art, not merely because close combat sometimes occurs, but because realistic fighting develops the physical skills, confidence, and psychological resilience required of warriors long before those skills are ever tested on the battlefield (du Picq, 1880/1947; Keegan, 1976).

Understanding the warrior arts in this way also clarifies why they often appear less technically refined in particular skills than specialized civilian systems. A military organization cannot devote all of its training time to grappling, swordsmanship, or marksmanship because it must prepare soldiers for a much wider range of tasks. Breadth is not evidence of inferiority. It is a consequence of purpose. A warrior art sacrifices specialization in individual disciplines in order to develop competence across the many skills required by coalitionary warfare.

This distinction provides the foundation for understanding the divergence of the modern martial arts. Once martial training ceased to be organized primarily around the requirements of coalitionary warfare, individual components of the warrior art increasingly became independent disciplines. Grappling, striking, weapons, competition, physical development, and personal cultivation gradually separated from the larger system that had originally united them. Each retained elements of its common ancestry while adapting to solve a different adaptive problem.

Individual Fighting Arts

As civilization became increasingly specialized, many of the component skills that had once existed within the warrior arts gradually became independent disciplines. They retained much of their technical heritage while adopting a different organizing principle. Rather than preparing individuals to function as members of a fighting coalition, they increasingly focused upon preparing individuals to prevail in interpersonal violence. The adaptive problem had changed, and the arts changed with it.

The objectives of these systems vary considerably. Some prepare practitioners for criminal violence and personal self-defense. Others emphasize judicial duels, challenge matches, prize fighting, law enforcement, or modern combat sports. Despite these differences, they share a common characteristic. Success is measured primarily by the individual’s ability to defeat another individual rather than by his contribution to the effectiveness of a larger fighting organization.

This distinction profoundly influences both training and culture. Because the individual fighter is the central concern, instruction naturally becomes more specialized. Training time that would once have been devoted to weapons, tactics, logistics, leadership, or coordinated movement can instead be invested in refining particular aspects of individual combat. The result is often an extraordinarily high level of technical proficiency. The specialist frequently surpasses the warrior in the narrow domain to which his training is devoted, not because the warrior art is inferior, but because it is organized around a broader purpose.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu illustrates this specialization particularly well. The art has become one of the most technically sophisticated grappling systems ever developed, owing in large part to its emphasis on continuous live training and competition. Yet its organizing principle is not coalitionary warfare. Most training is directed toward defeating another individual under conditions intentionally designed to isolate grappling from the broader problems of actual combat. Weapons, multiple opponents, tactical movement, communication, and the responsibilities of functioning within a military unit are largely outside its principal concern. They may be addressed in separate self-defense curricula, but they do not constitute the central activity around which the art is organized.

The same observation applies, in different ways, to boxing, wrestling, judo, mixed martial arts, and many systems of civilian combatives. Each has evolved to solve a particular individual problem, and each has become exceptionally effective within the domain for which it is organized. The mistake lies not in the specialization itself, but in assuming that success within one adaptive problem automatically transfers to another. A world-class boxer is not thereby prepared for infantry combat. An outstanding grappler is not necessarily prepared for armed confrontation. Likewise, an accomplished soldier may not perform at the highest levels of competitive grappling because his training has been organized around an entirely different objective.

Competition occupies a particularly important place within this category because it provides an efficient means of developing individual fighting ability. Formal contests create clear standards of performance, encourage sustained practice, reward technical innovation, and establish credible measures of proficiency. Competition also accelerates technical evolution, because ineffective methods are repeatedly exposed and replaced through continual testing against resisting opponents. They also recruit one of humanity's oldest behavioral systems: ritualized competition for position within the social hierarchy. As discussed earlier, ritualized competition for position within the social hierarchy long predates humanity itself. Modern combat sports represent highly refined cultural expressions of that ancient pattern. The contest determines relative standing while dramatically reducing the costs associated with unrestricted violence (Tinbergen, 1963; Huber & Kravitz, 1995; Boehm, 1999).

It is important, however, not to confuse the value of competition with the purpose of the art. In the individual fighting arts, competition often becomes the central organizing principle. The championship, the ranking system, and the public demonstration of individual superiority provide both motivation and measures of success. There is nothing inherently improper about this. It reflects the adaptive problem the system has evolved to solve. The art exists to produce highly capable individual fighters, and competition is among the most effective methods ever devised for accomplishing that objective.

This perspective also explains why the culture of many modern martial arts differs so markedly from that of military organizations. Civilian academies naturally depend upon voluntary participation. Instruction is directed toward those individuals sufficiently motivated to pursue excellence. The academy therefore becomes a community of enthusiasts, each pursuing his own development. The military cannot operate on this model. Its responsibility is not to produce a handful of exceptional fighters, but to ensure that every member of the formation achieves a level of competence consistent with the requirements of the coalition.

The distinction is one of purpose rather than quality. Individual fighting arts represent some of the highest expressions of technical combat skill ever developed. Their methods have much to teach soldiers, police officers, and civilians alike. The error arises only when their organizing principle is mistaken for that of the warrior arts. They answer a different question. Rather than asking how an individual contributes to the effectiveness of a fighting coalition, they ask how an individual defeats another individual. Both questions are legitimate. They are simply not the same.

Developmental Arts

The final stage in the specialization of the martial arts occurs when fighting itself ceases to be the principal objective of training. Techniques originally developed for warfare or interpersonal combat are retained, but they now serve primarily as vehicles for achieving other ends. Physical fitness, character development, recreation, cultural preservation, spiritual discipline, education, or personal identity become the organizing principles around which the system is structured. Combat remains present, but it is no longer the reason for practice.

This transformation is neither unusual nor uniquely modern. Throughout history, cultural practices have often outlived the conditions that originally produced them. Hunting traditions become sports after agriculture reduces dependence upon wild game. Horsemanship survives as recreation long after horses cease to dominate transportation and warfare. The martial arts underwent a similar process of cultural specialization. As fewer societies required large numbers of professional warriors, martial practice increasingly became valuable for reasons other than preparation for war (Henrich, 2016).

Many of the disciplines commonly associated with the Japanese concept of dō illustrate this transition. Technical practice remains important, but the emphasis increasingly shifts toward the effect that disciplined practice has upon the individual. The repeated performance of demanding skills cultivates discipline, patience, perseverance, humility, self-control, and attention to detail. The practitioner continues to study martial technique, but the ultimate product is no longer simply a more capable fighter. It is a more disciplined person (Draeger, 1973–1975; Bennett, 2015).

Competition often remains valuable within these systems, but its purpose changes. As discussed earlier, competition is an ancient expression of the behavioral system governing social hierarchy. Properly structured, it provides immediate feedback, reveals weaknesses, and motivates sustained effort. In developmental arts, however, victory is not the final objective. Competition becomes a means of improving the practitioner rather than an end in itself. The opponent serves not merely as an adversary, but as an indispensable partner in the practitioner's development (Tinbergen, 1963; Boehm, 1999).

This distinction helps explain why many modern practitioners speak of martial arts as lifelong pursuits. The battlefield imposes a practical standard: effectiveness in war. Individual fighting arts impose another: victory over another individual. Developmental arts substitute a different standard altogether. Success is measured by continued growth. Technical skill remains important, but it is valued largely because of the qualities developed through its pursuit rather than the practical application of violence.

The emergence of developmental arts should not be understood as a corruption of the warrior traditions from which they descended. Rather, they represent an adaptation to changing social conditions. As civilization created an ever-expanding number of peaceful avenues through which individuals could attain position within the social hierarchy, fewer people required martial training for war or personal combat. Yet many of the educational and psychological benefits of disciplined martial practice remained valuable. The arts therefore evolved to meet those new needs while preserving important elements of their technical and cultural inheritance. In doing so, they continued the broader evolutionary process described throughout this paper: recruiting their technical advances while preserving the organizing purpose of the warrior art: preparing individuals to become effective members of a fighting coalition. (Henrich, 2016; Bennett, 2015).

Recognizing developmental arts as a distinct functional category also clarifies many otherwise confusing debates within the martial arts community. Questions concerning whether an art is “effective” often become contentious because participants are evaluating different adaptive problems without realizing it. A system designed primarily for character development should not be judged by the same criteria as one designed for military service or competitive fighting. Likewise, a military combatives program should not be evaluated according to standards appropriate for a developmental art. Each should be judged according to the problem it is intended to solve.

Taken together, the warrior arts, the individual fighting arts, and the developmental arts represent not competing philosophies but different branches of a common evolutionary tree. They preserve much of the same technical heritage while organizing themselves around different purposes. Appreciating those purposes allows each to be understood on its own terms while avoiding the confusion that results from judging one category according to the standards of another.

This distinction also prepares us to examine a recurring problem in modern military combatives. Because civilian martial arts now exist primarily within the individual fighting and developmental categories, they exert a powerful influence upon military instructors. The resulting tension between civilian martial culture and the requirements of a warrior art lies at the heart of many contemporary debates concerning the purpose of military combatives.

Modern Army Combatives: A Return to Purpose

Understanding the distinction between warrior arts, individual fighting arts, and developmental arts clarifies a recurring source of confusion within modern military combatives. The military frequently draws instructors from civilian martial arts, particularly Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, wrestling, boxing, and mixed martial arts. These systems produce exceptionally capable individual fighters, and the Army has benefited enormously from the technical knowledge they provide. Difficulties arise not because these arts are ineffective, but because they are organized around a different adaptive problem than the one military organizations must solve.

The first purpose of a military combatives program is to develop generic fighting ability. Before soldiers specialize in the techniques, tactics, and procedures associated with their particular military specialty, they benefit from a common foundation of confidence in physical confrontation, controlled aggression, balance, composure under pressure, and the ability to continue functioning during intense interpersonal conflict. This foundation is not intended to replace mission-specific training. Rather, it prepares soldiers to benefit from it. Mission-specific training prepares soldiers for the particular circumstances they are most likely to encounter while accomplishing their unit's mission. Like all specialized skills, however, it must be built upon a more fundamental foundation. Just as a baseball player must first learn to throw and catch before mastering the double play, soldiers benefit from first developing generic fighting ability before specializing in the techniques, tactics, and procedures required to accomplish their unit's mission. That foundation develops the confidence, composure, and behavioral qualities upon which mission-specific skills can continue to be employed effectively, even when the battlefield departs from the conditions for which they were originally intended. An artilleryman must still master artillery, a tanker his tank, and a pilot his aircraft. At the same time, every soldier must be prepared for the possibility that the battlefield will collapse into close combat. Military history repeatedly demonstrates that soldiers of every specialty sometimes find themselves fighting in close quarters and hand-to-hand combat when plans fail, units become isolated, vehicles are disabled, ammunition is exhausted, or the enemy closes unexpectedly. The battlefield is inherently unpredictable. A military combatives program prepares soldiers for those possibilities while also developing the behavioral and psychological qualities common to warriors regardless of specialty.

The second purpose is psychological rather than technical. Close, physically demanding competition accustoms soldiers to many of the emotional and physiological realities of combat. Fear, uncertainty, fatigue, pain, frustration, physical exhaustion, and the necessity of continuing to function despite them are experienced repeatedly in training. Although no training environment can fully replicate the battlefield, repeated exposure to intense interpersonal conflict develops familiarity with many of the psychological demands common to both fighting and war. The objective is not to eliminate fear, but to ensure that soldiers discover through experience that they are capable of functioning effectively in its presence.

My own experience during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reinforced this conclusion. During the years of heaviest fighting, I routinely conducted post-action interviews with soldiers who had been involved in hand-to-hand combat. One observation appeared with surprising consistency. After describing the encounter, soldiers would often conclude with essentially the same statement: “It was like fighting a white belt.” The comparison was remarkably apt. Their opponents were typically aggressive, determined, and physically committed, but they possessed little understanding of how to fight against someone employing even basic grappling technique. They fought with tremendous determination, but without the technical understanding that comes through systematic training.

This observation illustrates an important principle. The purpose of military combatives is not to prepare soldiers to defeat world champions. It is to prepare ordinary soldiers to prevail in the kinds of close combat they are actually likely to encounter. The battlefield rarely presents carefully matched contests between equally trained martial artists. It more often presents chaotic encounters involving frightened, exhausted, and highly motivated individuals possessing widely differing levels of technical skill. Even a modest level of systematic training can therefore provide a decisive advantage when violence becomes immediate and personal.

The purpose of a military combatives program is not to produce a small number of outstanding fighters. It is to produce a unit in which every soldier possesses a functional level of fighting competence while reinforcing the behavioral qualities that make the unit itself more effective in combat. This distinction changes nearly every aspect of program design. The measure of success is not how many champions the program produces, but whether the average soldier becomes more capable, more confident, and more valuable to the coalition (Tinbergen, 1963; Boehm, 1999).

This difference in purpose naturally produces different cultures. Civilian academies generally depend upon voluntary participation. Individuals choose to attend because they enjoy training, seek competition, or wish to improve themselves. The instructor’s task is to develop those who have already chosen to be there. Military organizations cannot operate in this manner. Every soldier is part of the fighting formation, regardless of personal interest. A successful military program must therefore train the entire unit rather than merely attracting the most motivated individuals.

This distinction explains a common failure observed in military combatives programs. Instructors whose experience has been shaped primarily within the culture of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or mixed martial arts often build excellent clubs instead of effective unit programs. Participation gradually becomes concentrated among the small minority of soldiers who are intrinsically motivated to train. Technical standards within the club may become extremely high, while the overall fighting ability of the unit changes very little. The instructor has unintentionally solved a different adaptive problem. He has built an outstanding individual fighting program rather than a warrior art.

The difference is not simply organizational. It reflects the behavioral systems discussed earlier in this paper. Civilian academies rely primarily upon self-selection and personal ambition. Individuals train because they have already decided to compete within that particular hierarchy. Military organizations cannot rely upon self-selection because the coalition depends upon the competence of every member. The challenge is therefore to harness the ancient human drive for social hierarchy in a manner that motivates the entire formation rather than only its enthusiasts.

Competition remains one of the most powerful tools available for accomplishing this objective, but its purpose changes. In individual fighting arts, formal competition often becomes an end in itself. Championships, rankings, and public recognition encourage individuals to devote extraordinary effort toward technical mastery. These competitions are invaluable because they produce exceptionally skilled practitioners and drive the technical evolution of the art.

Within a warrior art, however, formal competition serves a different function. It identifies highly capable practitioners, develops instructors, and establishes demanding technical standards, but it cannot become the principal activity of the program because only a small percentage of soldiers will pursue it seriously. The broader objective remains the fighting effectiveness of the entire unit.

For that reason, informal competition assumes even greater importance. Every training session concludes with soldiers testing themselves against one another. These contests are not championships. They are part of the daily social life of the unit. Every soldier knows that his peers, leaders, and subordinates will observe his willingness to engage, his composure under pressure, his persistence, and his technical competence. No one is expected to become a champion. Everyone is expected to become a credible fighter.

This distinction reflects the evolutionary framework developed throughout this paper. Formal competition harnesses competition for social hierarchy among the small minority willing to pursue exceptional levels of performance. Informal competition harnesses the same behavioral system across the entire coalition. Because participation is universal, fighting competence becomes part of the unit’s social expectations rather than the hobby of a few enthusiasts. Competition remains the mechanism, but the adaptive problem has returned to its original purpose: strengthening the coalition.

Military combatives therefore measures success differently from civilian martial arts. Its purpose is not to maximize the technical ability of a few exceptional individuals. Its purpose is to develop the fighting capacity and warrior ethos of the entire formation.

When we began building the Army Combatives Program, I initially believed formal competition would be the primary engine driving improvement. Experience taught me otherwise. Formal tournaments are invaluable for developing exceptional fighters and instructors. If done well, in the overall context of soldiering, they also publicly identify and reward soldiers who exemplify the highest standards of the profession, providing visible examples of the qualities the Army wishes to cultivate. At the same time, the real transformation of the unit occurred in daily practice. When every physical training session, after the run or foot march, ended with soldiers testing themselves against one another, fighting ability became part of the social fabric of the unit. Every soldier knew that his peers and subordinates would witness not merely whether he won, but whether he continued to fight when tired, frustrated, or outmatched. It was this informal competition, repeated day after day, that changed the culture of the organization.

The principle is no different from the role of physical fitness in senior leadership. Few would argue that the primary value of a brigade commander lies in his ability to carry a heavy rucksack or run the fastest two-mile. His value lies in the knowledge, judgment, and experience accumulated over decades of service. History contains countless examples of commanders who directed campaigns while physically incapable of marching with their soldiers. Yet military organizations still expect senior leaders to maintain high standards of physical fitness. They do so not because physical performance is the principal contribution of a senior commander, but because leadership requires visible commitment to the standards expected of the force. Soldiers are more willing to accept hardship from leaders who willingly share it.

Combatives serves a similar function. The Army does not require every senior leader to become the finest fighter in the formation. It does require leaders to demonstrate, by personal example, that fighting competence matters. Participation communicates something far more important than technical proficiency. It demonstrates a willingness to enter the same demanding environment expected of the soldiers who will ultimately close with and destroy the enemy in close combat. That example reinforces the warrior ethos throughout the organization in a manner that no policy, speech, or written directive can achieve.

When senior leaders consistently participate in combatives training, they communicate that fighting remains central to the Army’s professional identity. When they consistently avoid it, soldiers notice that as well. The issue is not whether every commander can defeat every subordinate in a grappling match. Such an expectation would be both unrealistic and irrelevant. The issue is whether leaders visibly embrace the standards and culture they expect others to uphold. In a warrior profession, participation in demanding training is itself an act of leadership because it demonstrates commitment to the values upon which the fighting effectiveness of the coalition ultimately depends.

Modern Army Combatives should therefore be understood not as another civilian martial art, nor as a simplified version of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or mixed martial arts, but as a contemporary warrior art. It draws freely from the technical advances of the individual fighting arts because those arts have refined methods of developing individual combat skill to an extraordinary degree. Yet it organizes those methods according to a different principle. Individual skill serves the coalition, not the reverse.

In this sense, Modern Army Combatives represents less an innovation than a restoration. Civilization gradually separated the warrior arts into increasingly specialized disciplines as military service became only one of many avenues through which men sought position within the social hierarchy. Modern Army Combatives reunites those disciplines under their original organizing principle. It employs competition without allowing competition to become the purpose of training. It develops individual fighting ability without forgetting that the soldier’s ultimate task is not to win an individual contest, but to fight effectively as a trusted member of a coalition.

Confusing Purpose with Technique

One of the most persistent errors in discussions of the martial arts is the assumption that techniques determine the nature of a system. They do not. A technique has no purpose independent of the problem it is intended to solve. The same arm lock, takedown, sword cut, or marksmanship drill may appear in a warrior art, an individual fighting art, or a developmental art while serving entirely different functions. To classify martial systems by their techniques is therefore to mistake the means for the end. Purpose determines organization. Techniques are selected, modified, preserved, or discarded according to how well they contribute to that purpose.

This distinction explains why debates over “which martial art is best” rarely produce meaningful conclusions. Participants often assume they are discussing the same question when, in reality, they are evaluating different adaptive problems. A soldier preparing for combat, a police officer making arrests, a civilian concerned with personal protection, a mixed martial arts competitor, and an individual seeking physical discipline are not attempting to solve the same problem. It should therefore surprise no one that the optimal training methods differ.

The same confusion frequently appears within military organizations. A highly accomplished competitor is often assumed to possess the knowledge required to build an effective military combatives program. Competition certainly demonstrates exceptional individual fighting ability and frequently develops excellent instructors of individual combat. It does not, by itself, provide an understanding of how to train an entire military formation. Those are different educational problems and therefore require different organizational methods.

The reverse misunderstanding also occurs. Military combatives are sometimes criticized because they do not produce the same degree of technical specialization found among elite civilian competitors. Such criticism mistakes breadth for deficiency. A warrior art cannot devote all of its time to perfecting a single skill because it must prepare soldiers for the much broader demands of coalitionary warfare. Every hour devoted to one subject necessarily comes at the expense of another equally necessary military skill. The apparent compromise is not evidence of lower standards. It is evidence of a different purpose.

Recognizing the distinction between purpose and technique also changes how martial traditions should borrow from one another. A warrior art should enthusiastically adopt superior methods of developing individual fighting skill wherever they are found. Throughout history, successful military organizations have consistently incorporated useful techniques from rivals, allies, and civilian specialists (Keegan, 1976). What must remain constant is not the technique itself, but focus on the adaptive problem the system is organized to solve. Every borrowed method should ultimately be judged by one question: does it make the coalition more effective?

This perspective also resolves an apparent paradox. As civilization became more specialized, the individual fighting arts often surpassed the warrior arts in technical refinement within particular disciplines. This should not be surprising. Specialists almost always outperform generalists within their chosen fields. The military has every reason to learn from those specialists. It must never, however, mistake specialization for completeness. The broader requirements of the warrior art remain because the adaptive problem remains. Soldiers are still required to fight as members of coalitions rather than as isolated individuals (Henrich, 2016).

The functional classification proposed in this paper is therefore intended neither to rank nor to diminish the various martial traditions. Warrior arts, individual fighting arts, and developmental arts each represent successful solutions to different adaptive problems. Each has produced remarkable achievements within its own domain. Confusion arises only when the standards appropriate to one category are imposed upon another. Once the organizing purpose of a system is understood, many long-standing disagreements within the martial arts community become matters of classification rather than contradiction.

The same principle extends far beyond the martial arts. Throughout this paper, the central argument has been that culture repeatedly recruits ancient behavioral systems to solve new adaptive problems. Behaviors, institutions, and traditions can therefore be understood only by first asking what problems they evolved to solve. The martial arts provide an unusually clear illustration of this process because their evolution has been well documented while their purposes have repeatedly changed and many of their outward forms remained remarkably similar.

Conclusion

The martial arts are often treated as collections of techniques inherited from different cultures and historical periods. This perspective is understandable, but it obscures the more important question. Techniques are products of a deeper process. They emerge because they solve particular problems. As those problems change, the techniques, methods, organizations, and cultures surrounding them change as well.

Viewed in this way, the history of the martial arts reflects a much broader pattern in both biological and cultural evolution. Predator-prey interactions produced the earliest behavioral systems associated with violence. Competition within the social hierarchy produced ritualized forms of conflict that reduced the costs of repeated competition among members of the same species. Coalitionary competition built upon both of these ancient systems, preserving internal competition while reusing predator-prey behaviors in conflicts between groups. Human culture then recruited these inherited behavioral systems, organizing them into warrior traditions capable of producing disciplined fighting coalitions.

The warrior arts emerged as practical solutions to this coalitionary problem. Their purpose was never simply to produce better individual fighters. It was to prepare individuals to function effectively within groups engaged in violent competition with other groups. As civilization became increasingly specialized and warfare ceased to dominate the lives of most people, those arts naturally diversified. Some evolved into highly refined systems of individual combat. Others became vehicles for physical development, recreation, education, or personal cultivation. The technical ancestry often remained visible, but the adaptive problems they addressed became increasingly distinct.

Recognizing this process helps explain many of the persistent disagreements within the modern martial arts community. Systems are frequently judged according to standards they were never intended to satisfy. A military combatives program is criticized for failing to resemble a competitive fighting academy. A developmental art is dismissed because it does not produce elite fighters. A combat sport is expected to solve tactical problems that belong to warfare rather than individual competition. In each case, the error lies not in the art itself but in misunderstanding the purpose for which it exists.

The functional classification proposed in this paper is intended to reduce that confusion. Warrior arts, individual fighting arts, and developmental arts should not be understood as competing philosophies or successive stages of improvement. They represent different solutions to different adaptive problems. Their methods, cultures, and standards of excellence follow naturally from those purposes. Appreciating those differences allows each category to be understood on its own terms while encouraging the thoughtful exchange of techniques and ideas among them.

Modern Army Combatives illustrates the continuing relevance of this perspective. It benefits enormously from the technical advances produced by the individual fighting arts, particularly through the use of live training and competition. At the same time, it must remain organized around the needs of the fighting coalition rather than the ambitions of individual competitors. Its success therefore depends not upon rejecting the individual fighting arts, but upon recruiting their technical advances in service of the larger cultural purpose for which warrior arts evolved: preparing individuals to become effective members of a fighting coalition.

The broader lesson extends well beyond the martial arts. Human culture rarely creates entirely new motivational systems. Instead, it repeatedly recruits ancient biological ones, directing them toward purposes that evolution alone could never specify. Competition for social position becomes honor. Coalition loyalty becomes military discipline. Ancient predator-prey behaviors become military tactics. Purpose determines organization. When the adaptive problem changes, institutions change with it, preserving what remains useful while reorganizing inherited behaviors around new cultural purposes. The martial arts are therefore not merely systems of fighting. They are cultural institutions built upon behavioral architectures whose origins extend hundreds of millions, and in some cases more than a billion, years into the past. Understanding them requires understanding both biology and culture, and the continuing partnership between them.

For that reason, the first question we should ask of any martial system is not what techniques it teaches or from which tradition it descends. The more fundamental question is the one that has guided this paper from the beginning:

What problem was it created to solve?

Only after answering that question can its techniques, its methods of instruction, its culture, its standards of excellence, and ultimately its place within the broader history of the martial arts be fully understood.

References

Bennett, A. (2015). Kendo: Culture of the sword. University of California Press.

Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Harvard University Press.

Draeger, D. F. (1973–1975). Martial arts and ways of Japan (Vols. 1–3). Weatherhill.

du Picq, C. A. (1947). Battle studies: Ancient and modern battle (J. N. Greely & R. C. Cotton, Trans.). Stackpole. (Original work published 1880)

Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press.

Keegan, J. (1976). The face of battle. Viking Press.

Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20(4), 410–433.

Introduction

The term martial art is commonly used as though it describes a single category of human activity. Brazilian jiu-jitsu, boxing, military Combatives, civilian self-defense, judo, mixed martial arts, and even competitive shooting are consequently discussed as different expressions of essentially the same endeavor: learning how to fight. They certainly share techniques, training methods, and historical influences, but treating them as equivalent obscures a more important distinction. They do not exist to solve the same problem.

A competitive fighter is preparing to defeat another willing competitor. A civilian studying self-defense is preparing for the possibility of criminal violence. A police officer seeks to control violent individuals while operating within legal and professional constraints. A soldier is preparing to function as a member of an armed organization engaged in combat against another armed organization. A practitioner of a modern martial way may train primarily for competition, physical development, discipline, recreation, or character. These activities share a common ancestry, but they have diverged because they are organized around fundamentally different purposes.

The central argument of this paper is that martial practices can only be understood by first examining the problems they evolved to solve. To investigate those problems, the method employed throughout this paper is one of consilience. Rather than relying upon a single discipline, the argument draws upon evolutionary biology, ethology, anthropology, military history, and practical military experience, asking whether each independently reveals the same underlying patterns in the evolution of violence and the development of the martial arts. Fighting itself did not appear fully formed in human beings, nor did all forms of fighting arise simultaneously. Rather, the history of violence is one of successive evolutionary innovations, each creating new behavioral problems and new forms of adaptation. The oldest was the predator-prey relationship. Later came competition within the social hierarchy among members of the same species. Finally, in a comparatively small number of highly social species, coalitionary competition emerged as groups cooperated in violent conflict against rival groups (Darwin, 1859; Tinbergen, 1963; Wrangham, 2019; Boehm, 1999). From that final development emerged warrior culture, and from warrior culture emerged the warrior arts.

The distinction is more than historical. These ancient behavioral systems remain active in human beings today. Criminal violence still resembles the predator-prey relationship. Bar fights, duels, challenge matches, and combat sports remain expressions of hierarchical competition. Warfare remains fundamentally coalitionary. Modern martial practices, whether consciously or not, continue to organize themselves around one or more of these ancient behavioral problems (Buss, 2016; Sapolsky, 2017; Wrangham, 2019).

Understanding this evolutionary progression provides a framework for understanding why modern martial practices differ so profoundly despite their common ancestry. It also provides a framework for understanding why military Combatives cannot simply adopt the culture of civilian martial arts. The military’s purpose is different. It is not trying to produce better competitors, nor even merely better individual fighters. Its purpose is to contribute to the development of effective members of a fighting coalition.

The questions explored in this paper did not first arise for me in a university. It began as a young Marine Corps 0311 infantryman trying to understand how best to prepare for war. Over the following four decades, as a Ranger, combat veteran, director of the Army Combatives Program, and teacher at West Point, that practical problem gradually became an evolutionary one. Why did these methods work? Why did some programs consistently succeed while others failed? This paper represents my attempt to answer those questions through the combined perspectives of evolutionary biology, anthropology, military history, and four decades of studying, teaching, and applying these ideas in military organizations.

The argument therefore begins, not with martial arts, but with the evolution of violence itself.

The broader argument of this paper extends beyond the martial arts themselves. Biological evolution produced ancient motivational systems that solved recurring adaptive problems throughout the history of life. Human culture did not replace those systems. It repeatedly recruited and organized them to solve increasingly complex social problems. The history of the martial arts is one expression of this larger process. Understanding their evolution therefore requires understanding not only how biology shaped human behavior, but also how culture learned to direct that behavior toward new purposes.

Behavior Comes Before Cognition

Understanding the evolution of fighting requires adopting a particular perspective on the relationship between behavior and cognition. Human beings naturally explain behavior by appealing to conscious thought. We ask why an individual acted, and we expect an answer involving beliefs, intentions, desires, or decisions. While such explanations are often useful, they describe only one level of analysis. Evolutionary explanations ask a different question. Rather than asking what an organism believes, they ask why a particular pattern of behavior exists at all.

The distinction is important because behavior is far older than cognition. Natural selection does not require organisms to understand why a behavior is advantageous. It requires only that organisms possessing heritable behavioral tendencies consistently leave more descendants than organisms possessing alternative tendencies. Over evolutionary time, successful patterns of behavior become increasingly common. The capacity to understand, explain, justify, or consciously reflect upon those behaviors evolves much later (Darwin, 1859/2009; Maynard Smith, 1982; Tinbergen, 1963).

This illustrates the principle of consilience. Evolutionary biology, comparative psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and history all examine human beings from different perspectives, yet each reveals continuity with the rest of the living world. Human beings are not exempt from evolution. We are among its products. The extraordinary sophistication of the human brain rests upon behavioral architectures whose origins extend hundreds of millions, and in some cases more than a billion, years into the past (Darwin, 1859/2009).

The earliest examples predate nervous systems altogether. Single-celled organisms detect chemical gradients, move toward nutrients, avoid harmful environments, pursue other cells, and defend themselves against predation. They solve problems fundamental to survival despite possessing neither brains nor thoughts in any recognizable sense. The evolution of nervous systems did not create these behavioral problems. It provided increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for solving them (Alberts et al., 2022; Maynard Smith, 1982).

As nervous systems became larger and more complex, organisms acquired greater capacities for perception, learning, memory, anticipation, and behavioral flexibility. Yet evolution rarely discarded successful behavioral solutions. Instead, it preserved them while elaborating the biological machinery through which they could be expressed. Ancient behavioral systems remained. The nervous system became progressively more capable of deploying them under increasingly complex conditions (Tinbergen, 1963; Maynard Smith, 1982; Sapolsky, 2017).

Even relatively simple animals illustrate this principle. A cricket possesses a nervous system consisting of a small brain connected to a ventral nerve cord and a series of ganglia. Nevertheless, it courts mates, competes with rivals, avoids predators, communicates through species-specific signals, and modifies its behavior according to experience. These behaviors are not the product of abstract reasoning. A cricket does not understand why it behaves as it does. It simply behaves. Its behaviors are products of evolution.

Human beings represent the most elaborate expression of this same process. Our greatly expanded cerebral cortex allows us to imagine hypothetical futures, construct languages, develop cultures, invent technologies, and consciously examine our own behavior (Deacon, 1997; Sapolsky, 2017). These capacities dramatically increase the sophistication with which we pursue our objectives.

They do not create the objectives themselves.

The motivational systems directing much of human behavior are evolutionarily far older than the cognitive machinery that now serves them. Our larger brains did not replace ancient behavioral systems. They made them vastly more flexible, allowing the same fundamental motivations to be pursued through an extraordinary range of behaviors unimaginable in simpler organisms.

Human beings therefore face a persistent temptation to mistake explanation for origin. Because we can explain our behavior, we often assume our explanations are the source of that behavior. Evolution suggests the opposite. Our explanations are among the newest products of evolution. The behavioral systems they describe are among its oldest.

The argument that follows adopts this perspective throughout. It does not seek to reduce human behavior to biology. Rather, it proceeds from the observation that evolution builds upon successful behavioral systems instead of replacing them. To understand why different forms of fighting exist, and why different martial traditions evolved to solve different problems, we must first understand the evolution of the behavioral systems they were developed to serve.

The First Fighting Problem: Predator and Prey

The oldest behavioral system examined in this paper is also one of the oldest relationships in the history of life itself: predator and prey.

Indeed, its origins almost certainly predate nervous systems altogether. Long before the evolution of brains, muscles, or even multicellular animals, single-celled organisms were already solving the same fundamental problem. Some evolved mechanisms for detecting, pursuing, engulfing, and digesting other cells. Others evolved mechanisms for detecting danger, avoiding contact, escaping, or resisting engulfment. The biological problem is therefore more than a billion years old, making it one of the oldest continuous behavioral patterns in the history of life (Alberts et al., 2022; Maynard Smith, 1982).

The evolution of nervous systems did not create the predator-prey relationship. It simply allowed organisms to solve it with increasing sophistication.

As animals became larger and more complex, predators and prey coevolved through an evolutionary arms race. Predators evolved improved sensory systems, greater speed, stealth, weapons, and increasingly sophisticated methods of detecting and capturing prey. Prey evolved corresponding improvements in vigilance, camouflage, defensive structures, escape behavior, alarm signaling, and, when escape became impossible, defensive aggression. Every improvement in one produced selective pressure for improvement in the other (Darwin, 1859/2009; Maynard Smith, 1982).

The defining characteristic of predator-prey interactions is that the objectives of the participants are fundamentally asymmetric.

The predator seeks to exploit the prey. The prey seeks only to survive. There is no mutually recognized contest, no competition for social position, and no expectation of fairness. Surprise, deception, ambush, overwhelming force, numerical superiority, and the exploitation of weakness are all advantageous because the objective is not to determine who is the better fighter. It is simply to eat or avoid being eaten.

These ancient behavioral systems remain active in human beings today. Much criminal violence retains the structure of the predator-prey relationship. The armed robber does not ordinarily seek a fair contest with his victim. He prefers surprise, intimidation, superior numbers, or the display of overwhelming force. A rapist seeks an isolated victim rather than the strongest available opponent. A burglar enters an empty house whenever possible. Even organized criminal violence frequently depends upon ambush, deception, or overwhelming advantage rather than open competition (Buss, 2016; Wrangham, 2019).

The victim’s objective is equally ancient. He seeks to detect the danger early, avoid the encounter if possible, escape if he can, and, only when escape is no longer possible, fight in defense of himself or those under his protection.

Viewed through this evolutionary framework, civilian self-defense systems exist to solve the predator-prey problem.

Properly understood, self-defense is not primarily preparation for competition with other members of one’s own social group. It is preparation for predatory violence. Situational awareness, avoidance, de-escalation, escape, intelligent positioning, and the appropriate use of force are therefore often more important than demonstrating superior fighting ability. The objective is not victory in a contest. It is survival.

Predator-prey interactions therefore produced the oldest behavioral systems associated with violence: detection, pursuit, concealment, ambush, escape, defensive aggression, and the intelligent exploitation of advantage. These behavioral systems have remained recognizable for well over a billion years because they continue to solve the same fundamental adaptive problem (Darwin, 1859/2009; Maynard Smith, 1982; Tinbergen, 1963).

They do not, however, produce social hierarchy.

The lion does not become socially superior to the gazelle. The hawk does not establish rank over the mouse. One organism simply attempts to exploit another.

A fundamentally different evolutionary problem emerged when members of the same species began competing with one another for resources. Fighting was no longer merely a means of exploiting another organism. It became a means of determining relative position within the social hierarchy.

It is from that problem that the next great behavioral system, and ultimately the roots of combat sports, honor, and the warrior tradition, would emerge.

The Second Fighting Problem: Social Hierarchy

The emergence of predator-prey interactions did not eliminate conflict. It solved only one biological problem: how one organism exploits another. A second problem emerged when members of the same species began competing with one another for resources.

Unlike predator and prey, members of the same species often require many of the same things. Food, territory, shelter, mates, and access to reproductive opportunities are finite. Individuals therefore compete, not because one intends to consume the other, but because both cannot always possess the same resource simultaneously. Fighting acquired a new function. It became a means of determining relative position within the social hierarchy (Darwin, 1859/2009; Maynard Smith, 1982; Tinbergen, 1963).

This behavioral system is extraordinarily widespread. It appears in animals that do not form enduring fighting coalitions and in many that do. Male crickets compete for territories from which they call to females. Male deer clash during the breeding season for access to mates. Elephant seals battle for breeding beaches. Walruses compete for favorable stretches of shoreline. Hippopotamus bulls defend sections of river occupied by females. Across an enormous diversity of species, the details differ, but the underlying biological problem remains recognizable: individuals compete for position within a social hierarchy because that position influences access to resources and reproductive success (Darwin, 1859/2009; Tinbergen, 1963; Buss, 2016).

One of the clearest examples is provided by the American lobster. This example became widely known through the work of psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, who used it to illustrate the deep evolutionary roots of social hierarchies. The underlying biological observations, however, derive from decades of neuroethological research on crustacean behavior (Doernberg et al., 2001; Huber & Kravitz, 1995; Peterson, 2018).

Imagine two male lobsters that have been raised in complete isolation from other lobsters. Neither has ever observed another lobster. Neither has had an opportunity to learn how lobsters behave. Yet when they are placed together near a desirable shelter, a remarkably organized sequence unfolds (Doernberg et al., 2001; Huber & Kravitz, 1995).

They do not immediately attempt to injure one another.

Each first attempts to intimidate the other. They raise their bodies, spread their claws, and make themselves appear as large and formidable as possible. If one male is obviously larger, the smaller may simply retreat. No fight occurs. The relationship between the two animals has nevertheless been resolved. Their relative positions within the social hierarchy have been established (Huber & Kravitz, 1995; Karavanich & Atema, 1998; Livingstone et al., 1980).

If neither yields, the contest escalates.

The two lobsters seize one another by the claws and engage in what is essentially a wrestling match. Each attempts to push, twist, and overturn the other. If one succeeds in flipping his opponent onto his back, the defeated lobster ordinarily retreats. Again, the contest ends without serious injury. The hierarchy has been established through a limited physical contest (Huber & Kravitz, 1995).

Only if these earlier forms of conflict fail does the encounter escalate into unrestricted fighting (Huber & Kravitz, 1995).

The progression is revealing because every stage provides an opportunity to avoid the costs of serious combat. A lobster that wins a violent contest but loses a claw may immediately lose both the shelter and his newly acquired position to the next healthy male that arrives. Winning matters, but remaining capable of winning the next contest matters as well. Natural selection therefore favors assessment, intimidation, ritualized escalation, wrestling, opportunities for withdrawal, and only finally unrestricted violence. The objective is not simply to defeat another individual. It is to establish relative position within the social hierarchy while minimizing unnecessary injury (Huber & Kravitz, 1995; Maynard Smith, 1982).

Only after understanding the behavioral sequence do we ask the obvious question.

Why are they competing over the shelter?

The answer is reproduction. The shelter itself has no evolutionary significance. What matters is that controlling it increases reproductive success. Female lobsters seek protected shelters in which to molt, and mating occurs shortly after the female sheds her shell. Males controlling the better shelters therefore enjoy greater reproductive success because females preferentially seek out those protected locations during this vulnerable period. The males do not understand this relationship. They need not. Behavior came before cognition. The behavioral system evolved because individuals possessing these behavioral tendencies left more descendants than those who did not (Atema & Cobb, 1980; Karnofsky et al., 1989).

The continuity with human behavior is difficult to ignore.

Two young men confronting one another in a bar often follow a remarkably similar sequence. They assess one another. They attempt to appear larger and more confident. They posture. They exchange threats. They invade one another’s personal space. They shove. They may wrestle. Only if neither yields does the confrontation commonly escalate into serious violence. The sequence differs in its cultural expression, but not in its underlying logic. The objective is to establish relative position within the social hierarchy while avoiding unnecessary costs whenever possible (Buss, 2016; Daly & Wilson, 1988).

Human beings possess nervous systems incomparably more sophisticated than those of lobsters. Our larger brains have not replaced this ancient behavioral system. They have greatly expanded the ways in which it can be expressed. Human societies contain countless overlapping social hierarchies. Individuals may compete through athletic ability, military achievement, political influence, artistic accomplishment, scientific discovery, wealth, entrepreneurship, or any number of culturally recognized forms of excellence (Buss, 2016; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001).

Not all hierarchies contribute equally to reproductive success. Some translate more readily than others into access to resources, long-term stability, and reproductive success. A young man may devote thousands of hours to becoming the highest-ranked competitor in an online game, driven by the same ancient motivation to improve his position within a social hierarchy, yet that particular hierarchy may confer little advantage in attracting a mate. By contrast, success in business, military leadership, athletic achievement, or other culturally valued pursuits may be more readily converted into resources and family formation. Human cognition has multiplied the number of arenas in which status can be pursued. It has not changed the underlying motivational system (Buss, 2016; von Rueden et al., 2011).

The continuity extends below behavior itself. Comparative neuroscience has shown that ancient neuromodulatory systems involved in regulating aggressive behavior and social status in crustaceans have homologous counterparts that continue to regulate social competition in vertebrates, including humans. Evolution did not discard successful biological machinery as nervous systems became more sophisticated. It preserved it, modified it, and incorporated it into increasingly complex brains (Edwards & Kravitz, 1997; Kravitz, 2000; Sapolsky, 2017).

Competition for position within the social hierarchy therefore represents one of the oldest and most persistent behavioral systems in the animal kingdom. It long predates humanity and has been preserved through hundreds of millions of years of evolution because it continues to solve the same biological problem (Darwin, 1859/2009; Maynard Smith, 1982; Tinbergen, 1963).

For many species, the story ends there.

For a comparatively small number, however, another evolutionary innovation transformed the nature of violence once again. A strong rival ceased to be merely a competitor. Under certain conditions, he became an ally. From that development emerged the coalition, and with it an entirely new set of adaptive problems.

The Third Fighting Problem: Coalitionary Competition

Competition for position within the social hierarchy solved an important evolutionary problem. It allowed members of the same species to compete over resources, mates, and social position while minimizing the costs of repeated conflict. For many species, that was sufficient. A comparatively small number of highly social species, however, confronted an entirely new problem. How can individuals cooperate in violent competition against other groups? This question represents one of the great behavioral innovations in evolutionary history because it fundamentally changed the nature of violence (Darwin, 1859/2009; Boehm, 1999; Wrangham, 2019).

For species whose interactions consist primarily of individual competition, another capable male is principally a rival. His success comes at the expense of your own position within the social hierarchy. Coalition-forming species confront a more complicated reality. The individual capable of defeating you in a contest within your own group may also be indispensable when confronting another group. His strength no longer represents only a threat to your own position; it also increases the probability that your coalition will survive and prevail. Evolution therefore faced a new challenge. It had to preserve the ancient behavioral systems governing competition within the social hierarchy while simultaneously producing new behavioral systems that made cooperation among competitors possible (Tooby & Cosmides, 1988; Boehm, 1999).

The distinction can be observed in a variety of highly social species. Wolves illustrate one form of coalitionary life. Living in family groups, they cooperate in hunting, territorial defense, and the care of offspring. Although social hierarchies exist within packs, the success of individual wolves depends not merely upon their own abilities but upon the effectiveness of the pack as a whole (Mech, 1999). Chimpanzees provide perhaps the clearest illustration because their social lives reveal both behavioral systems operating simultaneously. Within their own communities, males compete continuously for social position, forming alliances, competing for mating opportunities, and engaging in political maneuvering. Yet these same males also cooperate in territorial patrols. When they encounter isolated members of neighboring communities under favorable circumstances, they launch coordinated attacks that cannot be understood solely in terms of competition within the social hierarchy (Goodall, 1986; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996; Wrangham, 2019).

Coalitionary competition therefore does not replace competition within the social hierarchy. It builds upon it. Within the coalition, individuals continue to compete for position, influence, and reproductive opportunities. Between coalitions, however, violence serves an entirely different purpose. The objective is no longer to determine who occupies the higher position within a shared social hierarchy, but to defeat another coalition. The same individual may therefore be both rival and indispensable ally depending entirely upon the context. Evolution therefore did not eliminate hierarchical competition. It subordinated it to the larger problem of coalition survival whenever conflict between groups became the greater selective pressure.

Many of the behavioral solutions that evolved during the ancient predator-prey relationship reappear at this higher level of biological organization. Coalitions benefit from surprise, deception, reconnaissance, concealment, ambush, and the concentration of overwhelming force against isolated opponents. These are not new behavioral inventions. They are ancient predator-prey solutions employed by a new kind of organism: the coalition itself. Evolution did not discard successful behavioral systems as new adaptive problems emerged. It preserved them, modified them, and employed them in increasingly complex forms of organization.

The emergence of coalitionary competition therefore transformed the adaptive landscape. A successful coalition required more than physically capable individuals. It required individuals who could cooperate despite competing with one another, coordinate their actions under conditions of danger, trust one another with their lives, and reliably place the immediate demands of the coalition above momentary individual advantage when circumstances required it. Biology could produce the capacity for these behaviors, but it could not specify the particular forms they would take in different societies.

The solution to that problem was cultural rather than biological. Every successful warrior society developed mechanisms for directing ancient competition for social position toward behaviors that increased the effectiveness of the coalition. The emergence of warrior culture therefore represents not another form of fighting, but an evolutionary solution to the problem created by coalitionary competition (Boehm, 1999; Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Henrich, 2016).

The Emergence of Warrior Culture

Coalitionary competition created a problem that biology alone could not solve. Evolution could produce behavioral tendencies favoring cooperation among members of the same group, just as it had produced behavioral systems governing competition within the social hierarchy. It could not, however, determine the particular behaviors that would make one human coalition more successful than another. Those solutions depended upon geography, technology, political organization, and the character of the enemy. The result was a new evolutionary partnership between biology and culture. Warrior culture did not eliminate biological competition within the social hierarchy. It redirected that competition toward behaviors that increased the effectiveness of the coalition (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Boehm, 1999; Henrich, 2016).

Every human society inherited the same ancient motivational systems. Individuals continued to seek position within the social hierarchy because social position remained associated with resources, influence, and reproductive opportunity. Warrior societies did not eliminate these motivations. Instead, they redirected them. Rather than rewarding individuals simply for defeating one another, successful warrior cultures increasingly rewarded behaviors that made the coalition itself more effective in conflict with rival coalitions (Boehm, 1999; Henrich, 2016).

This transformation is visible throughout history. Although separated by geography, language, religion, and political institutions, successful warrior societies repeatedly converged upon remarkably similar ideals. Courage was admired because coalitions require individuals willing to face danger. Loyalty was honored because coordinated action depends upon mutual trust. Discipline allowed large groups to act as a single organism rather than a collection of competing individuals. Reliability ensured that every member of the group could predict the behavior of the others under conditions of uncertainty. Self-control, endurance, honesty, and the willingness to place the welfare of the group above immediate personal advantage likewise increased the effectiveness of the coalition. These qualities persisted because societies that successfully rewarded them generally outperformed societies that did not (du Picq, 1880/1947; Keegan, 1976; Boehm, 1999).

Honor emerges naturally from this process. It is often discussed as an abstract moral concept, but from an evolutionary perspective it serves a practical social function. Every society possesses mechanisms by which status is earned, distributed, and recognized. In warrior cultures, honor became one of those mechanisms. It identified the behaviors the coalition wished to encourage and attached social status to their demonstration. A courageous warrior earned admiration. A reliable warrior earned trust. A coward, a liar, or one who abandoned his companions lost status because those behaviors weakened the coalition upon which everyone’s survival depended (Boehm, 1999).

This perspective also explains why warrior cultures devote such attention to rituals, traditions, songs, stories, decorations, public ceremonies, and the remembrance of heroic deeds. These practices are not merely symbolic. They are methods by which a society teaches each generation which behaviors earn respect and which invite shame. They transform ancient competition for social position into a force that strengthens rather than weakens the coalition (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Henrich, 2016).

Friendship takes on a deeper meaning within this framework. Among members of a warrior culture, friendship is more than affection or shared interests. It is a relationship built upon mutual confidence that another individual will fulfill his obligations when danger appears. Friends compete with one another, but they also trust one another. The coalition depends upon both. In this sense, friendship becomes one of the principal mechanisms through which cooperation is stabilized among individuals who remain, in other contexts, competitors for position within the social hierarchy.

The emergence of warrior culture therefore represents one of humanity’s most significant cultural achievements. It did not replace the ancient behavioral systems inherited through evolution. It organized them. Competition for social position remained as powerful as ever, but the criteria by which status was earned increasingly reflected the needs of the coalition. Individuals sought prestige not merely by demonstrating their superiority over one another, but by becoming the kind of companions every warrior wished to have standing beside him in battle.

Only after this cultural transformation do organized systems of martial training become fully understandable. The warrior arts did not arise simply to teach individuals how to fight. They arose to prepare individuals to become effective members of a fighting coalition. To understand their subsequent evolution, we must first examine the relationship between the warrior and the art by which he was trained.

The Emergence of the Warrior Arts

The emergence of warrior culture created a new requirement. If societies wished to reward courage, discipline, loyalty, and competence, they also required systematic methods for developing those qualities. Fighting ability could no longer depend solely upon individual experience or natural talent. It had to be cultivated deliberately, transmitted from one generation to the next, and adapted as the methods of warfare changed. From this requirement emerged the warrior arts (Boehm, 1999; Henrich, 2016).

A warrior art is more than a collection of fighting techniques. Its purpose is not merely to teach an individual how to win a fight. It exists to prepare individuals to fight effectively as members of a coalition. Technical proficiency is only one component of that preparation. The warrior must also learn to function within a larger organization, to coordinate his actions with others, to operate under discipline, to master the weapons and equipment of his society, and to continue performing under conditions of danger, fatigue, uncertainty, and fear. The warrior art therefore develops both the technical skills of combat and the behavioral characteristics required by the coalition.

This distinction is important because fighting ability and warrior ability are not synonymous. An exceptional duelist is not necessarily an effective soldier, just as an accomplished marksman is not necessarily an effective infantryman. Individual excellence remains valuable, but it is always subordinate to the effectiveness of the coalition. The warrior art therefore judges techniques according to a different standard than individual fighting systems. The central question is not simply, “Does this help me defeat another individual?” but rather, “Does this make the coalition more effective in accomplishing its mission?”

Throughout history, every warrior society developed systems of training that reflected this purpose. Although the techniques differed enormously according to available technology and the character of war, the underlying problem remained remarkably consistent. Greek hoplites trained to fight within the phalanx. Roman legionaries mastered weapons, formations, engineering, and discipline. Medieval knights learned horsemanship, weapons, and the obligations of their social class. Steppe horsemen developed extraordinary riding and archery skills. Each system reflected the military requirements of its own society, yet all shared a common purpose: preparing individuals to function as effective members of a fighting coalition (du Picq, 1880/1947; Keegan, 1976).

Because the purpose of these systems was coalitionary success, they necessarily included far more than methods of individual combat. Physical conditioning, weapons proficiency, tactical movement, discipline, leadership, communication, logistics, fieldcraft, and the cultivation of courage all belonged to the warrior art because each contributed directly to battlefield effectiveness. Hand-to-hand combat occupied an important place, but it remained one component within a much larger system whose purpose was victory in war rather than victory in individual contests (du Picq, 1880/1947; Keegan, 1976).

The increasing complexity of civilization gradually altered the environment in which these warrior arts existed. As societies grew larger and more specialized, opportunities for attaining position within the social hierarchy multiplied. In simpler societies, martial ability was often among the principal determinants of a man’s social standing because warfare remained central to the survival of the community. Civilization created an ever-expanding number of alternative hierarchies. Men could now compete through commerce, politics, craftsmanship, scholarship, religion, administration, science, engineering, athletics, and countless other specialized pursuits. Military excellence remained one path to status, but it was no longer the only one, nor in many societies even the most important (Henrich, 2016).

This diversification inevitably influenced martial training. As fewer practitioners expected to fight as members of military formations, the reasons for studying the martial arts became increasingly varied. Some sought individual fighting ability for duels or personal protection. Others pursued physical conditioning, competition, recreation, social identity, or personal development. The techniques often remained recognizable, but the problems they were intended to solve gradually changed. A system originally developed to prepare warriors for coalitionary warfare could, over time, become a system for producing successful competitors, capable individual fighters, or disciplined citizens (Henrich, 2016).

This distinction is central to the argument of this paper. The history of the martial arts is not simply the history of techniques. It is the history of changing adaptive problems. As societies became more complex and the conditions of warfare changed, the martial arts adapted to those changes, preserving many of their older methods while serving increasingly different purposes.

Among the many societies in which this process occurred, Japan preserves perhaps the clearest historical record. The continuity of the Japanese warrior class through periods of warfare, political consolidation, and the prolonged peace of the Tokugawa period allows us to observe how a warrior art gradually evolved as the battlefield conditions that had originally produced it became increasingly distant. No modern scholar examined this transformation more systematically than Donn F. Draeger, whose work sought to explain how the Japanese martial traditions changed as the adaptive problems they addressed changed (Draeger, 1973–1975; Friday, 1997).

The Japanese experience is important not because it is unique, but because it makes visible a process that has occurred repeatedly throughout history. Warrior arts emerge to solve the problem of coalitionary warfare. As societies change and military service becomes less central to attaining position within the social hierarchy, the arts themselves naturally diversify, specializing in individual fighting, competition, physical development, recreation, or character while retaining elements of their common ancestry. Japan therefore provides an ideal case study through which to examine both Donn Draeger’s influential classification and the broader evolutionary process it illustrates (Draeger, 1973–1975; Bennett, 2015; Friday, 1997).

Japan as a Case Study: Donn F. Draeger and the Evolution of the Warrior Arts

Having developed an evolutionary framework for understanding fighting, we may now ask whether history provides an example in which these processes can be observed over time. Few civilizations offer a clearer case than Japan. The Japanese warrior class persisted for centuries through periods of active warfare, political consolidation, and prolonged peace, allowing the purposes of martial training to evolve while many of the outward forms remained recognizable. As a result, Japan preserved an unusually detailed record of the transformation of the warrior arts (Friday, 1997; Bennett, 2015).

Among modern scholars, few contributed more to the study of this transformation than Donn F. Draeger. A United States Marine, accomplished martial artist, and one of the founders of the modern academic study of martial traditions, what he termed hoplology, Draeger devoted much of his life to documenting the classical fighting systems of Japan and other cultures. Unlike many popular writers of his era, he approached martial traditions historically rather than romantically, emphasizing their development within the societies that produced them (Draeger, 1973–1975; Bennett, 2015).

Draeger presented his most influential interpretation in his three-volume series Martial Arts and Ways of Japan. There he proposed a classification that distinguished between classical bujutsu, classical budō, and their modern descendants. Although subsequent scholarship has questioned the rigidity of some of these categories and shown that the historical development of Japanese martial traditions was more complex than any simple taxonomy can capture, Draeger’s central insight remains remarkably valuable. Martial systems retain the imprint of the problems they were originally created to solve, even after those problems have changed (Draeger, 1973–1975; Friday, 1997; Bennett, 2015).

To understand Draeger's classification, it is helpful to begin with the language itself. The Japanese word jutsu (術) is commonly translated as "art," "method," or "technique." It denotes practical skill directed toward accomplishing a specific task. Dō (道), by contrast, literally means "the way" or "the path." It is the Japanese reading of the same Chinese character pronounced dao (or tao in older transliterations), a concept long associated with a way of life or disciplined path of cultivation. Rather than emphasizing technical proficiency alone, dō refers to a lifelong discipline through which technical practice becomes a vehicle for personal development. The distinction should not be exaggerated, classical schools often pursued both practical skill and character, while modern schools frequently retain highly practical methods, but the terms describe different centers of gravity (Draeger, 1973–1975; Friday, 1997; Bennett, 2015).

For Draeger, classical bujutsu referred to the practical fighting systems developed by the warrior class for use under the conditions of warfare. Their purpose was straightforward: to prepare warriors to survive and prevail in armed conflict. Technique was judged by its contribution to success on the battlefield, and instruction encompassed far more than individual combat. Weapons, tactics, discipline, and the practical demands of military service formed an integrated whole because they all served the same coalitionary purpose (Draeger, 1973–1975).

As Japan entered the long peace of the Tokugawa period, however, the relationship between the warrior and the battlefield gradually changed. The samurai class remained, but opportunities to employ battlefield skills largely disappeared. Martial traditions continued to be practiced, preserved, and refined, yet the practical conditions that had originally shaped them became increasingly distant. It was under these circumstances that Draeger identified the emergence of classical budō, systems in which martial training increasingly served ethical, educational, and cultural purposes in addition to military ones (Draeger, 1973–1975; Bennett, 2015).

The process continued into the modern era. New disciplines such as judo, kendo, kyudo, and eventually many twentieth-century martial arts developed in societies where warfare was no longer the primary context of practice. Competition, physical education, character development, recreation, and sport assumed increasingly prominent roles. The arts survived, but many now existed to solve different problems than those faced by the warriors from whom they descended (Bennett, 2015; Friday, 1997).

Viewed through the evolutionary framework developed in this paper, Draeger’s historical observations become especially illuminating. The transition he described was not simply a change in techniques or teaching methods. It reflected a gradual change in the adaptive problem that martial training was expected to solve. Warrior arts developed to prepare individuals for coalitionary warfare. As warfare became less central to daily life, elements of those systems naturally specialized. Some emphasized individual fighting ability. Others emphasized physical education, moral development, or competitive sport. The common ancestry remained, but the purposes diverged.

This distinction is not unique to Japan. Similar processes can be observed whenever prolonged peace, technological change, or social transformation separates martial traditions from the battlefield environment that originally produced them. Japan is significant because its historical continuity allows that transformation to be seen with exceptional clarity. Draeger’s work therefore serves not as the foundation of the argument presented here, but as an independent historical case study that strongly corroborates it.

The remaining task is to examine how this same process has continued in the modern world. Contemporary combat sports, civilian self-defense systems, military combatives, and developmental martial arts all descend, directly or indirectly, from the warrior arts. They preserve many of the same techniques, yet they increasingly solve different problems. Understanding those differences requires a new classification based not upon historical lineage, but upon function.

In Part II, I develop a functional classification of the martial arts, explaining why warrior arts, combat sports, civilian self-defense systems, developmental martial arts, and modern military combatives evolved to solve different adaptive problems, and why understanding those differences is essential to building an effective military combatives program.

References

Bennett, A. (2015). Kendo: Culture of the sword. University of California Press.

Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Harvard University Press.

Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection. John Murray.

Doernberg, S., Cromarty, S. I., Heinrich, R., Beltz, B. S., & Kravitz, E. A. (2001). Agonistic behavior in juvenile lobsters: The influence of serotonin, octopamine, and the social environment. Journal of Experimental Biology, 204, 3349–3369.

Draeger, D. F. (1973–1975). Martial arts and ways of Japan (Vols. 1–3). Weatherhill.

du Picq, C. A. (1947). Battle studies: Ancient and modern battle (J. N. Greely & R. C. Cotton, Trans.). Stackpole. (Original work published 1880)

Goodall, J. (1986). The chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of behavior. Harvard University Press.

Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press.

Huber, R., & Kravitz, E. A. (1995). A quantitative analysis of agonistic behavior in juvenile American lobsters (Homarus americanus L.). Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 46(2), 72–83.

Keegan, J. (1976). The face of battle. Viking Press.

Mech, L. D. (1999). Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 77(8), 1196–1203.

Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20(4), 410–433.

Wrangham, R. W. (1999). Evolution of coalitionary killing. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 42, 1–30.

Wrangham, R. (2019). The goodness paradox: The strange relationship between virtue and violence in human evolution. Pantheon Books.

Wrangham, R., & Peterson, D. (1996). Demonic males: Apes and the origins of human violence. Houghton Mifflin.

Wrestling with Reality

The greatest obstacle to discovering truth is not ignorance.

It is the illusion of understanding.

Human beings possess perhaps the most extraordinary organ known to science. The human brain has unraveled the structure of DNA, walked on the moon, split the atom, and traced the history of the universe back nearly fourteen billion years. Yet it remains a biological organ, shaped by evolution to solve the practical problems of survival, cooperation, and reproduction among small bands of hunter-gatherers.

It would be remarkable if such a mind could fully comprehend the ultimate nature of reality.

History suggests otherwise.

For more than two centuries, Isaac Newton’s laws appeared to describe the universe itself. They predicted the motions of planets, the trajectories of cannonballs, the tides, and the mechanics of machines with astonishing precision. Engineers built bridges, navies crossed oceans, and, centuries later, spacecraft were sent to the moon using equations rooted in Newton’s work.

It would have been easy to conclude that humanity had uncovered the true nature of reality.

Then Albert Einstein showed that Newton had not discovered the universe as it ultimately is. He had discovered an extraordinarily accurate approximation.

Newton’s laws had not become false. They remained true within the domain for which they were developed: the ordinary speeds and gravitational fields of everyday life. But beyond that familiar world, they were only part of a much larger reality.

One of the greatest scientific achievements in human history had not been overthrown.

It had been humbled.

Einstein’s work carried another surprise that challenged one of humanity’s deepest assumptions.

Since antiquity, nearly everyone had assumed that time itself flowed uniformly throughout the universe. A second was a second everywhere. The universe possessed a single cosmic clock against which every event could be measured.

Relativity revealed that this intuition was mistaken.

Time itself depends upon motion and gravity. Two clocks following different paths through the universe do not necessarily agree. Astronauts age by infinitesimally different amounts than those who remain on Earth. GPS satellites must continually account for these differences or they would drift by miles each day.

One of the most fundamental features of reality had not changed.

Our understanding of it had grown deeper.

The history of science is filled with discoveries like these. Every generation has mistaken its current understanding for the final answer. Every generation has eventually been humbled. Science advances not because its practitioners possess certainty, but because they are willing to abandon certainty when reality refuses to cooperate. Every discovery answers one question while revealing ten more. As our knowledge expands, so too does our awareness of how much remains unknown.

When Interpretation Becomes Truth

For centuries, the dominant understanding of the cosmos placed the Earth motionless at its center, with the sun, planets, and stars moving around it. This was not originally a Christian idea. It had been inherited from the natural philosophy of Aristotle and the astronomy of Ptolemy, and it appeared to agree with ordinary human experience. The ground beneath us seemed still. The sun appeared to cross the sky. Nothing in daily life suggested that the Earth was rotating or traveling through space.

Over time, however, this model became entangled with theology.

Scripture spoke of the sun rising and setting. The book of Joshua described the sun standing still. The Psalms spoke of the Earth being firmly established. These passages appeared to confirm what nearly everyone already believed about the physical structure of the universe.

The conclusion seemed obvious.

The Earth stood still because both reason and Scripture appeared to say that it stood still.

But a subtle and consequential mistake had occurred.

A human interpretation of Scripture had gradually become indistinguishable from Scripture itself.

When Copernicus proposed that the Earth moved around the sun, and Galileo later defended that possibility, the challenge was therefore greater than an argument over astronomy. The new model threatened an entire structure of understanding in which Greek philosophy, ordinary perception, scientific theory, and biblical interpretation had become bound together.

To question one part seemed to threaten all the others.

Some religious authorities consequently treated the motion of the Earth not merely as an unsettled scientific question, but as a challenge to the authority of Scripture. Their confidence was so great that they could no longer clearly distinguish between what God had revealed and what human beings had concluded that the revelation must mean.

That distinction was precisely what Galileo asked them to reconsider.

He did not argue that science had disproved Scripture. He argued that Scripture and the natural world had the same author and therefore could not ultimately contradict one another. When observation and demonstration revealed that a traditional interpretation of a biblical passage was mistaken, the proper response was not to deny reality. It was to reconsider the interpretation.

The error was not faith.

Nor was it the belief that Scripture contained truth.

The error was the assumption that fallible human beings had understood that truth completely.

The Earth moved whether theologians permitted it to move or not. Reality did not alter itself to preserve their interpretation. Eventually, the interpretation had to yield.

The lesson extends far beyond astronomy.

Whenever believers confuse their understanding of God with God Himself, certainty becomes a form of idolatry. They cease worshiping the source of truth and begin defending the intellectual structure they have built around Him.

Theology becomes dogmatism not when it holds convictions, but when it forgets the difference between revelation and interpretation.

A humble theology does not abandon truth. It recognizes that truth is larger than any human explanation of it. It approaches Scripture with conviction, but also with the awareness that the reader remains finite, culturally situated, and capable of error.

The humiliation of geocentrism did not diminish God.

It diminished only an inadequate human conception of His creation.

Indeed, the universe revealed by modern astronomy is not smaller, simpler, or less worthy of wonder than the one imagined by medieval theologians. It is vastly larger, older, stranger, and more magnificent.

The mistake was not believing too much about God.

It was believing too much about ourselves.

More than two thousand years before modern science, Socrates was reputed to be the wisest man in Athens. When told that the Oracle of Delphi had declared him the wisest of men, he concluded that if he possessed any wisdom at all, it was only this: that he knew how much he did not know.

His insight extends beyond the individual.

When a Model Becomes a Creed

Science is supposed to protect us from this temptation, but scientists are human beings too.

During the twentieth century, a powerful view of human nature took hold across important parts of the social sciences. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides would later call it the Standard Social Science Model, although the term describes a family of assumptions rather than a doctrine to which every social scientist subscribed.

Its central tendency was to emphasize culture, environment, and socialization while minimizing the importance of evolved human nature in explaining behavior. Human beings were extraordinarily malleable. Culture wrote upon us. Differences between societies—and increasingly differences between men and women—were therefore understood primarily as products of upbringing and social organization.

There were understandable historical reasons for this intellectual turn. Biological theories had been abused to justify racism, eugenics, coercive sterilization, and political hierarchy. After the horrors of the twentieth century, explanations rooted in biology could appear not merely scientifically questionable but morally dangerous.

But an understandable reaction can still become an overreaction.

Gradually, in some corners of intellectual life, the proposition that human behavior was largely socially constructed ceased functioning merely as a hypothesis and began functioning almost as a moral commitment. Biological explanations of human behavior could be treated with suspicion not simply because the evidence for them was weak, but because of the political conclusions people feared might follow if they were true.

That is a dangerous moment in any intellectual tradition.

Once the moral consequences of a proposition become more important than whether the proposition corresponds to reality, inquiry begins running backward. Instead of asking what is true and then deciding what we ought to do about it, we decide what ought to be true and become suspicious of evidence pointing elsewhere.

The bitter controversy surrounding the emergence of sociobiology and, later, evolutionary psychology demonstrated the problem. Researchers who proposed that natural selection had shaped not merely the human body but aspects of human psychology encountered opposition that was sometimes scientific, sometimes political, and frequently both.

Yet human beings did not cease being animals because acknowledging that fact had become politically uncomfortable.

Natural selection shaped our eyes, hands, immune systems, endocrine systems, reproductive organs, and brains. It would be extraordinary if the same evolutionary process had shaped every organ responsible for human behavior while somehow leaving human behavior itself untouched.

Sex provides an especially revealing example. Males and females have faced overlapping but not identical reproductive problems throughout our evolutionary history. That does not mean that culture is unimportant, that every behavioral difference between men and women is innate, or that individuals must conform to statistical averages. It means only that we should expect biology and culture to interact rather than assuming in advance that socialization explains everything.

Research increasingly made that assumption difficult to sustain. Cross-cultural studies found recurring differences between male and female mating preferences even among societies separated by enormous differences in language, religion, economics, and custom. Behavioral genetics demonstrated substantial heritable influences upon many psychological traits. Neuroscience and endocrinology continued revealing biological influences upon behavior.

The blank slate became harder and harder to reconcile with the creature standing before us.

Yet ideas have consequences long after the assumptions beneath them begin to erode. The belief that human beings could be largely remade through socialization influenced theories of childhood, education, sexuality, family, and sex itself. At its strongest, it encouraged the remarkable proposition that many differences between boys and girls existed primarily because adults taught children to become different.

Reality proved less cooperative.

Boys and girls are certainly shaped by their cultures. So are men and women. But they are not created from nothing by those cultures. They arrive carrying an evolutionary inheritance vastly older than civilization itself.

The Wisdom We Inherit

Civilizations, like people, accumulate wisdom through experience. Long before psychology, sociology, or neuroscience existed, our ancestors spent countless generations wrestling with marriage, parenthood, loyalty, conflict, sacrifice, and the raising of children. They observed which habits strengthened families, which customs produced stable communities, and which behaviors led to misery and decline. The lessons they judged most enduring became woven into law, tradition, literature, and religion.

Modern society often assumes that those who came before us were simply less enlightened than we are. Yet they were no less human, no less intelligent, and no less interested in understanding how to live well. They confronted many of the same problems we face today. Their accumulated wisdom deserves neither unquestioning acceptance nor casual dismissal. Like every other claim about reality, it should be tested.

Many religious teachings are normative rather than predictive. They tell us how we ought to live, not what will inevitably happen. They are moral instruction rather than scientific hypotheses. Yet it is striking how often the principles they preserve continue to correspond with what careful observation has revealed about human flourishing.

Consider the New Testament’s teachings on family life. Parents are instructed not to provoke their children but to raise them with loving discipline. Husbands are commanded to love their wives sacrificially. Fidelity, forgiveness, patience, self-control, and steadfast commitment are presented as the foundations of healthy families. For two millennia these teachings have guided countless households.

Modern psychology and family research did not create these principles. At many points they have helped explain why they work. The scientific literature continues to demonstrate the profound importance of loving, stable caregivers, committed parents, secure attachments, and peaceful homes in the healthy development of children. The mechanisms are becoming clearer. The underlying wisdom is often ancient.

Whether one believes these truths were revealed by God, discovered through generations of human experience, or both, the epistemological lesson remains the same. Truth does not become true when science finally explains it. Reality does not wait for our understanding. If a principle continues to withstand centuries of experience and increasingly rigorous empirical examination, our confidence that it reflects something real should grow.

The same standard should apply everywhere. Ancient ideas should not be accepted because they are old. Modern ideas should not be accepted because they are new. Both should be judged by the same question:

Do they correspond to reality?

When independent paths of inquiry converge upon the same conclusion, humility requires us to notice. Perhaps our ancestors knew more than we have been willing to admit. Perhaps the accumulated wisdom preserved within our religious traditions is not merely a collection of myths and rituals, but the record of generations wrestling with reality before us.

Wrestling with God

Perhaps this explains one of the oldest impulses of the human mind.

We seek to name the source of existence.

Names help us think. They allow us to classify, remember, and communicate. But they also tempt us into believing that because we have named something, we have understood it.

The Hebrew Scriptures contain a remarkable warning against that temptation.

When Moses asked for God’s name, he did not receive a name in the ordinary sense. He received a mystery:

“I AM THAT I AM.”

The answer refuses to reduce the source of existence to a category. It reminds us that ultimate reality cannot be captured by a human definition.

Perhaps that is why another foundational story in the Hebrew Scriptures is not about explaining God, but about wrestling with Him.

Jacob spends the night struggling with a mysterious man. By dawn he concludes that he has encountered God. He leaves transformed, walking with a limp, and receives a new name: Israel.

The story is striking because Jacob receives no explanation. He is not given a systematic theology.

He is changed by the encounter.

But the mystery remains.

Perhaps that is the point.

Science is one form of that wrestling.

Philosophy is another.

Religion is another still.

Seventeenth-century educator John Amos Comenius believed that all genuine knowledge ultimately converges because it describes the same creation. He called this vision pansophia, universal wisdom. Theology, philosophy, and the study of nature were not competing pursuits but different paths toward the same underlying truth.

Whether one approaches reality through a telescope, a microscope, history, philosophy, or Scripture, the destination should be the same.

If reality is one, every honest discipline should ultimately converge upon it.

Each generation inherits the understanding of those who came before, tests it against experience, preserves what proves true, discards what proves false, and adds something of its own. Humanity’s greatest intellectual traditions are, in many ways, the history of our wrestling with reality.

Yet every path toward truth encounters the same obstacle: our attachment to what we already believe.

The temptation of certainty.

Certainty is comforting. It relieves us of the burden of questioning, the discomfort of ambiguity, and the humility required to continue learning. Once we become convinced that we possess the whole truth, curiosity begins to die.

The danger is not conviction.

Convictions are necessary. We must act on what we believe to be true.

The danger is believing that our finite minds have exhausted an infinite reality.

Science becomes ideology when it mistakes its models for reality itself.

Religion becomes dogmatism when it mistakes human interpretations for the mind of God.

Philosophy becomes vanity when it mistakes elegant ideas for truth.

The common error is not faith.

It is arrogance.

Truth is not merely a collection of correct statements.

Truth is the flow of the universe.

Our theories, philosophies, and theologies are maps. They are valuable only to the extent that they bring us into closer alignment with that flow. When they cease to correspond to reality, reality does not change.

Only our understanding does.

The wise do not seek the comfort of certainty.

They seek alignment with truth.

And because truth is larger than any mind can contain, humility is not merely a virtue.

It is the proper posture of every human being before God.

Christopher Nolan's $250 million adaptation of The Odyssey has become one of the largest cinematic retellings of Homer's epic ever attempted. Unfortunately, his adaptation appears to miss the very reason Homer's story has endured for nearly three thousand years.

Predictably, much of the controversy has centered on casting choices and Hollywood’s familiar habit of retelling ancient stories through the moral assumptions of the present rather than those of the civilizations that produced them. Much of this generation of filmmakers seems convinced that it possesses a superior moral vision to those who came before and therefore feels compelled to rewrite the stories of the past with their modern values.

It is a tiresome exercise.

It also points to a much deeper problem.

When we insist on filtering ancient stories through modern moral assumptions, we often lose the very truths that allowed those stories to endure for thousands of years.

The public conversation revolves around the casting, the spectacle, the voyage, the Cyclops, the Sirens, and the adventure.

They’re talking about the journey.

Homer was writing about the homecoming.

The monsters, even voyage was never the point, except to show us what Odysseus was willing to endure, and how fiercely he longed to return to his homeland.

They give meaning to the homecoming.

But they are not the climax of the story.

The climax is what he finds when he finally reaches home.

More precisely, the betrayal the homecoming revealed

They’re talking about the journey.

Homer was writing about the homecoming.

One of Nolan’s most revealing departures from Homer comes in Hades.

Homer confronts Odysseus with Achilles, the greatest warrior of his age, a man who achieved the immortal glory promised to the greatest of heroes, only to discover among the dead that glory was no substitute for life. And having dismissed the value of his own glory, Achilles immediately asks Odysseus for news of his father and his son. When Odysseus tells him of his son’s courage and accomplishments, Achilles departs filled with pride.

The sequence matters. The greatest warrior in the Greek imagination has achieved everything a warrior could ask of glory, yet from beyond the grave his thoughts turn back to the living and to his family.

Nolan replaces that encounter with Sinon and, in doing so, changes the question the story asks.

This is not an incidental encounter. It is one of the keys to understanding the entire story.

Achilles received everything the heroic warrior was supposed to desire. He achieved immortal glory, but he never came home.

Odysseus already has glory.

What he wants is home.

Not merely Ithaca as a place, but home in the fullest sense of the word.

His homeland. His household. His father. His son. Penelope.

His family. His people. His culture.

Everything that gives a man a reason to leave and fight, and everything that gives him a reason to survive and return.

Nolan removes Achilles from this encounter and replaces him with Sinon, a dead soldier from Odysseus’s war, whom the film presents as the greatest warrior Odysseus ever knew. Much has already been said about the decision to cast Elliot Page, a 5-foot-1 transgender man, in a role meant to embody such a traditional masculine ideal of the warrior, physical strength and stature, masculinity, and the archetype of the ancient warrior. The choice is so conspicuous that it has understandably dominated much of the criticism of the film.

But I think the more consequential change has received far less attention.

Nolan has changed the question the story asks.

Homer confronts Odysseus with Achilles, the greatest warrior of his age, only to have that warrior tell him that all his glory was not worth the price of never coming home. Nolan instead turns the encounter toward the burden the surviving warrior carries for the dead.

The first change challenges our traditional image of the warrior.

The second changes the meaning of the story.

There are burdens that soldiers carry home from war, but we should be careful about imposing modern assumptions upon them. My experience has not been that soldiers are haunted by guilt for vanquishing their enemies. Nor does the death of a beloved comrade necessarily produce guilt. It produces grief, sometimes terrible grief, but grief and guilt are not the same thing.

Men can bear extraordinary loss when they understand what the sacrifice was for. If a man believes that he and his comrades fought in defense of their homes, their families, and their people, the death of a friend can be heartbreaking without being morally incoherent.

The deeper wound comes when that connection is broken.

When the warrior begins to wonder whether the sacrifice had meaning.

Whether those who sent him valued it.

Whether the home for which he believed he fought has forgotten what was sacrificed in its defense.

That is why Homer’s original choice of Achilles matters so much. The Odyssey is not fundamentally a story about a warrior learning to feel guilty for having been a warrior. Odysseus does not return home to renounce his capacity for violence. When he discovers his household occupied and his family threatened, he becomes a warrior again.

The lesson is not that war and glory have no value.

It is that they are not the highest values.

Achilles chose glory and never came home.

Odysseus already has glory.

What he wants now is Ithaca.

Home.

His father.

His son.

Penelope.

His family.

Perhaps this is a lesson that becomes clearest only after a man has spent enough of his life wandering. I spent much of mine as a soldier and adventurer, traveling to distant places, fighting wars, seeking challenges, and living among extraordinary men. I would not trade those experiences away. They made me who I am.

But one of the great lessons of that life has been learning the value of the thing I so often left behind.

Home.

Family.

The people for whom all the wandering, fighting, and sacrifice were ultimately supposed to matter.

Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam transformed the way many psychologists think about the hidden wounds of war. Drawing upon Homer’s Iliad, Shay argued that some of the deepest injuries a warrior can suffer are not physical, but moral.

Moral injury occurs when reality destroys beliefs that once gave a person’s life meaning, order, and purpose. The world no longer operates according to the moral framework by which he understood it. What he believed to be true collides with what he has experienced, and something fundamental breaks.

For Shay, one of the most devastating sources of that injury was betrayal by legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation. Warriors can endure fear, hardship, deprivation, and even killing. What they often struggle to survive is the realization that those they trusted to lead them violated the very moral code they expected them to uphold.

In the decades since Achilles in Vietnam, our understanding of moral injury has continued to grow. We now recognize that the destruction of deeply held beliefs can arise from many sources. Many of the moral assumptions formed in peaceful societies simply cannot survive exposure to the realities of war. A warrior’s beliefs may be shattered by what he is forced to do, by what he witnesses, by what is done to him, or by the realization that the world does not conform to the moral order he once believed governed it.

I believe Homer understood a different wound long before modern psychology gave it a name.

Modern storytelling has become so accustomed to portraying the returning warrior as psychologically broken that it often reads Homer through that same lens. Yet Homer does not present Odysseus as a man psychologically destroyed by war. He returns weary, older, and deeply tested, but still capable of clear judgment, disciplined action, and decisive leadership. The deepest wound Homer explores is not what the war has done to Odysseus. It is what twenty years with its warriors away have done to Ithaca.

Not the psychological wounds of battle that modern storytellers so often project onto Odysseus.

The moral injury of returning to a home that no longer feels like home.

Homer understood that the greatest trial of the warrior often begins only after the fighting ends.

For years after September 11, one phrase united America.

Never Forget.

It appeared on bumper stickers, billboards, memorials, T-shirts, and stadium scoreboards. It was more than a slogan. It was a promise.

A promise that the dead would be remembered.

A promise that their sacrifice would mean something.

A promise that the nation would remain worthy of the young men and women who answered the call.

Tens of thousands believed it.

Many walked into recruiting offices within days of the attacks. They believed their generation had been given its purpose. They would defend their country. They would ensure that such an attack would never happen again.

The next twenty years became deployments, memorial ceremonies, folded flags, prosthetic limbs, marriages strained and broken by separation, children growing up in photographs, and friends who never came home.

Years later, before dawn in New York, one of them lies awake in his own bedroom and hears the Islamic call to prayer drifting over the city.

To many of his neighbors, it is simply another sound in a changing city.

To him, it is something else.

It is Fallujah.

It is Ramadi.

It is Kandahar.

It is every patrol that began before sunrise.

It is memorial services.

It is folded flags.

It is friends whose names are etched into stone.

For years, he had been told that men like him had to fight the enemy over there so America would never have to face him here. He believed it. His friends believed it. Some of them died believing it.

Now, lying awake in the darkness, he hears the same call that once echoed over the battlefields where they fought and died.

The deepest wound is not what happened on the battlefield. It is the realization that, while he was fighting, the country he believed he was defending was breaking faith with him.

The battlefield did not merely follow him home.

It was invited in.

Invited by people who never bore the cost of the war, who valued tolerance, political power, and profit more than the covenant they had made with the men and women they sent to fight.

He kept faith with his country.

His country did not keep faith with him.

And lying awake in the darkness, there is only one question left.

What exactly did they die for?

The question is older than September 11.

Older than America.

Older even than Rome.

Homer had already asked it.

In the Odyssey.

The Odyssey is not about fighting a war.

It is about coming home from one.

After twenty years away, Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca expecting to reclaim the home for which he had sacrificed the best years of his life.

Instead, he finds betrayal. His palace has been occupied. His wealth has been consumed. His authority has been mocked. Men who contributed nothing to his household feast at his table, consume the inheritance he left behind, and compete for the hand of his wife because they assume he will never return.

The tragedy is not merely that his property has been stolen. It is that the people who remained behind failed to preserve what he sacrificed to defend.

The covenant has been broken.

That is the moral injury of homecoming.

Modern psychology often asks what happened to the veteran.

Homer asks what happened to his home.

Perhaps those are not separate questions.

A nation asks extraordinary things of its warriors. It asks them to leave their families, risk their lives, fight and kill its enemies, watch friends die, and bear burdens that the overwhelming majority of citizens will never experience.

In return, the warrior asks very little.

Only that the nation remember.

Only that it remain faithful to the ideals for which those sacrifices were made.

Only that, when he finally comes home, he recognizes the home he fought to defend.

For many veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars, that is precisely where the deepest wound begins.

Not on the battlefield.

Not in the explosion.

Not in the firefight.

But in the slow realization that while they were fighting abroad, their society changed without them.

They begin to wonder whether the covenant embodied in the words Never Forget was itself forgotten.

Whether one agrees with that conclusion is almost beside the point.

The feeling itself is real.

It is as old as Homer.

Three thousand years ago, Odysseus stepped onto the shores of Ithaca and discovered that the hardest battle of his life was no longer against the enemy.

It was to determine whether the home he had sacrificed everything to preserve still existed.

Perhaps that is why The Odyssey remains one of the greatest stories ever told.

Every generation will have its own Odysseus.

Every generation will ask young men to leave home and bear burdens that others will not.

If they return to find that faith has been broken, they face the same choice Homer gave his hero.

They can surrender to bitterness.

Or they can accept one final duty.

Not merely to come home.

But to reclaim it.

“The moral is to the physical as three is to one.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte

Every generation assumes the next technological innovation will make close combat obsolete.

Machine guns were supposed to do it.

Tanks were supposed to do it.

Precision-guided munitions were supposed to do it.

Now many assume drones will finally eliminate the need for soldiers to fight at close quarters.

History suggests otherwise.

One of the more surprising lessons emerging from the war in Ukraine is not simply the effectiveness of drones, but how they are changing the relationship between firepower and maneuver. Soldiers who are horribly wounded frequently remain where they fell for days because attempting evacuation across drone-observed terrain is often more dangerous than staying put. Medics are increasingly treating wounds that have become infected, necrotic, and even infested with maggots before casualties can safely be evacuated. Vehicles are readily detected and destroyed. Large formations become lucrative targets. Instead, both sides rely on infiltration tactics, moving soldiers individually or in very small groups so that a drone strike is likely to kill or wound only one man instead of an entire squad. Even resupply is increasingly conducted by drones because concentrating soldiers or vehicles has become so dangerous.

The battlefield has become transparent.

Imagine lying in a shallow fighting position scraped into the earth.

Your leg is shattered.

The bandage wrapped around it a week ago is soaked through. Infection has begun. Flies crawl over the wound. Somewhere overhead you hear the faint buzzing of a drone.

In every previous war you would have used low ground and dead space, area that cannot be observed by the enemy, to evacuate the wounded.

Today, leaving a concealed position is more likely to kill you than staying in it.

So you stay.

Not because the hole is safe.

Because everything outside of it is worse.

That feeling is not new.

It is one of the oldest truths of war.

The primary forcing factor for hand-to-hand combat in the age of firearms has always been small spaces. Whenever soldiers can maneuver freely, they usually do. Faced with overwhelming firepower, they withdraw, reposition, or break contact. By the time the assault reaches the objective, many defenders have already escaped.

But when maneuver becomes impossible, soldiers remain.

The trench.

The bunker.

The cave.

The room.

The fighting position.

Eventually someone has to enter those places.

The First World War demonstrated this brutally. Trenches made movement across open ground so dangerous that soldiers remained where they were despite constant shellfire, mud, disease, and death. The thought of climbing out of the trench was often more terrifying than remaining inside it.

Every soldier heard the same voice.

Don’t climb out.

Stay down.

You’ll die up there.

During Belleau Wood, with two Marine regiments pinned flat beneath devastating German machine-gun fire, Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, already one of the most decorated Marines in American history and the recipient of two Medals of Honor, stood up and shouted,

“Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”

That is leadership in combat.

Not removing fear.

Overcoming it.

Technology changes what fear tells a soldier to do.

Machine guns told him to stay in the trench.

Urban combat told him not to go outside.

Today, drones tell him not to leave the hole at all.

The voice changes.

Fear does not.

The same pattern appeared during the Second World War.

Standing outside the entrance to a cave on Iwo Jima, you already know what is waiting inside. The defenders are not coming out. There is nowhere for them to go.

American firepower has isolated the position. Every exit is covered. Every attempt to escape is likely to end in death.

So they stay.

Not because the cave is safe. Because everything outside it is worse.

Now you have a different problem. You know they are still alive. You know they are waiting.

The tunnel twists into darkness. There is barely enough room to move. Somewhere ahead are men who have already decided that if they cannot escape, they will kill as many Americans as they can before they die.

Your nervous system is screaming.

Don’t go in there.

If you enter, rifles jam against walls.

There isn’t room to swing them or bring them to bear on the enemy.

Men collide.

Hands reach for throats.

For eyes.

For knives.

For anything.

Now answer the question.

Do you lead your friends into that cave?

Or do you shoot fire into it and burn the men inside alive?

There is no good answer.

There are only terrible ones.

The flamethrower was not adopted because soldiers delighted in cruelty. It was adopted because once defenders had been trapped inside a confined space, the alternative was sending more young Americans into a fight that would be decided inside arm’s length.

The same principle appeared in Iraq.

American soldiers experienced far more close combat in the cities of Iraq than in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan. The difference was not the enemy.

It was whether the defenders could escape.

In Afghanistan, when coalition forces gained fire superiority, Taliban fighters usually had somewhere to go. They fled, disappeared into the mountains, or blended into nearby villages before American soldiers could close with them. The battle ended because the defenders escaped.

Cities were different.

Once American forces dominated the streets and alleys with fire, every exit became a gamble. Leaving often meant stepping from the relative safety of the room into exposed ground covered by rifles, machine guns, snipers, and supporting fires.

Leaving felt more dangerous than staying.

Yet every instinct still whispered the same thing.

Don’t go out that fucking door.

Outside was death.

So they stayed.

Eventually, someone had to come through the doorway.

Drones are creating many of these same conditions without changing the physical terrain.

A Ukrainian field remains physically open, but psychologically it behaves like a trench. Movement invites detection. Detection invites attack. Leaving a concealed position increasingly feels more dangerous than remaining inside it.

Technology has created artificial confinement.

The battlefield remains open.

The defenders no longer experience it that way.

The United States has traditionally answered this problem with overwhelming firepower.

Rather than accepting the casualties of repeatedly assaulting prepared positions, American doctrine seeks to locate enemy defenses and destroy them with artillery, armor, airpower, and precision munitions before infantry closes with the objective. My friend John Spencer, after observing combat in Gaza, described a similar Israeli approach. Drones located defended positions. Massive firepower followed. When enough firepower can be concentrated, relatively little close combat occurs because many defenders never survive to meet the assault.

That approach, however, comes at a cost.

Destroying defended positions with overwhelming fires often produces significant collateral damage, particularly in dense urban terrain, as happened with the Israeli forces. America’s adversaries understand this. They deliberately position themselves among civilians, inside homes, schools, hospitals, and other protected locations, not simply because it offers physical protection, but because civilian casualties become a weapon in the information war. Every bomb that destroys a defended position risks creating a political victory for the enemy.

Even when collateral damage is not the deciding factor, overwhelming firepower cannot be everywhere at once. Future conflicts against peer adversaries will be fought across vast battlefields where ammunition is finite, artillery and aircraft must be prioritized, and commanders are forced to ration their fires against the highest-value targets. Not every trench, bunker, building, cave, or fighting position can be destroyed before it is assaulted.

Some defenders will survive.

And someone will still have to go in.

That is why Combatives remains indispensable.

Not because every soldier will wrestle with the enemy.

Not because rifles fail.

Because every technology that prevents defenders from maneuvering increases the likelihood that the final moments of the battle will be decided inside arm’s length.

American doctrine has never been built around fighting fair. We seek overmatch in every domain of warfare. We strive to dominate the enemy through superior firepower, intelligence, mobility, communications, logistics, and technology because every advantage increases the odds that our soldiers come home alive.

Close combat should be no different.

Combatives creates overmatch after every other form of overmatch has been exhausted.

It develops the psychological ability to continue functioning when fear demands retreat.

And it develops the technical skill to dominate the enemy if the fight collapses inside arm’s length.

Technology will continue to evolve.

Every generation will believe it has made close combat obsolete.

History suggests otherwise.

The battlefield changes.

Human fear does not.

Neither does the requirement for ordinary infantrymen to enter the places every instinct tells them to avoid.

The final few meters of every battlefield still belong to the infantryman.

They always will.

Today Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

We rightly remember the eloquent words adopted in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. Yet by the time those words were written, blood had already been shed. More than a year earlier, on April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began when the government sent its army to Concord, Massachusetts.

Its mission was not to arrest murderers or suppress a riot. General Thomas Gage, the Governor of Massachusetts, ordered the nation’s professional soldiers to seize the military stores of the common people of Concord, Massachusetts. Their objective included muskets, bayonets, gunpowder, ammunition, entrenching tools, and artillery, including cannon owned by the people through their militia.

The men who stood in their way were not yet Americans. They were British subjects.

Nor did they view the red-coated soldiers as a foreign invading army. Those soldiers were their own national army, acting under the lawful authority. The conflict that began at Lexington and Concord was not initially a war between two nations. It was a conflict between a government and a people who had come to believe that government had violated their liberties.

To understand why ordinary farmers were willing to stand before the government’s army, one must first understand the institution they belonged to: the militia.

Modern Americans often imagine the militia as a small group of volunteers who gathered occasionally to drill with whatever firearms they happened to own. That picture bears little resemblance to the institution that existed in eighteenth-century America.

To the Founding generation, the militia was neither voluntary nor separate from the people. It was a legal institution composed of ordinary citizens, and military service was one of the obligations of citizenship.

Understanding that institution requires understanding four simple principles.

The Militia Was the People

The Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 described the militia as:

“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state.”

Twelve years later, during Virginia’s convention debating ratification of the Constitution, George Mason asked what should have been an obvious question:

“I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officers.”

Those words would have sounded unremarkable to eighteenth-century Americans. The militia was not an elite military organization. It was not a select body of volunteers. It was the people themselves, organized for the common defense.

Militia Service Was a Legal Duty

Today military service is voluntary. In colonial America it generally was not.

Throughout the colonies, militia laws required most able-bodied free men to enroll, attend periodic musters, train alongside their neighbors, and report when called into service. Men who failed to appear or neglected their obligations could be fined.

Massachusetts law made that obligation unmistakable:

“Every listed Souldier and other Householder... shall be always provided...”

The word shall mattered. Militia service was not encouraged. It was required.

Pennsylvania likewise required virtually every able-bodied free man of military age to serve in the militia, while Virginia’s militia laws required enrollment and gave citizens a limited period to acquire the military equipment required by law.

Citizenship carried obligations as well as rights.

Citizens Were Required to Keep Military Arms

The obligation to serve carried with it another obligation: to appear properly armed.

Massachusetts law required every militiaman to possess:

“...a well fix’d Firelock Musket... a Cartouch box, one Pound of good Powder, Twenty Bullets fit for his Gun, and Twelve Flints, a good Sword or Cutlace...”

This was not a recommendation.

It was not advice for hunters.

It was not a suggestion for sportsmen.

It was a legal requirement that every citizen expected to perform militia duty maintain military equipment suitable for war.

The musket hanging above the fireplace was certainly useful for hunting. It was also expected to answer the militia muster. It served two purposes because its owner served two roles: private citizen and member of the militia.

This explains something often overlooked in modern debates. The question was never whether an individual “needed” a military firearm. The law assumed he did, because service in the militia was mandatory. His neighbors depended upon it.

What “Well Regulated” Actually Meant

Modern readers often misunderstand one of the most famous phrases in American history.

Today, the word regulated usually suggests government restrictions and administrative rules. That is not how eighteenth-century Americans ordinarily used the word.

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary defined “regulate” as bringing something into proper order according to rule or method. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary similarly defined it as putting something “in good order.”

A well-regulated clock kept accurate time.

A well-regulated household functioned efficiently.

Likewise, a well-regulated militia was one that was properly organized, trained, disciplined, and equipped.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights makes this clear in its own wording. It describes the militia as “the body of the people, trained to arms.” Training, not regulation in the modern bureaucratic sense, was central to the idea.

A militia that lacked discipline, neglected training, or appeared without the required military equipment would not have been considered well regulated.

Security Was a Civic Responsibility

These obligations reflected the world in which the Founders lived.

There were sheriffs, constables, and town watches, but there were no professional police departments. The first municipal police department in the United States was established in Boston in 1838, more than sixty years after Lexington and Concord, when the city’s population had grown to roughly 90,000 people. New York followed in 1845 with a population approaching 370,000. As American cities became larger and more complex, governments increasingly hired professionals to perform duties that had once rested with ordinary citizens.

The eighteenth century was different.

The same man who might serve on a jury, answer the sheriff’s call to pursue a criminal, or stand a turn on the night watch was also expected to appear with his musket when the militia assembled.

Security was not primarily a government service.

It was a civic responsibility.

Concord

Understanding the militia makes the opening of the American Revolution easier to understand.

On April 19, 1775, General Thomas Gage, the Governor of Massachusetts and commander of the government’s regular army in North America, ordered troops to march to Concord.

The soldiers in red coats were not a foreign invading army. They were the government’s professional soldiers, carrying out the orders of their lawful civil governor against what the government regarded as a developing rebellion among its own subjects.

Their mission was to confiscate the military stores assembled by the Massachusetts militia.

Those stores included muskets, bayonets, gunpowder, ammunition, cartridge boxes, entrenching tools, provisions, and even artillery, including several cannon belonging to the people of Concord.

That final point is often forgotten.

The government’s objective was not merely to seize privately owned firearms. It sought to confiscate the military capability of the people themselves, including weapons that no one would mistake for sporting arms.

To eighteenth-century Americans, this was entirely logical. If the militia was the body of the people, and if the law required those people to furnish military arms suitable for service, then disarming the militia necessarily meant disarming the people who composed it.

Why It Matters

By the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress concluded that reconciliation was no longer possible. The Declaration of Independence announced to the world that the colonies were assuming “the separate and equal station” to which they believed they were entitled.

The road to that declaration had passed through Concord.

There, the government attempted to seize the military capability of the militia: muskets, powder, ammunition, and even cannon. The men who resisted did so because they believed the militia was not merely another government institution. It was the body of the people, fulfilling a legal duty that free citizens had carried for generations.

The Founding generation left little doubt about what they believed. When a government ceased to protect the liberties of the people and instead sought to destroy the means by which those liberties could be defended, they concluded that the people retained the right to alter or abolish that government and to establish one they believed would better secure their liberty.

That conviction gave birth to the United States.

Today, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth remembering that the Declaration did not begin the American Revolution. It explained why the men who had already stood at Concord believed they had been right to do so.

The Founders lived in a different world. They believed that liberty depended not only upon rights, but upon citizens willing to accept the responsibilities that accompanied them. Among those responsibilities was the duty to be prepared to defend their families, their neighbors, and their communities.

According to the Founders, when a government attempted to strip the people of the military arms they were legally obligated to possess. including even their cannon, it was no longer merely debating policy. It was attacking one of the institutions that secured the liberty of a free people.

Their answer was not another petition.

It was the American Revolution.

The purpose of the Army Combatives School is widely misunderstood.

People often mistake an expert in Army Combatives for an expert martial arts instructor. They are not the same profession. Of course, every Combatives expert must first be an expert fighter. Fighting ability is a foundational skill because individual fighting ability establishes credibility. They must also be an expert instructor, capable of developing fighting skills in others. These are essential prerequisites, but they are not the profession itself. The profession of Army Combatives is the science and art of helping commanders build successful Combatives programs that improve the fighting ability of the average soldier and strengthen the Warrior Ethos throughout the unit.

This distinction is fundamental because it defines the purpose of the Army Combatives School.

The school does not exist simply to produce expert fighters or expert instructors. It exists to educate professionals capable of helping commanders employ the Army Combatives Program as a tool for building combat capability and developing warrior culture within their organizations.

The Army Combatives Program is not an end in itself. It is a commander’s leadership tool. Everything described above exists for one purpose: to provide commanders with a tool capable of simultaneously improving the fighting ability of the average soldier and strengthening the Warrior Ethos throughout their formation.

Like any leadership tool, its value is measured not by the skill of the instructor, but by its effect on the organization.

Two questions determine whether a unit’s Combatives Program is successful.

Does the average soldier become a better fighter?

Does the unit develop a stronger Warrior Ethos?

Those are the measures of success. Understanding this distinction is the beginning of professional expertise.

One of the most common misconceptions about the Army Combatives Program is that successful unit programs are identified by thriving Combatives clubs or by producing individual champions.

Neither is an adequate measure of success.

Every unit contains a small number of highly motivated soldiers who will seek additional training regardless of the quality of the unit’s program. They attend civilian academies, train after duty hours, compete on weekends, and often become exceptional fighters. Their success is admirable, but it tells us very little about the effectiveness of the commander’s Combatives Program.

Likewise, a successful Combatives club may provide valuable opportunities for those who choose to participate, but voluntary participation by a small percentage of the unit does not substantially improve the fighting capability of the formation. A commander’s responsibility is not to develop a few elite fighters. It is to develop the entire unit.

A unit with a successful Combatives competition team, but average soldiers who have never been seriously developed has not built a successful Combatives Program. Conversely, a unit with no higher level champions may possess an outstanding program if the average soldier is demonstrably more capable in close combat and the Warrior Ethos has become more deeply rooted throughout the organization.

In a properly functioning Army Combatives Program, future instructors are identified within successful unit programs. Through regular training and competition, commanders recognize soldiers who have demonstrated exceptional fighting ability, maturity, leadership, and commitment to the Warrior Ethos. Their fighting ability gives them credibility. Their experience teaching within the unit develops them as instructors.

The Army Combatives School exists to build upon that foundation.

Understanding the purpose of the Army Combatives Program is only the beginning of professional expertise. A second essential body of professional knowledge is understanding the distinct purpose and culture of the Combatives profession itself.

Many of the Army's finest individual fighters develop their skills in civilian martial arts such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, wrestling, boxing, and mixed martial arts. The Army benefits enormously from that experience and should encourage soldiers to pursue it. Those schools produce highly skilled fighters and provide an invaluable source of technical expertise.

Yet the purpose of a civilian martial arts academy differs fundamentally from the purpose of the Army Combatives Program. Confusing those two purposes has been one of the greatest obstacles to the development of the Army Combatives profession. Civilian schools exist to develop the individuals who choose to attend them. The Army Combatives Program exists to improve the fighting ability of an entire formation and strengthen the Warrior Ethos throughout the unit.

Consequently, one of the Army Combatives School's most important responsibilities is not merely to improve technical skill but to enculturate accomplished fighters into the profession of Army Combatives. Graduates must learn to think like professional advisors to commanders rather than fight coaches or martial arts teachers. Those who remain committed to the assumptions, methods, and culture of civilian academies naturally tend to recreate them inside military units, building voluntary clubs for highly motivated soldiers rather than commander-led programs that develop the entire formation.

The Army benefits enormously from civilian martial arts because they produce skilled individual fighters. The responsibility of the Army Combatives School is to transform those accomplished fighters into professionals capable of helping commanders build successful Combatives programs.

Understanding the profession itself is only part of a Combatives expert's education. They must also understand the scope and purpose of the Army Combatives Program.

Like every profession, Army Combatives possesses a distinct body of professional knowledge. An expert instructor therefore requires far more than technical proficiency. The Army Combatives School must teach the professional knowledge required to advise commanders, design successful unit programs, develop instructors, integrate training into the unit's battle rhythm, strengthen organizational culture, and understand the limits of the program itself. Technical fighting skill establishes credibility, but professional knowledge is what makes an instructor valuable to a commander. The Army Combatives School exists to teach that body of knowledge.

The Army Combatives Program is designed to develop fundamental fighting ability and strengthen the Warrior Ethos across the force. It is not intended to teach the tactics, techniques, and procedures that individual units employ to accomplish their specific missions. Those requirements are determined by each unit’s Mission Essential Task List (METL).

This distinction is essential to understanding the profession of Army Combatives.

Every unit in the Army fights according to the same fundamental principles. Fire and maneuver, mutual support, and the ability to dominate an opponent through superior skill and coordinated action are universal. What differs from one unit to another is not how human beings fight, but the missions they are expected to accomplish and the tactical situations in which they must apply those universal principles. Consequently, each organization develops tactics, techniques, and procedures appropriate to its mission.

The Army Combatives Program serves the same role for close combat. It teaches the universal principles of fighting upon which all mission-specific applications are built. Units then develop and train the tactics, techniques, and procedures necessary to apply those fundamentals in the context of their own missions.

The development of the Special Operations Combatives Program (SOCP) illustrates this relationship well. Following the introduction of the Army Combatives Program into the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, Greg Thompson, and the Combatives Instructors in the cadre at the Special Forces Advanced Reconnaissance, Target Analysis, and Exploitation Techniques Course (SFARTAETC), who had just completed MACP levels I-IV in the last six months, developed SOCP to address the mission-specific requirements of units conducting direct action operations. Rather than replacing the Army Combatives Program, SOCP assumed soldiers already possessed its fundamental fighting skills taught through the Combatives Program and built upon that foundation by teaching the tactics, techniques, and procedures appropriate to those missions.

The relationship between fundamental skills and tactical procedures is no different elsewhere in the Army.

Consider the infantry drill for crossing a linear danger area. The procedure is valuable because it places the unit in a position to employ fire and maneuver effectively if contact is made with the enemy. But if the soldiers have never learned how to conduct fire and maneuver, the technique of how to cross a danger area provides little advantage. They may execute the crossing perfectly, but they still cannot fight.

The same principle applies in law enforcement. Handcuffing techniques are designed to place an officer in a position of advantage if the subject begins to resist. But those techniques assume the officer already possesses the ability to control and defeat a resisting opponent. Without that foundation, memorizing the procedure offers little real advantage because the officer cannot exploit the positional advantage it creates.

One of the most common mistakes made by commanders unfamiliar with the purpose of the Army Combatives Program is attempting to build mission-specific capability before developing fundamental fighting ability. Tactical procedures do not create fighting ability; they multiply it. The foundation must come first. Only then do mission-specific techniques achieve their intended effect.

This mistake persists because specialized training is inherently attractive. Mission-specific techniques appear more advanced, more operationally relevant, and more exciting than mastering the fundamentals. They also allow experienced soldiers and leaders to remain within areas where they already possess confidence and professional identity. Fundamental training, by contrast, often exposes weaknesses. It requires experienced personnel to become students again, sometimes learning alongside or even from junior soldiers who possess greater technical skill. That demands humility. Yet the more specialized a technique becomes, the more it assumes competence in the fundamentals.

A Combatives expert understands how the Army Combatives Program undergirds mission-specific training. The purpose of the program is to develop universal fighting ability and strengthen the Warrior Ethos across the force. Unit Combatives instructors then help commanders develop, refine, and teach the tactics, techniques, and procedures that apply those universal skills to their unit's specific mission. In other words, the Army Combatives Program provides the foundation; unit training builds the mission-specific applications.

An effective Combatives instructor must therefore be competent in both. They must understand how to build universal fighting ability across an organization, and they must be capable of adapting that foundation to the tactical requirements of their own units.

This distinction also explains why technical fighting ability should be a prerequisite for attendance at the Army Combatives School rather than its primary focus. Individual fighting ability establishes the credibility necessary to advise commanders and teach soldiers. The school's responsibility is to build upon that foundation by educating graduates in the broader profession of Combatives: designing unit programs, integrating training into the commander's battle rhythm, developing instructors, strengthening organizational culture, and helping commanders apply fundamental fighting skills to their unit's mission.

Professional soldiers understand that mastery always begins, and continually returns, to the fundamentals. As expertise increases, so does appreciation for their importance. The Army's elite organizations are not exceptional because they possess fundamentally different skills from the rest of the force. They are exceptional because they demand a higher standard of mastery in the fundamentals. The 75th Ranger Regiment exemplifies this principle. Organizations that neglect the basics in pursuit of advanced techniques often become proficient at rehearsing procedures without ever developing the underlying fighting ability required to execute them effectively.

A second essential body of professional knowledge is understanding not merely what the Army Combatives Program teaches, but why it was deliberately designed to function as it does.

It was deliberately designed to solve one of the commander’s greatest challenges: how to develop fundamental fighting skills across an entire formation without competing for additional training time. Rather than existing as a separate training event, the program’s foundational drills were designed to become part of the unit’s normal physical training routine.

Equally important, the Army Combatives Program was designed to complement physical training, not replace it. A Combatives class is not physical training. During technical instruction, much of the time is necessarily spent watching demonstrations, receiving coaching, and practicing techniques cooperatively. Those activities are essential for learning but contribute relatively little to developing strength, endurance, or cardiovascular fitness. By integrating Combatives drills and competitive grappling into an existing physical training session, before or after the primary conditioning event, the Army develops fighting ability without sacrificing physical readiness.

The first three drills consist of continuous partner movements in which every repetition naturally returns both soldiers to the starting position. Like throwing a baseball before practice or swinging a golf club before a round, they can be performed continuously as warm-up exercises before the day’s workout. Because the movements are repeated every day, instructors can focus attention on a single detail during each session. One day the emphasis may be proper grips. Another day it may be posture, weight distribution, or finishing mechanics. Over months and years, thousands of repetitions produce steady technical improvement.

Yet technical refinement is only one purpose of the drills.

The drills were also designed to teach the underlying schema of fighting. They are constructed from the fundamental positions of ground combat and the proper transitions between them. As soldiers repeat these movements day after day, they unconsciously learn the positional hierarchy of grappling, where they should be trying to move from every major position and why those positions matter. Likewise, the inclusion of fundamental submissions such as the bent arm bar and the rear naked choke teaches not merely how to execute those techniques, but from which positions a fighter possesses the leverage necessary to attack an opponent’s joints or neck. Rather than memorizing isolated techniques, soldiers gradually internalize the conceptual structure of ground fighting itself.

The same principle applies to instruction. Combatives has remained a Level I Soldier task in the Soldier's Manual of Common Tasks for decades. Like every other fundamental Soldier task, responsibility for teaching it belongs to the unit's NCOs rather than a small number of specialists. If many NCOs do not feel adequately prepared to teach Combatives, it is evidence that the Army has not built a system that routinely develops and sustains Combatives proficiency throughout the NCO corps. Integrating Combatives into the unit's regular physical training corrects this problem by providing the repetition, experience, and daily involvement necessary for NCOs to build and maintain that proficiency while simultaneously developing every soldier in the formation.

Integrating these drills into daily physical training produces another important effect. The Army already understands the value of common physical exercises. When a leader commands, “The High Jumper,” every soldier immediately knows what movement to perform because those exercises are part of the Army’s shared professional language. The Combatives drills were designed to achieve the same result. Every soldier is expected to know them. If they do not, the deficiency is immediately visible and corrected through the chain of command. Fundamental fighting movements therefore become part of the common professional knowledge expected of every soldier rather than the specialized knowledge of a few enthusiasts.

Understanding why the drills were designed this way is as important as learning to perform them. A Combatives expert is not merely someone who can demonstrate the movements. They understand the educational principles behind them and how those principles allow commanders to improve the fighting ability of an entire formation without requiring additional time on the training calendar.

A third essential body of professional knowledge is understanding how organizational culture is built and sustained.

The Army Combatives Program works because it deliberately shapes the social environment of a military unit. Soldiers naturally respect courage, competence, perseverance, humility, and the willingness to embrace difficult challenges. A properly designed program creates repeated opportunities for those qualities to be demonstrated before peers.

This is why informal competitions are indispensable.

Regular grappling conducted as part of unit physical training, for example after a unit run, ruck march, or other demanding physical event, does far more than improve fighting ability. Like physical training itself, fundamental Combatives skills are too important to leave to individual motivation. Every commander understands that if physical training were conducted only as an optional activity after duty hours, many soldiers would simply choose not to participate. The same is true of Combatives. By integrating it into the unit's normal battle rhythm, participation becomes an expected part of soldiering rather than an activity reserved for enthusiasts. This is one of the program's most important design features.

Because everyone participates, these events create a culture in which toughness and competence earn respect. Soldiers become motivated not merely by instruction from leaders but by the desire to meet the standards established by their peers. Over time, peer pressure encourages every soldier to become both tougher and more technically competent because those qualities carry social status within the organization.

Formal competitions accomplish a different purpose.

Company, battalion, and brigade tournaments publicly recognize excellence, establish organizational standards, and create role models for younger soldiers. They communicate what the commander values and reinforce the legitimacy of those who have earned distinction. Informal competitions shape the culture from within. Formal competitions reinforce it publicly. Both are essential, but they accomplish different objectives.

A graduate who cannot explain why informal and formal competitions produce different effects on organizational culture has not yet mastered Army Combatives. They may be an excellent fighter. They may even be an excellent instructor. But they do not yet understand the profession.

Everything described above exists for one purpose: to provide commanders with a leadership tool capable of simultaneously improving the fighting ability of the average soldier and strengthening the Warrior Ethos throughout the formation.

The Army Combatives School is therefore not simply a place where soldiers learn to fight or teach fighting.

It is the institution responsible for educating the professionals who help commanders use the Army Combatives Program to build units in which the average soldier fights better, the Warrior Ethos is strengthened, and the capability endures long after individual instructors and commanders have moved on.

That is what an expert in Army Combatives should be.

Imagine a weather forecaster who predicts sunshine every time it rains.

Eventually, no one watches.

Imagine an investment advisor whose recommendations consistently lose money.

Eventually, no one invests with him.

Now imagine an opinion journalist whose predictions repeatedly fail.

Often, he becomes even more influential.

Why doesn’t that destroy his reputation?

If his purpose were to predict the future, it should.

Yet in opinion journalism, and increasingly throughout the broader media, the relationship between accuracy and prestige appears surprisingly weak. Some of the most influential commentators continue to command enormous audiences despite making confident predictions that later prove dramatically wrong. In finance, the phenomenon has become so well known that investors have jokingly created strategies built around doing the opposite of certain famous television stock pickers.

Why?

Prediction may not be the product being sold.

Certainty is.

Those who produce certainty are rewarded with status within the coalition.

As societies become more specialized, fewer people experience most of reality firsthand, making interpretation itself an increasingly valuable profession.

Most of us think of opinion journalism as a way of making sense of the world. Columnists observe events, interpret their significance, and present arguments that help readers understand public affairs. Better explanations persuade people because they correspond more closely to reality. Over time, stronger ideas replace weaker ones.

In this model, prediction is one measure of competence. Accurate commentators gain credibility. Repeatedly inaccurate ones lose it.

It is an attractive ideal.

It is also probably an incomplete description of what opinion journalism actually does.

An evolutionary perspective begins with a different assumption. Human beings did not evolve in universities, newspapers, or television studios. We evolved in small bands competing with other bands for territory, resources, mates, and status. Communication evolved within that environment. As a result, its function has never been limited to discovering objective truth (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Dunbar, 1996).

We communicate to identify allies, establish trust, reinforce shared values, coordinate collective action, negotiate status, expose defectors, and maintain the cohesion of our group. Truth matters, but it exists alongside other evolutionary pressures that often prove just as powerful (Mercier & Sperber, 2011; Simler & Hanson, 2018; Trivers, 2011).

This may sound like a cynical view of human communication, but it reflects a broader shift within cognitive science. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have argued that human reason itself did not evolve primarily as a mechanism for discovering objective truth. Rather, it evolved to produce and evaluate arguments within social groups—to justify our own beliefs, assess the claims of others, and help coalitions coordinate around shared understandings of reality (Mercier & Sperber, 2011, 2017).

If they are correct, then opinion journalism is not an aberration from human nature. It is one of its most sophisticated expressions.

Viewed through that lens, modern opinion journalism begins to look very different.

The columnist does not simply report events. He performs a function that human societies have always required: helping the group construct a shared interpretation of reality. He tells his audience what events mean. He identifies heroes and villains. He explains which emotions are appropriate, which values are under attack, and which people deserve admiration or condemnation. His role is less like that of a scientist describing reality than that of a respected elder interpreting reality for the tribe.

Notice something important.

Very little of this requires persuading ideological opponents.

Its primary audience often consists of people who already share the same basic worldview. They are not merely looking for new information. They are looking for reassurance. They want arguments that confirm they understand the world correctly, that their moral instincts are justified, and that their coalition remains on the side of truth (Nickerson, 1998; Haidt, 2012).

The audience is asking two questions simultaneously.

“Is he one of us?”

“Are we right?”

If that is the product being consumed, many otherwise puzzling features of modern media suddenly become easier to understand.

Why are opinion pieces so often written in ways that opponents find dismissive or even insulting? Because they are not primarily written for opponents.

Why do readers enthusiastically share articles that almost no one on the other side will find persuasive? Because sharing them reinforces a common understanding of reality within the coalition while simultaneously signaling loyalty to it.

Why do some commentators become less persuasive to outsiders as they become more prestigious within their own political tribe? Because the incentives reward becoming a more faithful representative of the coalition, not a more effective persuader of its rivals.

This leads to a more fundamental question.

What behavior is the modern media ecosystem actually selecting for?

If prestige were primarily determined by predictive accuracy, commentators with consistently poor forecasting records would gradually disappear. Readers would seek out those who most accurately described reality, regardless of ideology.

But that is not what we observe.

This does not require anyone to be consciously deceptive. Evolution does not require intention. Organisms adapt to environments without understanding the forces shaping them. Institutions can do the same.

Of course, newspapers did not evolve through natural selection in the biological sense. The minds that created them did. Once created, however, institutions become subject to a different kind of selection. Communication strategies that better satisfy enduring features of human psychology spread, while those that do not gradually disappear. Over time, journalism adapts to the psychological environment in which it exists.

The media rewards attention. It rewards confidence, emotional engagement, and moral certainty. Above all, it rewards communicators who make members of a coalition feel understood, validated, and united.

From an evolutionary perspective, this should not surprise us.

Like every environment, the modern media ecosystem creates selection pressures.

Forests select for different traits than deserts. Oceans select for different traits than mountains. Likewise, every social institution rewards certain behaviors while discouraging others.

Those selection pressures do not reward prediction. They reward coalition maintenance. The commentators who reassure the tribe, reinforce its identity, define its enemies, and confidently interpret events through its existing worldview are more likely to rise in influence than those who merely make accurate predictions.

Prediction, in other words, may not be the product being selected.

The ability to produce certainty is.

Those who produce certainty are rewarded with status and influence within the coalition.

This also explains why repeated forecasting failures often produce remarkably little reputational damage.

That seems irrational if readers are purchasing forecasts.

It makes perfect sense if they are purchasing certainty.

The commentator’s primary value lies not in telling the future.

It lies in reducing uncertainty within the coalition.

Even when events unfold differently than predicted, he continues performing his more fundamental function: affirming the group’s shared narrative and reassuring its members that they remain morally and intellectually justified.

This is not unique to one political ideology.

Conservative and progressive media operate under remarkably similar evolutionary pressures. Their narratives differ, but the incentives are largely the same. Every coalition rewards those who articulate its worldview most effectively. Every coalition punishes those who publicly validate its rivals. Every coalition prefers confidence to visible doubt, particularly during periods of conflict (Tajfel & Turner, 1979).

From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that modern opinion journalism has become increasingly moralized and increasingly difficult for ideological opponents to read. The purpose of the writing has subtly shifted. Instead of attempting to persuade neutral observers, much of it functions to reassure believers.

There is an even broader implication.

Throughout history, every society has relied upon specialists. Some grew food. Some built houses. Some healed the sick. Some defended the community with violence.

Today we increasingly rely upon another class of specialists: people who interpret reality itself on behalf of coalitions. Opinion journalists are among the most influential members of that class.

Every increase in specialization reduces the amount of reality any one individual can experience firsthand. It therefore increases our dependence on trusted interpreters.

As civilization becomes more complex, each of us knows more about less, while depending more on others to understand everything else.

Most citizens lack the time to become experts in economics, constitutional law, foreign policy, epidemiology, climate science, or countless other increasingly complex fields. Instead, they outsource interpretation itself. They rely upon trusted members of their coalition to tell them not merely what happened, but what it means.

Opinion journalists have therefore become a new kind of specialist. Their raw material is not information. It is interpretation. Their role extends beyond reporting facts. They organize facts into narratives, assign moral significance to events, identify heroes and villains, and reduce uncertainty for the people who trust them.

This helps explain why political disagreement today often feels much deeper than disagreement over facts. Competing coalitions are not simply consuming different information. They are consuming different interpretations of reality.

That may be inevitable.

Complex societies require specialization. No individual can master every field of knowledge. We will always depend upon others to help us understand a world that has grown too complicated for any one person to fully comprehend.

But understanding the evolutionary function of opinion journalism changes how we should evaluate it.

Prediction was never the primary product.

Certainty was.

Those who consistently produce certainty earn status and influence within the coalition.

Instead of asking whether a commentator was right, perhaps we should first ask a different question.

What evolutionary function is the commentator serving?

If the primary function is helping a coalition construct and maintain a shared understanding of reality, then prediction is only one measure of success—and perhaps not even the most important one.

That realization does not make objective truth unattainable. It simply reminds us that institutions evolve just as organisms do. They are shaped by selection pressures. To understand an institution, we should look less at what it claims to produce and more at the behaviors it consistently rewards.

The evolutionary question is never, “What was this institution intended to do?”

It is, “What does this institution reliably produce?”

Only then can we ask the question that matters most.

Is this article helping me understand reality more accurately?

Or is it helping my coalition feel more certain that it already does?

Those are not always the same thing.

References

Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 163–228). Oxford University Press.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1996). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. Harvard University Press.

Durkheim, É. (2014). The division of labor in society (S. Lukes, Ed.; W. D. Halls, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1893)

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon.

Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(2), 57–74. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X10000968

Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220.

Simler, K., & Hanson, R. (2018). The elephant in the brain: Hidden motives in everyday life. Oxford University Press.

Smith, A. (1976). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1776)

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

Trivers, R. (2011). The folly of fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life. Basic Books.

Last night, the White House became something it has rarely been in modern times.

An arena.

With the President of the United States in attendance, the world’s premier mixed martial arts organization held an event on the grounds of the Executive Mansion itself. Regardless of what one thinks of the politics involved, the symbolism is difficult to ignore. The seat of American political power became, if only for an evening, a place where courage, skill, discipline, and the willingness to test oneself against another human being were celebrated before the nation.

That image would not have surprised Theodore Roosevelt.

More than a century ago, Roosevelt delivered what would become one of the most famous speeches in American history. It contained a passage that has since become known simply as The Man in the Arena.

“It is not the critic who counts... The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...”

Roosevelt understood something that modern society often forgets.

Civilizations are shaped by what they choose to admire.

For nearly all of human history, the qualities most admired were not wealth, celebrity, or the ability to criticize from the safety of the sidelines. They were courage, competence, endurance, and the willingness to accept risk in pursuit of excellence. Warrior cultures, whether ancient Greece, medieval Europe, feudal Japan, the Mongolian steppe, or the tribal societies of Africa, all found ways to cultivate those virtues long before young men ever faced the reality of battle.

They did so through competition.

The arena was one of civilization's oldest technologies.

Combat sports were never merely entertainment. They were reduced-risk forms of combat itself, places where young warriors learned to control fear, endure hardship, test themselves against worthy opponents, and earn the respect of their peers without the fatal consequences of war. Wrestling, boxing, pankration, fencing, jousting, judo, sambo, and today’s mixed martial arts all descend from the same simple idea: if a society expects men to fight when necessary, it should first give them opportunities to learn how.

The remarkable thing is not that so many cultures practiced combat sports.

The remarkable thing is that nearly every warrior culture on Earth invented them independently.

Among the Nuba people of Sudan, villages gather for wrestling festivals that are equal parts athletic competition and cultural celebration. Young men earn prestige through victory. Historically, young women watched the matches, often taking notice of the competitors as potential husbands. From an evolutionary perspective, this should surprise no one. A woman choosing the father of her children has always had reason to value courage, strength, discipline, and the demonstrated ability to protect a family. Wrestling made those qualities visible.

Medieval Europe held tournaments where knights tested themselves before kings and crowds. Ancient Greece celebrated Olympic wrestling, boxing, and pankration as the highest expressions of athletic excellence. Japan refined martial traditions into jujutsu, kendo, and sumo. Mongolia developed Bökh wrestling as a national institution. Scotland celebrated feats of strength and martial skill in the Highland Games.

Different civilizations, but the same pattern.

This points toward something even more fundamental. Competition is not a cultural invention. It is a feature of human nature.

In every society, young men compete for status, respect, influence, and ultimately for the opportunity to become husbands, fathers, and leaders. Those competitive instincts do not disappear simply because a culture finds them inconvenient.

The question is not whether young men will compete. The question is whether the adults will decide where and how that competition takes place.

Healthy societies answer that question by creating arenas governed by rules, honor, discipline, and mutual respect. They channel competitive energy into wrestling mats, boxing rings, rugby pitches, shooting ranges, weightlifting platforms, and other demanding pursuits where young men can earn status by demonstrating courage, competence, and self-control.

If society refuses to provide those arenas, young men will create their own.

History offers no shortage of examples. Street gangs, violent rivalries, reckless displays of dominance, and destructive risk-taking all satisfy the same ancient drive for status and recognition. The competitive instinct has not disappeared. It has merely escaped civilization’s guidance.

Combat sports do not create aggression.

They canalize it into socially productive forms.

Warriors also tend to enjoy these contests, a fact that often puzzles those who have never lived in that world. There is a profound difference between enjoying violence and enjoying controlled competition. Boxers do not gather because they hate one another. Wrestlers do not shake hands after a match because they sought to injure a friend. They compete because testing oneself against another willing and capable human being is one of the purest forms of challenge. It is a game, but it is a game that only a certain kind of person finds deeply satisfying.

That is not a flaw.

It is precisely the sort of person you hope is standing beside you when the stakes are no longer a medal or a championship, but your life.

Not every martial competition involves striking or grappling. Warrior cultures have always celebrated excellence in marksmanship, strength, endurance, and teamwork as well. Practical shooting sports such as USPSA and IDPA reward many of the same qualities demanded in combat: accuracy, speed, sound judgment, and the ability to solve tactical problems under pressure.

No single competition, however, captures the whole of what it means to be a warrior. Marksmanship is indispensable, but so are strength, endurance, mobility, and the ability to think clearly while physically exhausted. A person who excels with a pistol but neglects his physical fitness has mastered only part of the problem. If your goal is truly to protect yourself or those you love, the gym deserves as much attention as the range.

Events like The Tactical Games take that next step. Rather than testing marksmanship in isolation, competitors must first overcome demanding physical challenges before engaging complex shooting problems. Strength, endurance, composure, and technical skill become inseparable, much as they are in military operations. The result is a competition that tests not simply a marksman, but a more complete warrior.

That principle could be taken even further. After the final matches of the Army Combatives Championship, the Lacerda Cup, the weight division champions could compete in a three-gun competition involving the carbine, pistol, and precision rifle. Rather than simply crowning the Army's best fighter, the event would identify the competitor who best combines close combat skill, marksmanship, physical fitness, and mental composure under pressure. It would celebrate not merely excellence in a single discipline, but more the ideal of the complete warrior.

That principle should not be limited to the military. Whether the arena is a boxing ring, a wrestling mat, a rugby pitch, a football field, or a military competition, its highest purpose is not simply to identify winners. It is to shape character.

Like many men, one of the most influential figures in my adolescence was my high school football coach, Oscar Cripps. Only years later did I realize he understood something I was too young to appreciate. The purpose of the game was never simply to win football games. The purpose was to build men. The practices, the discipline, the physical hardship, the accountability to teammates, and the expectation that each player would willingly place himself in difficult situations for the benefit of the group were all preparing us for something much larger than a Friday night scoreboard.

The best coaches have always understood this.

The sport is the classroom.

Character is the subject.

Roosevelt understood this instinctively. He boxed while attending Harvard, wrestled, and played rugby. Even after becoming President of the United States, he continued boxing inside the White House until an injury permanently damaged the vision in one eye. Becoming the most powerful man in America did not exempt him from the arena. If anything, he believed it demanded that he remain in it.

Healthy societies do not merely admire competitors.

They encourage participation.

Contrast that with the experience of millions of Americans whose athletic careers end with their final high school football game. For decades afterward, many maintain a passionate connection to the sport, but only as spectators. They gather every weekend to watch other men struggle while they themselves never again step into an arena.

Warrior cultures encourage lifelong participation because courage, competence, and physical capability are not adolescent virtues. They are adult responsibilities.

Roosevelt understood this. That is why he continued to box, wrestle, and even learned Judo while serving as the President. He admired participation.

Every competition teaches something.

Combat sports reward courage under pressure. Wrestling rewards perseverance. Boxing rewards composure in the face of adversity. Rugby rewards a different but equally martial virtue. Your teammates depend upon your willingness to engage the opposing team physically, to absorb punishment, to continue forward when exhausted, and to place the success of the group ahead of your own comfort. It teaches that courage is not merely personal, it is a responsibility owed to those beside you. Shooting sports reward calm judgment under stress.

Likewise, sports also teach whatever behaviors they reward.

Warrior cultures have always been careful about the behaviors they celebrate.

For years I have described what often happens when someone begins to fall behind during a military unit run. Rarely do they continue running in formation until they have reached their limit. Instead, they drift toward the back of the formation and begin performing for the audience around them. The grimaces become more dramatic. The breathing louder. The gestures more expressive. Every signal seems designed to communicate the same message: Can’t you see how hard I’m trying?

It is an appeal for sympathy.

A warrior culture teaches something different. Warriors do not ask others to notice how much they are suffering because their attention is fixed on the task itself. The arena is not a place to seek sympathy. It is a place to demonstrate character.

Not every sport encourages the right things.

Every competition teaches its participants what behaviors earn status, admiration, and success. Warrior cultures have therefore always been careful about the incentives they create.

There is nothing honorable about pretending to be injured in order to deceive an official into granting a competitive advantage. There is nothing admirable about exaggerating pain to manipulate the outcome of a contest. Such behavior may be permitted within the rules of a game, but it cultivates habits that no warrior culture has ever sought to encourage.

The opposite error exists as well. Modern promotions sometimes encourage competitors to manufacture rivalries, trade insults, and cultivate exaggerated public personas to attract attention. These theatrics may sell tickets, but they do little to elevate the dignity of either the athletes or the sport.

A mature warrior is dangerous.

An immature warrior wants everyone to think he is dangerous.

Though they appear opposite, theatrical weakness and theatrical toughness are really the same strategy. Both attempt to obtain status without first earning it. Warrior cultures reject both. Status should follow demonstrated competence.

The arena changes. Sometimes it is a wrestling circle beneath African skies. Sometimes it is a medieval tournament field. Sometimes it is a rugby pitch, a boxing ring, a shooting range, or an MMA cage. The purpose remains the same.

Civilizations do not endure because they eliminate competition. They endure because they teach each generation where to compete, how to compete, and what kind of person competition ought to produce.

A civilization that mistakes coddling for compassion should not be surprised when it produces adults unprepared for hardship.

To cultivate men and women who willingly embrace challenge, who measure themselves honestly, who learn to lose with dignity, to win with humility, and to accept that growth requires risk.

Roosevelt was right.

The credit belongs not to those who sit safely outside the arena, commenting on the courage of others.

It belongs to the one whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.

Long before modern psychology attempted to classify personality types, motivational systems, archetypes, or behavioral drives, human beings were already encoding these patterns into stories, symbols, and gods.

Ancient pantheons were not merely primitive attempts at science. Nor were they simply collections of entertaining myths. They were symbolic maps of human nature itself.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung argued that recurring mythological symbols persist across civilizations because they express enduring structures within human experience. Long before modern psychology gave these patterns clinical names, ancient peoples had already transformed them into narrative and iconography.

The old gods represented recurring aspects of reality and recurring aspects of the human psyche: wisdom, fertility, chaos, courage, love, sovereignty, deception, war, motherhood, craftsmanship, sacrifice, vengeance, order, fate. The ancients observed that these forces existed both in the world around them and within human beings. Their mythologies became a symbolic language for discussing enduring truths about human behavior and civilization.

From an evolutionary perspective, this recurrence should not be surprising.

Human beings everywhere confront many of the same fundamental adaptive challenges. We must form coalitions, compete for status, attract mates, raise children, establish trust, identify leaders, manage conflict within groups, and defend ourselves against rival groups. Although cultures differ dramatically in language, geography, and religious belief, the underlying problems of human social life remain remarkably similar.

Because these challenges recur across generations and across civilizations, the psychological tendencies that evolved to navigate them recur as well. People everywhere recognize courage, loyalty, wisdom, deception, sacrifice, ambition, love, and vengeance because these traits have shaped human survival and social life for thousands of generations.

Mythology can be understood, in part, as an attempt to map these recurring patterns. The gods became symbolic embodiments of the forces and behavioral tendencies that people repeatedly observed within themselves, within their communities, and within the broader struggle to build and sustain civilization.

Modern people often misunderstand this because we inherit centuries of thinking shaped by materialism and literalism. We tend to ask whether the gods were “real,” as though the only meaningful reality is physical existence. But symbolic systems can contain profound psychological truth regardless of whether one believes the beings themselves literally walked the earth.

Even Christianity, despite its rejection of pagan worship, inherited and transformed many of these symbolic structures rather than erasing them entirely. Medieval Christians continued to think symbolically. Saints became icons of particular virtues and struggles. Archangels represented divine justice, warfare, healing, or judgment. The dragon-slayer motif survived in figures like Saint George and Michael the Archangel. The symbolic language changed, but the underlying human realities remained.

This is important because many ancient gods represented not merely isolated concepts, but tensions within civilization itself.

One of the clearest examples is Týr.

To the modern mind, Tyr’s domains can appear contradictory. He is associated with war, law, justice, oaths, and courage. Today we often imagine these as separate spheres. Law is supposed to restrain violence. Justice is supposed to rise above force. Courage belongs to warriors, while law belongs to judges and legislators.

But ancient societies understood something we often forget:
law without force is merely suggestion, and force without law becomes predation.

The deeper insight embedded in Tyr is that civilization itself depends upon dangerous men voluntarily binding themselves to moral structure.

This is why Tyr’s central myth matters so much.

The monstrous wolf Fenrir represents unrestrained destructive force. The gods know he must be bound or the world itself will eventually be destroyed. Yet Fenrir understands deception and refuses to be restrained unless one of the gods places a hand in his mouth as a pledge of honesty.

Only Tyr agrees.

He knowingly risks mutilation to make the binding possible. When Fenrir realizes he has been deceived, he bites off Tyr’s hand.

The symbolism is extraordinarily sophisticated.

Tyr becomes the guarantor of the oath by placing his own body at risk. His sacrifice represents the cost of social order itself. Trust is not maintained by words alone. Someone must bear danger personally to uphold collective stability.

The hand itself is symbolically important. Hands wield weapons, swear oaths, enforce law, and establish contracts. Tyr loses the very instrument through which warriors fight and men establish trust. His mutilation becomes proof that maintaining order always extracts sacrifice.

This is not merely a story about bravery. It is about the moral burden of civilization.

The same traits that make men effective protectors, aggression, fearlessness, dominance, willingness to use violence, can also destroy society if left unconstrained. Tyr represents the channeling of warrior energy into lawful order.

The highest form of strength is not the capacity for violence. Predators possess that naturally. The higher achievement is the voluntary subordination of strength to duty, law, and moral obligation.

This pattern appears repeatedly across cultures.

Ares represented the chaos and bloodlust of war in Greek thought, while Athena represented disciplined warfare guided by wisdom and civilization. The Greeks understood that war itself contains multiple psychological dimensions. One can fight like a berserker, or one can fight as a disciplined guardian of order.

Similarly, Mars was not merely a god of violence. To the Romans, Mars was tied to agriculture, fatherhood, citizenship, and the defense of the state. Roman civilization understood that military virtue and civic order were inseparable. The disciplined soldier protected the field, the family, and the republic.

Even within Christianity, the same psychological tension persists. Christians are called toward peace, mercy, and forgiveness, but Christian civilization also recognized the necessity of courage, discipline, sacrifice, and righteous defense. This tension produced traditions such as Just War Theory, knightly orders, and the image of the warrior saint.

The point is not that all religions are secretly the same. They are not. Their theological claims differ profoundly. But human beings across civilizations repeatedly confronted the same realities:
danger,
violence,
trust,
loyalty,
sacrifice,
order,
death,
and the need to organize imperfect human beings into functioning societies.

Their symbolic systems reflected this.

In many ways, ancient pantheons operated like maps of recurring human behavioral patterns. The Norse gods, for example, embodied different approaches to solving the problems of life and civilization.

Odin sought understanding. He sacrificed an eye for wisdom, hung upon the World Tree in pursuit of knowledge, and continually searched for deeper insight into forces larger than himself. His stories suggest that vision, strategy, and wisdom often come at a cost.

Thor confronted problems more directly. He protected gods and men alike not through subtlety but through strength, reliability, and decisive action. When chaos threatened the community, Thor met it head-on.

Tyr occupied a different role. He neither sought hidden knowledge nor relied primarily upon overwhelming force. Instead, he embodied duty, trustworthiness, and the willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the maintenance of social order. Where Odin pursued understanding and Thor provided protection, Tyr represented the moral obligations that transform collections of powerful individuals into functioning coalitions.

These were not random stories. They were observations about recurring modes of human existence.

Modern psychology sometimes rediscovers these patterns using clinical language:
dominance hierarchies,
coalitional psychology,
risk tolerance,
attachment,
moral foundations,
personality structures,
aggression regulation,
sacrificial behavior.

The ancients encoded them symbolically instead.

This does not require modern Christians to worship pagan gods or abandon their faith. In fact, many early Christian thinkers recognized that pagan cultures often grasped fragments of moral and psychological truth imperfectly through philosophy and myth. One can understand the symbolic power of Tyr without believing that Tyr is literally a divine being.

In that sense, these mythic figures function much like literary archetypes or moral icons. They compress complex truths about human beings into memorable symbolic form.

And perhaps that is why they endure.

Because the central problem Tyr represents has never disappeared.

Civilization still depends upon the ability to transform dangerous human beings into trustworthy protectors rather than predators. Every society still struggles to balance force and restraint, courage and law, justice and power.

We still require men willing to bear risk personally so that others may live safely under ordered systems of trust.

The old Norse poets simply captured that reality in the image of a one-handed god placing his hand willingly into the mouth of the wolf.

My grandfather, Carl Johan Larsen, grew up on a farm in the Danish community of Danevang, Texas.

There was no grocery store.

There was no butcher shop.

Everything the family ate was grown, raised, harvested, or processed by hand.

If they ate chicken, it was because they had raised a chicken, killed it, plucked it, cleaned it, and cooked it.

Often preparing the chicken would fall to a young boy.

Processing animals was not a special event.

It was a chore.

Just another task that had to be done.

The boys fed animals.

Collected eggs.

Worked in the fields.

Cut wood.

And when it was time to eat chicken, they helped kill and clean chickens.

The first time they saw blood was not extraordinary.

The first time they saw and smelled internal organs was not extraordinary.

Those lessons were learned gradually over years, woven into the ordinary rhythms of life.

If they ate bacon with breakfast or ham at Christmas, it was because they had raised a hog, killed it, cleaned it, butchered it, and preserved it long enough to eat.

Death was not hidden.

It was part of life.

Like many boys of his generation, he learned from childhood that life feeds on life.

Later he became a nose gunner on a B-17 during the Second World War.

He flew in the most dangerous phase of the American daylight bombing campaign over Europe. Just five months before his aircraft was shot down, the Eighth Air Force lost 148 bombers and approximately 1,500 aircrew during "Black Week." On one mission alone, 60 B-17s were shot down. The losses were so severe that crews often spoke less about completing their tours than about how long their luck would hold. Few men expected to finish the war unscathed. Many doubted they would finish it alive.

He was a bombardier, operating the aircraft’s Norden bombsight over targets, and also manned the twin .50 caliber machine guns in the nose.

On his seventeenth mission, flying as a substitute with a crew that was not his own, his aircraft was attacked by a German Messerschmitt in a head-on pass. Cannon fire severely wounded the navigator and crippled the bomber. Despite losing more than one engine, and having several wounded crewmen, including my grandfather, they managed to keep the aircraft in the air long enough to reach neutral Switzerland, where they bailed out. The severely wounded navigator successfully bailed out, but was unable to deploy his parachute, and was killed.

For most men, survival would have been enough. Interned in Switzerland for the remainder of the war, he escaped, was recaptured, and escaped again. On his second escape attempt, he paddled across a lake under cover of darkness to make it into Italy where American troops were in control. He eventually made his way back to England to returned to the war.

Like many of his generation, raised to be a farmer, when called upon by his country Carl Larsen was a warrior.

Yet it is important to understand what my grandfather was not.

He was not a violent man.

He was one of the most civilized men I have ever known.

He was kind.

Honest.

Gentlemanly.

Well-mannered.

Deeply devoted to his family, his community, and his country.

He possessed a strong sense of personal responsibility and obligation to others.

Years later, after I had become a soldier myself and had seen a little combat, while we were hunting and talking about his experiences, he shared a lesson I have never forgotten.

“The first time a man smells viscera, it shouldn’t be his friend’s.”

At first glance, this may sound like a lesson about hunting.

It was not.

It was a lesson about reality.

My grandfather had grown up in a world where death was visible. He had smelled blood. He had handled dead animals. He understood from childhood that life, death, injury, and survival were inseparable parts of existence.

What he was telling me was that there is a cost to encountering these realities for the first time under the worst possible circumstances.

For most of human history, people learned such lessons long before they ever encountered warfare.

Today, many people reach adulthood having never encountered them at all.

That difference matters.

In fact, it may help explain some of the greatest mistakes in twentieth century combat psychology.

Nature Is Not Sentimental

My grandfather’s lesson reflected a reality that modern people rarely encounter.

For most of human history, human beings lived much closer to nature than we do today.

And nature is not sentimental.

Every animal eventually dies.

Most do not die peacefully.

They die from disease.

They die from injury.

They die from starvation.

They die from exposure.

Many are killed and consumed by other animals.

Predation is not an exception in nature.

It is one of the fundamental processes through which life operates.

Life feeds on life.

As Jack London’s Wolf Larsen observed, “Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives...”

Whatever one thinks of his conclusions, London understood something modern people often forget. Nature is not organized around comfort, fairness, or the preservation of every individual life.

A deer torn apart by wolves.

A rabbit carried off by a hawk.

A chimpanzee killing a rival male.

A human hunter butchering an animal for food.

These are not aberrations.

They are ordinary features of the natural world.

For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings observed these realities from childhood.

Children watched animals butchered.

They watched livestock slaughtered.

They saw predators kill prey.

They saw injury.

They saw disease.

They saw death.

Long before they were old enough to participate in hunting or warfare themselves, they understood that life was fragile and survival was never guaranteed.

This does not mean they were cruel.

Quite the opposite.

People who live close to these realities often develop a profound respect for life precisely because they understand how easily it can be lost.

My grandfather was not hardened by understanding death.

He was civilized while understanding it.

That distinction matters.

Modern civilization has created an unprecedented degree of separation from these realities.

Many people can now reach adulthood without ever seeing an animal butchered.

Without seeing a dead body.

Without witnessing serious violence.

Without understanding where food comes from beyond a supermarket shelf.

Without ever confronting the realities that sustained human existence throughout nearly all of our evolutionary history.

This separation has obvious benefits.

Civilization is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

Yet it also creates a danger.

People may begin to mistake their distance from reality for reality itself.

Ideas emerge that would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors not because our ancestors were less moral, but because they lived in circumstances where survival imposed different demands.

The question is not whether civilization has made life safer and more humane.

It unquestionably has.

The question is whether a population largely insulated from the realities that shaped human evolution can accurately understand the psychology of those realities.

The answer to that question lies at the heart of one of the greatest mistakes in combat psychology.

The Civilization Problem

Modern people often assume their moral intuitions are universal.

They are not.

They are products of a particular environment.

For hundreds of thousands of years, every human being lived as a member of a hunter-gatherer band.

The survival of the group depended directly upon its ability to acquire resources and defend them.

Human beings hunted because failure to hunt meant starvation.

Human beings fought because failure to fight meant displacement, enslavement, or death.

Neighboring groups competed for territory, water, game, and other resources. Groups unable or unwilling to defend themselves disappeared.

This was not a specialized activity performed by a minority of the population.

It was the human condition.

The moral systems that evolved in these environments reflected those realities.

Courage was a virtue.

Loyalty was a virtue.

Competence was a virtue.

Willingness to contribute to group survival was a virtue.

Failure to contribute was not viewed as a harmless personal preference.

It imposed costs on everyone else.

As a result, hunter-gatherer societies developed powerful mechanisms for enforcing participation.

Ridicule.

Shaming.

Loss of status.

Ostracism.

Expulsion.

Anthropologists have documented these mechanisms repeatedly across small-scale societies (Boehm, 1999).

This should not surprise us.

For most of human history, survival could not be outsourced.

Imagine a young man in a hunter-gatherer band announcing that he does not wish to hunt.

He does not wish to defend the group.

He does not wish to participate in coalition obligations.

This would not have been seen as a lifestyle choice.

That assumption itself reflects the moral intuitions of civilization.

In the ancestral environment, others would have to acquire the food he consumed.

Others would have to accept the risks he refused to accept.

Others would have to defend resources from which he benefited.

His reputation would suffer.

His status would suffer.

His influence would suffer.

His opportunities for mating would suffer.

Likely, persistent failure to contribute would result in ostracism or expulsion, and inevitable death.

The issue was not merely economic.

It was moral.

Hunter-gatherer morality evolved specifically to encourage behaviors necessary for group survival and discourage behaviors that threatened it.

This observation leads to an uncomfortable conclusion.

Many moral beliefs common today could not have emerged in the environments that shaped human evolution.

Pacifism is one example.

Not because human beings were naturally bloodthirsty.

But because pacifism depends upon conditions that did not exist.

Pacifism becomes possible when defense can be delegated to others.

It becomes possible when individuals can benefit from security without personally contributing to its provision.

It becomes possible when civilization separates the costs of violence from the benefits of protection.

The same principle applies to many other modern moral intuitions.

They are not necessarily wrong.

But they are historically unusual.

They are products of specialization.

They are products of civilization.

Most importantly, they are not necessarily windows into ancestral human psychology.

As specialization increased, responsibility for managing violence became concentrated in a shrinking portion of the population while increasing numbers of people became insulated from it.

The result was not merely a division of labor. It was the beginning of moral divergence.

Those responsible for providing security remained tied to realities that had shaped human behavior for thousands of generations. Those protected by that security increasingly developed moral intuitions under very different conditions.

Over time, the moral assumptions of the protector and the protected began to diverge.

This distinction lies at the heart of one of the greatest mistakes in combat psychology.

Why Morality Exists

Human beings possess powerful moral instincts.

Across cultures, people admire courage, value loyalty, reward cooperation, condemn cheating, and feel obligations toward family, community, and group. The specific rules may differ, but many of the underlying moral themes appear repeatedly throughout human societies.

The question is what purpose these moral systems serve.

Human beings did not survive as solitary individuals.

We survived as members of coalitions.

Throughout human history, groups competed over food, water, territory, mates, and other resources. Coalitions that cooperated effectively tended to survive and reproduce. Coalitions that failed to cooperate often disappeared.

Morality can be understood as one of the mechanisms that made cooperation possible.

Loyalty encouraged individuals to place the interests of the group above their immediate self-interest.

Reciprocity rewarded cooperation and punished freeloading.

Honor created incentives for courage.

Shame discouraged behaviors that imposed costs on the coalition.

Duty encouraged individuals to accept risks on behalf of others.

Far from being opposed to evolution, these moral emotions can be understood as adaptations to the realities of coalition survival.

More broadly, morality can be understood as a system for aligning individual behavior with the interests of the coalition.

In some circumstances this produces compassion, generosity, and forgiveness.

In others it produces punishment, exclusion, and violence.

The underlying question is often not whether a behavior benefits humanity in the abstract, but whether it benefits the group to which the individual belongs.

This observation has important implications for understanding warfare.

The moral intuitions common in modern industrial societies are not necessarily the same moral intuitions that shaped human evolution.

And that distinction becomes critically important when attempting to understand the psychology of war.

Marshall, Grossman, and the Resistance-to-Killing Hypothesis

The most influential modern argument about combat psychology emerged from the work of S.L.A. Marshall and later Dave Grossman.

Marshall’s book Men Against Fire claimed that only fifteen to twenty-five percent of American infantrymen fired their weapons at exposed enemy soldiers during World War II (Marshall, 1947).

The implication was obvious.

Most soldiers were not shooting.

Why?

Marshall suggested that human beings possessed a powerful resistance to killing members of their own species.

Decades later, Grossman expanded this argument in On Killing (Grossman, 1995).

Grossman argued that military training largely functions by overcoming an innate human reluctance to kill.

His evidence came from several sources:

Marshall’s firing-rate statistics.

Reports of soldiers shooting high.

Examples of ritualized aggression among animals.

Psychological distress experienced by combat veterans after killing.

The argument was elegant.

The problem is that both the evidence and the assumptions behind it are deeply flawed.

First, the Marshall data themselves appear far weaker than most people realize.

Roger Spiller’s review of Marshall’s work found little evidence that the systematic data collection Marshall described had actually occurred (Spiller, 1988).

John Whiteclay Chambers likewise concluded that the empirical foundation supporting Marshall’s famous firing ratios was much weaker than commonly believed (Chambers, 2003).

The most influential statistic in combat psychology may never have rested upon a reliable empirical foundation.

But even if Marshall’s observations were entirely accurate, Grossman’s interpretation does not follow.

The central mistake is the confusion of fear with reluctance to kill.

Combat veterans understand something many psychologists do not.

The dominant emotion in battle is often not guilt.

It is fear.

Fear of being shot.

Fear of being blown apart.

Fear of being trapped.

Fear of watching friends die.

A soldier who hesitates to expose himself long enough to place effective fire on the enemy is not necessarily demonstrating reluctance to kill.

He may simply be demonstrating a healthy desire not to be killed himself.

The courage required in combat is often not the courage to kill.

It is the courage to remain exposed long enough to kill effectively.

This distinction matters because fear requires no elaborate explanation.

Natural selection has been shaping it for hundreds of millions of years.

The same problem appears in Grossman’s interpretation of soldiers shooting high.

Every experienced infantryman knows that inexperienced shooters naturally fire high.

They do so on qualification ranges.

They do so in training.

They do so when no human target is present.

Ordinary marksmanship errors explain the phenomenon perfectly well.

No subconscious resistance to killing is required.

The animal evidence is equally problematic.

Grossman interpreted ritualized aggression as evidence of reluctance to kill.

Evolutionary biology offers a simpler explanation.

Injury is costly.

Animals avoid unnecessary injury because avoiding injury improves survival and reproduction.

No moral reluctance is required.

In fact, some of our closest relatives provide evidence in the opposite direction.

Chimpanzees conduct territorial patrols.

When they encounter isolated rivals and possess overwhelming numerical superiority, they attack.

The critical variable is not aggression.

The critical variable is risk.

As Richard Wrangham’s imbalance-of-power hypothesis argues, coalitionary violence becomes most likely when attackers can act with minimal danger to themselves (Wrangham, 1999).

The objective is not bravery.

The objective is victory.

Researchers have documented chimpanzee groups systematically killing neighboring males and expanding into newly available territory (Mitani et al., 2010; Wilson et al., 2014).

The chimpanzees do not appear traumatized by these victories.

The victorious chimpanzees gain territory.

They gain access to resources.

They gain access to females.

They improve the future prospects of their own group.

The violence is potentially costly.

But from an evolutionary perspective, it is often adaptive.

Human history contains countless examples of similar patterns.

Victorious warriors were frequently celebrated rather than traumatized.

Successful raids could bring territory, resources, prestige, security, and reproductive opportunities.

This does not mean that violence carries no psychological cost.

It means that the act of killing itself cannot automatically be assumed to be psychologically damaging.

Context matters.

Meaning matters.

Whether violence benefits or harms the coalition matters.

This should sound familiar.

Throughout human history, successful warriors were often celebrated precisely because they benefited the coalition.

The pattern is ancient.

The interpretation is modern.

The Video Game Panic

One often forgotten aspect of Grossman’s work is that his theory extended far beyond military psychology.

When On Killing was written, Grossman became one of the most prominent critics of violent media, particularly first-person shooter video games.

He described such games as “murder simulators” and argued that they conditioned children to overcome their natural resistance to killing.

This argument followed directly from the resistance-to-killing hypothesis.

If humans possess a powerful innate reluctance to kill, then repeated exposure to simulated killing should be deeply concerning.

The problem is that subsequent decades of research have failed to support many of the most alarming predictions associated with this theory.

Violent video games may increase short-term aggressive thoughts and physiological arousal, but the dramatic increases in violent criminal behavior predicted by many critics never materialized (Ferguson, 2015).

The significance of this failure extends beyond video games.

It suggests that the underlying theory itself may be weaker than its influence would suggest.

Grossman’s concern about video games is revealing because it demonstrates how broadly the resistance-to-killing hypothesis was applied.

The theory was not merely about combat.

It was a theory of human nature.

And it is that theory that deserves reexamination.

Moral Divergence

The deeper mistake made by legacy psychology was not misunderstanding violence.

It was misunderstanding morality.

Psychologists assumed that the moral intuitions of modern civilization represented universal human nature.

They did not.

They represented a particular stage of social evolution.

The deeper mistake made by legacy psychology was not misunderstanding violence.

It was misunderstanding morality.

As specialization increased, fewer people became responsible for managing violence while increasing numbers became insulated from it.

The result was moral divergence.

Those responsible for providing security continued to confront realities that had shaped human behavior for thousands of generations. Those protected by that security increasingly developed moral intuitions under very different conditions.

The protector and the protected began to inhabit different moral worlds.

To understand moral divergence, it is necessary to understand what morality originally evolved to accomplish.

Morality did not emerge in a vacuum.

It emerged in coalitions.

For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings survived not as isolated individuals but as members of small groups competing with other groups for resources, territory, mates, and survival itself.

In such environments, morality functioned as a mechanism for assigning value to other members of the coalition.

Loyalty mattered because loyal allies increased the group’s chances of survival.

Courage mattered because groups that fled from every threat eventually lost resources, territory, and opportunities.

Reciprocity mattered because individuals who consistently accepted benefits without contributing imposed costs upon everyone else.

Honor mattered because reputation influenced who could be trusted when survival depended upon cooperation.

The lives of coalition members possessed extraordinary value.

The lives of competitors often did not.

This pattern appears repeatedly throughout human history.

Men willingly sacrificed themselves for family, tribe, clan, regiment, or nation while simultaneously fighting, raiding, conquering, or killing members of competing groups.

From a modern perspective this may appear contradictory.

From an evolutionary perspective it is exactly what we should expect.

The same psychological mechanisms that produce self-sacrifice for the in-group can produce indifference, hostility, or violence toward out-groups.

Morality appears to have evolved primarily in the context of coalition survival rather than concern for humanity in the abstract.

It emerged to maximize the survival and success of coalitions.

This is one reason modern moral intuitions can differ so dramatically from those of our ancestors.

Civilization transformed the environment in which moral systems operated.

Agriculture produced surplus.

Surplus produced specialization.

Specialization allowed increasing numbers of people to live without hunting, fighting, or directly defending the group.

The responsibility for violence became concentrated in a shrinking percentage of the population.

Most people became consumers of security rather than providers of it.

As this occurred, moral frameworks increasingly expanded beyond the immediate coalition.

Religious traditions began extending moral concern beyond kinship groups.

Empires created broader identities encompassing multiple tribes and peoples.

Modern states extended legal protections to millions of strangers.

Industrial societies eventually produced moral systems that increasingly emphasized universal human rights, universal human dignity, and universal moral concern.

Whether this development represents moral progress, moral divergence, or some combination of both is a question reasonable people may debate.

What matters here is that these moral systems emerged under conditions radically different from those that shaped human evolution.

For the first time in history, large numbers of people could advocate moral principles without personally confronting many of the realities those principles depended upon others to manage.

The farmer no longer defended the frontier.

The merchant no longer stood watch against raids.

The professor no longer hunted for food.

The citizen no longer fought most wars.

Specialists performed these functions on behalf of society.

This distance from the realities of coalition competition does not necessarily make modern moral systems wrong.

But it does make them historically unusual.

And it creates the possibility that individuals exposed to war may experience profound conflict between modern moral expectations and realities that would have been familiar to their ancestors.

This possibility leads directly to a different interpretation of combat psychology.

Perhaps the central issue is not that human beings possess a universal resistance to killing.

Perhaps the central issue is that many people enter combat carrying moral expectations shaped by the protected world from which they came, only to be confronted by realities that have always belonged to the protector’s role.

If so, psychological injury may arise when the moral assumptions of the protected world collide with the realities of the warrior’s role.

Human beings do not enter combat carrying identical moral frameworks.

They enter combat carrying expectations shaped by family, religion, education, peers, institutions, and culture.

Psychological injury emerges when reality collides with those expectations.

A soldier who kills while defending his comrades.

A soldier who accidentally kills civilians.

A soldier who witnesses atrocities.

A soldier who feels betrayed by leaders.

A soldier who concludes that his sacrifices served no legitimate purpose.

All may experience similar symptoms.

But the psychological mechanisms involved are radically different.

The act itself cannot explain the difference.

Meaning can.

Conclusion

The greatest mistake in combat psychology was treating violence as the problem.

Violence is ancient.

Fear is ancient.

Coalitionary conflict is ancient.

What changes across societies and historical periods is morality.

Marshall and Grossman interpreted combat through the lens of civilization.

They mistook historically recent moral intuitions for universal features of human nature.

An evolutionary perspective suggests a different interpretation.

Human beings evolved in a world where hunting, defense, coalition loyalty, and competition over resources were ordinary features of life.

Our moral systems evolved in response to those realities.

Civilization changed those realities.

It changed morality.

And when modern moral frameworks collide with the realities of war, psychological injury can emerge.

The future of combat psychology lies not in asking why violence traumatizes people.

The better question is this:

Why does a particular experience violate a particular person’s moral expectations?

Until we answer that question, we will continue treating symptoms while misunderstanding causes.

References

Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.

Chambers, J. W. II. (2003). S. L. A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire: New Evidence Regarding Fire Ratios. Parameters, 33(4), 113–121.

Ferguson, C. J. (2015). Do Angry Birds Make for Angry Children? A Meta-Analysis of Video Game Influences on Children’s and Adolescents’ Aggression, Mental Health, Prosocial Behavior, and Academic Performance.

Grossman, D. (1995). On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.

Marshall, S. L. A. (1947). Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command.

Mitani, J. C., Watts, D. P., & Amsler, S. J. (2010). Lethal Intergroup Aggression Leads to Territorial Expansion in Wild Chimpanzees. Current Biology, 20(12), R507–R508.

Spiller, R. J. (1988). S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire. RUSI Journal, 133(4), 63–71.

Wilson, M. L., Boesch, C., Fruth, B., et al. (2014). Lethal Aggression in Pan Is Better Explained by Adaptive Strategies Than Human Impacts. Nature, 513, 414–417.

Wrangham, R. W. (1999). Evolution of Coalitionary Killing. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 110(S29), 1–30.

Stories do more than entertain.

They teach people what kind of person they should become.

For most of human history, stories were one of the primary mechanisms through which societies transmitted values from one generation to the next. Long before formal schools, standardized curricula, or mass media, stories taught children what was admirable, what was shameful, what behaviors were expected, and what sacrifices were necessary. They preserved traditions, transmitted cultural knowledge, and helped shape character.

If we compare many of the stories that shaped previous generations with those increasingly popular today, a striking difference emerges. Older stories were often about character formation. Newer stories are increasingly about self-expression.

The distinction may appear subtle, but it reflects a profound shift in how we think about morality, human nature, and the purpose of culture itself.

The Heroes We Once Admired

Consider some of the most beloved stories of the last century. Different genres, different audiences, and different creators, yet all of them teach remarkably similar lessons.

The Lord of the Rings

Frodo does not volunteer to carry the Ring because it will help him discover his authentic self. Sam does not follow Frodo into Mordor because doing so fulfills his personal aspirations. Aragorn does not become king by rejecting social expectations and embracing his true identity.

Instead, each character accepts burdens. Frodo sacrifices comfort, safety, and eventually his peace of mind. Sam remains loyal despite fear, exhaustion, and near-certain death. Aragorn gradually accepts responsibilities he initially hesitates to embrace. The story is saturated with duty, sacrifice, courage, loyalty, and self-mastery. Its heroes become worthy not because they express themselves, but because they accept obligations larger than themselves.

Rocky

The same lesson appears in a very different setting. Rocky is not a story about self-expression; it is a story about self-discipline.

Nobody remembers Rocky because he accepted himself exactly as he was. They remember him because he transformed himself. He trains relentlessly, suffers setbacks, and develops capabilities he did not previously possess. The lesson is straightforward: the person you are is not necessarily the person you should remain. Growth requires effort. Achievement requires sacrifice. Respect must be earned.

Star Wars

The original Star Wars trilogy tells a remarkably similar story. Luke Skywalker’s greatest challenge is not the Empire but himself.

Yoda’s lessons are not lessons in self-expression. They are lessons in discipline, patience, restraint, and self-control. The greatest threat Luke faces is his inability to govern his own fear, anger, and hatred. Victory requires self-mastery. The central conflict is internal as much as external. Luke succeeds because he becomes capable of governing himself.

The Lion King

Even Disney once told stories centered on responsibility rather than self-expression.

Many people remember The Lion King for “Hakuna Matata.” What they often forget is that the film ultimately rejects Hakuna Matata. Simba’s problem is not that he lacks authenticity. His problem is that he is avoiding responsibility.

The middle of the story celebrates a life free from obligations, burdens, and expectations. Then Rafiki and Mufasa remind him of something more important. Their message is not “be yourself.” Their message is “remember who you are.”

In other words, remember your responsibilities. Remember the burden you have been running from. Remember what is expected of you. The story ends not with self-discovery but with the acceptance of duty. That is why Simba becomes king.

The Common Pattern

These stories differ in setting, genre, audience, and style, yet they teach remarkably similar lessons. The hero is not someone who simply expresses himself. The hero is someone who masters himself.

Again and again, the virtues being celebrated are courage, discipline, loyalty, responsibility, perseverance, and sacrifice. The heroes become worthy through transformation rather than validation. Their journey is not primarily about discovering who they are. It is about becoming who they ought to be.

For most of human history, this was one of the central purposes of storytelling. Stories taught people how to become functioning adults. They taught what behaviors were admirable, what sacrifices were necessary, and how to place obligations above impulses. They were tools of character formation.

The New Moral Framework

Of course, not every modern story follows this pattern. Many contemporary stories continue to celebrate courage, sacrifice, loyalty, and responsibility. Nor did every older story emphasize duty. The point is not that one framework has disappeared and another has completely replaced it. Rather, the cultural center of gravity appears to have shifted.

Increasingly, modern stories ask a different question.

Rather than asking, “What kind of person should I become?” they ask, “Who am I really?”

This shift appears across a growing number of modern reinterpretations and retellings.

Notice how often contemporary stories revisit villains, outsiders, and secondary characters. Again and again, the direction is remarkably similar.

The villain becomes the victim.

The outsider becomes the hero.

Social expectations increasingly become obstacles to self-expression.

Authenticity replaces duty.

Self-discovery replaces self-mastery.

The pattern extends far beyond a handful of films. Modern storytelling increasingly revisits antagonists, rebels, antiheroes, and outsiders in order to reinterpret them sympathetically. The audience is invited to understand rather than judge, to contextualize rather than condemn. Again and again, the story shifts from asking whether a character’s actions were right or wrong to asking how that character became who they are.

Moral evaluation increasingly gives way to psychological explanation.

Consider the pattern. Maleficent is no longer simply a villain to be defeated. She is a wounded individual whose actions are understood through the lens of trauma. Cruella is no longer merely a selfish antagonist. She becomes a rebellious outsider struggling against an unjust system. Wicked asks audiences to reconsider the Wicked Witch not as evil, but as misunderstood.

Even stories built around traditional villains increasingly ask the same question: What if the real problem was not the villain? What if the real problem was society?

This is not necessarily bad. Understanding motives has value. Compassion has value. Perspective-taking has value.

But it is undeniably a different moral framework.

The question is no longer how to cultivate virtue.

The question is how to understand identity.

The lesson is no longer “Become better.”

The lesson increasingly becomes “Become yourself.”

Why Societies Tell Stories

At first glance, this might seem like a trivial change in entertainment.

It is not.

Stories have always been among the primary tools through which societies transmit values from one generation to the next. The heroes a culture admires reveal the traits it wishes to reproduce. The villains it condemns reveal the behaviors it wishes to discourage.

Stories are not merely reflections of culture. They are one of the mechanisms through which culture perpetuates itself.

Every society faces the same fundamental challenge. Children are born impulsive. Civilization requires self-control. Children are naturally self-interested. Civilization requires cooperation. Children seek immediate rewards. Civilization often requires delayed gratification.

The problem is universal.

Human beings are born with the raw materials necessary for civilization, but not with civilization itself.

Every society must therefore shape behavior.

Parents do it.

Teachers do it.

Religious traditions do it.

Peer groups do it.

Stories do it.

The heroes a culture celebrates reveal what that culture believes people should become.

That is why changes in storytelling matter.

They reveal changing assumptions about human nature and changing beliefs about what society needs from its members.

Duty, Sacrifice, and Civilization

The reason nearly every historical culture emphasized character formation is straightforward.

Civilization depends upon people accepting burdens.

Parents sacrifice for children. Soldiers risk themselves for their communities. Farmers delay gratification by storing food for the future rather than consuming it immediately. Citizens obey laws even when doing so is inconvenient. Leaders place long-term interests above short-term desires.

None of these behaviors emerge automatically.

Human beings are born with impulses. Civilizations are built by teaching people how to govern them.

This is why stories across cultures and centuries celebrated courage, discipline, loyalty, honor, responsibility, and sacrifice. These were not arbitrary virtues. They were solutions to recurring problems.

The stories of Sparta, Rome, medieval Christendom, frontier America, and countless other societies differed in content, yet they shared a common assumption: individuals were expected to subordinate some portion of their personal desires to obligations larger than themselves.

A society that cannot convince enough people to accept obligations eventually ceases to function.

For most of history, stories reinforced this reality. The hero was not the person who escaped responsibility. The hero was the person who accepted it.

Frodo accepts a burden he did not choose.

Rocky accepts suffering in pursuit of excellence.

Luke accepts the discipline necessary to master himself.

Simba accepts the responsibilities of adulthood.

The stories differ. The lesson remains remarkably consistent.

Maturity requires accepting burdens.

Every society eventually confronts the same reality: adulthood means accepting burdens. The burden of raising children. The burden of supporting a family. The burden of defending a community. The burden of leadership. The burden of self-restraint.

Childhood is defined by dependence. Maturity is defined by responsibility.

Many of the stories that shaped previous generations taught precisely this lesson.

The Fertility Question

This shift in values may help illuminate one of the defining demographic trends of the modern world.

Across much of the developed world, birth rates have fallen below replacement levels. Housing costs, urbanization, educational attainment, delayed marriage, contraception, economic uncertainty, and changing social norms all contribute to this trend.

Yet beneath these practical explanations lies a deeper cultural question.

How does a society persuade people to make sacrifices for future generations?

Children are among the greatest sacrifices most people will ever undertake. They consume time, money, freedom, sleep, career opportunities, and personal autonomy.

Historically, cultures justified these sacrifices through duty, family obligation, religious commitments, and social expectations. Parenthood was not merely a lifestyle choice. It was understood as a meaningful responsibility.

Within a framework centered on self-expression, however, the calculus changes.

The question increasingly becomes: Does this choice help me become who I want to be?

Marriage becomes optional.

Children become optional.

Service becomes optional.

Every obligation becomes subject to personal preference.

The deepest difference between duty-based moral systems and self-expression-based moral systems may be their attitude toward unchosen obligations.

The former assumes that many of life’s most important responsibilities arrive uninvited. The latter increasingly assumes that obligations must justify themselves to the individual.

These are not identical moral frameworks, and they may produce very different societies.

This does not mean stories caused declining fertility. The relationship is far more complex than that.

But stories both reflect and reinforce cultural values. If a society increasingly celebrates personal fulfillment while rarely celebrating duty, sacrifice, parenthood, or generational continuity, it would be surprising if that had no effect whatsoever.

Who Tells the Stories?

An even deeper question concerns who creates the stories themselves.

For most of history, storytellers were closely connected to the communities they served. Parents told stories. Grandparents told stories. Religious leaders told stories. Teachers told stories.

The people transmitting values had a direct stake in the future. Their children would inherit the consequences of what was taught.

Stories therefore served a socialization function. They were not merely entertainment. They were tools for preparing the next generation.

Today storytelling has been largely industrialized.

Stories are increasingly created by entertainment corporations, creative professionals, streaming platforms, and social media ecosystems. The incentives are different.

The dominant question is no longer necessarily, “What kind of adults should these children become?”

Instead, the question may be:

What will attract attention?

What will maximize engagement?

What will generate profit?

What will resonate with the worldview of the people creating it?

This observation is not an accusation. It is simply an acknowledgment that incentives matter.

A parent and a streaming platform are optimizing for different outcomes. A parent may care most about the long-term flourishing of a child. A corporation may care most about audience size.

Neither objective is inherently evil.

But they are not the same objective.

For most of history, one of the primary mechanisms of moral transmission was controlled by people with a direct stake in the future.

Today that mechanism is increasingly shaped by institutions whose incentives are concentrated in the present.

This does not mean the people creating these stories are malicious. It does mean that they often operate under different incentives and hold different priorities than the families consuming their work.

For most of history, the people responsible for transmitting values were also responsible for living with the consequences of those values. Today those roles are increasingly separated.

That change alone deserves careful consideration.

Why the Stories Changed

If stories are changing, it is worth asking why.

It is tempting to assume that the change occurred because storytellers simply abandoned older values. The reality is probably more complicated.

Stories reflect the environment in which they are created.

For most of human history, people lived much closer to the realities of hunger, violence, disease, child mortality, and intergroup competition. Failure to fulfill one’s obligations often carried immediate consequences not only for individuals, but for families and entire communities.

In such an environment, duty, sacrifice, courage, loyalty, and self-discipline were not merely moral preferences. They were practical necessities. Stories reflected that reality. Heroes accepted burdens because burdens were unavoidable. They sacrificed because sacrifice was often required for survival.

Modern prosperity has changed much of this.

For the first time in human history, large numbers of people can live relatively comfortable lives while remaining insulated from many of the pressures that shaped previous generations. Food arrives from distant supply chains. Security is provided by institutions. Specialized occupations allow people to spend entire careers focused on narrow domains of expertise.

As direct exposure to many of civilization’s foundational problems declines, the moral questions that seem most important also begin to change.

Obligation increasingly appears as constraint.

Tradition increasingly appears as limitation.

Authority increasingly appears as restriction.

At the same time, individual fulfillment, self-expression, and personal identity become more central concerns.

The stories change accordingly.

Yet changing values are only part of the story.

Equally important is the question of who is transmitting those values.

For most of human history, the vertical vector of influence dominated childhood development. Parents, grandparents, extended family members, and local communities spent more time shaping the values of children than any other source of influence. The people transmitting values were usually the same people who would live with the consequences of those values.

Today the balance has shifted.

Children spend much of their waking lives under the influence of schools, peer groups, entertainment media, social media platforms, and digital content creators. The oblique and horizontal vectors increasingly compete with, and often outweigh, the vertical vector.

The result is historically unprecedented.

Never before have so many children received such a large portion of their moral education from people their parents have never met, who live thousands of miles away, and who bear no responsibility for the long-term consequences of the values they transmit.

This does not mean those influences are necessarily harmful. It does mean they are different.

The stories shaping children’s moral imagination are increasingly produced by people with different incentives, different experiences, and often different priorities than the families consuming them.

The question is no longer whether values are being transmitted. The question is which values are being transmitted, and whether they remain sufficient for the long-term maintenance of the civilization that produced them.

The Great Experiment

For thousands of years, stories taught people that freedom and responsibility were inseparable. They taught that maturity required sacrifice and that meaning was often found in obligations willingly accepted rather than pleasures freely pursued.

Increasingly, our stories teach something different. They emphasize authenticity, self-expression, and self-discovery. These values are not inherently wrong, nor are they without merit. The question is whether they are sufficient.

Perhaps they are.

Perhaps a civilization can sustain itself while teaching each generation to prioritize self-expression over duty, preference over obligation, and personal fulfillment over sacrifice.

Or perhaps the virtues that built civilizations are more difficult to replace than many assume.

We do not yet know the answer.

What we do know is that stories matter.

The stories a society tells reveal what it admires. The stories it repeats reveal what it hopes to reproduce.

For most of human history, parents, grandparents, teachers, religious leaders, and local communities played the central role in transmitting those stories. Today, many have surrendered that responsibility to institutions, corporations, and cultural producers who often possess different priorities and different values.

If the stories shaping our children no longer teach the virtues we believe are necessary for adulthood, then the responsibility returns to us.

Parents must tell stories.

Grandparents must tell stories.

Teachers, coaches, mentors, and community leaders must tell stories.

Not merely stories about self-expression, but stories about courage, duty, loyalty, sacrifice, responsibility, and service.

Every civilization is ultimately only one generation away from forgetting what made it possible.

The question is not what stories Hollywood chooses to tell.

The question is what stories we choose to pass on.

The modern military has become extraordinarily sophisticated at teaching soldiers how to fight.

We are far less sophisticated at teaching them how to live with what fighting does to the human mind afterward.

For decades, the dominant psychological assumption has been that emotional disclosure, vulnerability, and repeated discussion of traumatic experiences are inherently therapeutic. Yet growing evidence suggests the relationship between trauma, memory, identity, and emotional processing may be far more complicated than modern trauma culture often assumes.

The problem may not simply be that warriors remember war.

The problem may be how they are taught to remember it.

Following the Vietnam War, psychiatrists such as Chaim F. Shatan, who helped organize veteran ‘rap groups,’ and Robert Jay Lifton, whose work focused on the psychological effects of war and atrocity, began working closely with returning veterans who felt profoundly alienated from American society (Lifton, 1973; Shatan, 1973). Many veterans believed civilians could neither understand nor morally comprehend their wartime experiences.

In response, Shatan and others helped organize informal group discussions where combat veterans openly discussed war experiences among peers. The underlying assumption was understandable: silence, suppression, and isolation appeared psychologically destructive, while communal discussion appeared therapeutic.

These ideas became enormously influential in shaping modern trauma culture.

But these assumptions did not emerge in isolation. They developed out of the broader evolution of psychiatry and psychology during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the rise of psychoanalytic thinking and the growing belief that hidden or suppressed emotions were central drivers of psychological suffering.

Many ideas that entered modern trauma culture originated in early psychological theories that were once highly influential but later became heavily revised, contested, or partially abandoned. Yet even after the original theories weakened scientifically, many of their assumptions and patterns of language continued propagating through psychology, institutions, media, and popular culture.

This pattern matters because modern assumptions about trauma inherited far more from early psychoanalytic thinking than most people realize.

Sigmund Freud and related early theorists increasingly framed psychological suffering as something caused not simply by external events, but by emotionally charged experiences that had been repressed, dissociated, or improperly processed within the unconscious mind (Freud, 1915/1957). Psychological health therefore became increasingly associated with bringing hidden emotions into conscious awareness through discussion, interpretation, and emotional disclosure.

Related figures such as Pierre Janet argued that traumatic experiences could become psychologically split off or dissociated from conscious integration, producing lasting symptoms unless properly processed and reintegrated (Janet, 1889/1973).

These ideas emerged during a period when psychiatry was attempting to move away from older religious and moral explanations for human suffering toward medical and psychological models. The hidden unconscious mind became one of the dominant explanatory frameworks of twentieth-century psychology.

Within that intellectual framework, emotional suppression increasingly came to be viewed as psychologically dangerous, while emotional expression increasingly came to be viewed as psychologically healthy.

Over time, these assumptions spread far beyond psychoanalysis itself. Even schools of psychology that rejected many of Freud’s specific theories often retained parts of the broader emotional-processing model: that “unprocessed” emotions remained psychologically active, that suppressed experiences continued exerting harmful influence, and that verbal expression and emotional disclosure were inherently therapeutic.

These assumptions became deeply embedded in Western therapeutic culture long before they were rigorously tested scientifically.

The historical context matters because many foundational concepts within early psychology and psychiatry emerged before modern standards of experimental validation, statistical replication, neuroscience, and evidence-based clinical testing existed. Freud’s theories of repression and the unconscious mind, for example, became enormously influential culturally despite longstanding criticism that many psychoanalytic concepts were difficult or impossible to empirically falsify (Crews, 1995; Popper, 1963).

Over time, portions of these early frameworks became so deeply embedded within Western culture that their underlying assumptions often came to feel self-evidently true. The idea that suppressed emotions are inherently pathogenic, that emotional expression is inherently therapeutic, or that psychological healing primarily requires verbal disclosure gradually spread far beyond psychoanalysis itself and became integrated into broader therapeutic culture, education, media, and institutional practice.

By the late twentieth century, many of these assumptions were no longer perceived as historically contingent theories emerging from a specific intellectual tradition. They were often treated instead as settled psychological reality.

The later scientific literature on trauma and debriefing complicated that assumption considerably.

World War I accelerated this process dramatically. Industrial warfare produced mass numbers of psychologically damaged soldiers suffering from what became known as “shell shock.” Military and medical authorities struggled to explain why physically uninjured soldiers could become emotionally and cognitively incapacitated after prolonged combat exposure (Jones & Wessely, 2005).

Interpretations varied widely. Some military leaders viewed shell shock as cowardice, weak character, or moral failure. Others increasingly interpreted it through emerging psychological frameworks emphasizing trauma, emotional overload, and nervous-system exhaustion (Jones & Wessely, 2005).

By World War II and afterward, psychiatry increasingly moved toward models emphasizing emotional processing, psychological ventilation, and early intervention after traumatic exposure. After Vietnam, these assumptions deepened further as psychiatrists such as Shatan and Lifton worked with veterans who felt alienated, isolated, and morally disconnected from American society.

Within this broader intellectual climate, the assumptions behind post-trauma discussion models appeared self-evident: if suppression harms, then expression heals; if silence isolates, then talking reconnects.

This framework strongly influenced the rise of Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD), developed by Jeffrey T. Mitchell during the 1980s (Mitchell, 1983). CISD was widely adopted across military, law enforcement, firefighting, EMS, and emergency response communities because its logic felt humane, intuitive, and psychologically sophisticated.

Popular military psychology works later reinforced similar themes. In On Killing, Dave Grossman argued that modern soldiers often lacked the communal decompression process available to earlier warriors returning from war (Grossman, 1995). Grossman contrasted modern rapid redeployment and isolation with World War II soldiers returning home slowly aboard ships surrounded by fellow veterans who shared and understood their experiences.

Grossman (1995) wrote:

“During World War II, the main way back home was aboard ships, a trip that could take weeks. This time was spent with others who had had similar experiences and could understand the problems faced by others.”

He further argued:

“This lack of time to debrief and decompress can cause a feeling of isolation that only worsens the effects of PTSD.”

There is obvious truth in some of these observations. Isolation can worsen suffering. Shared understanding matters. Human beings have probably always required some form of post bellum reintegration after prolonged exposure to organized violence.

The importance of communal reintegration may help explain why some studies have found elevated psychological difficulties among members of the National Guard and Reserve following combat deployments (Milliken et al., 2007; Thomas et al., 2010). Unlike many active-duty units, reserve-component soldiers often disperse rapidly back into civilian life after deployment. The shared social structure that existed during combat dissolves almost immediately.

A soldier who spent months or years living, fighting, and surviving alongside the same men may suddenly return home to geographic isolation, civilian social environments incapable of understanding combat experience, and the abrupt loss of daily contact with the very people who shared the moral and emotional burden of war.

This stands in sharp contrast to the communal reintegration processes that existed in many historical warrior cultures and even, to some extent, earlier military systems. World War II soldiers often returned home slowly aboard ships over periods of weeks surrounded by fellow veterans. Many traditional warrior societies incorporated communal rituals, storytelling traditions, mourning ceremonies, religious rites, and public recognition to reintegrate warriors after combat.

Modern reserve-component soldiers often experience the opposite: rapid demobilization, social fragmentation, geographic dispersion, and immediate reintegration into civilian roles largely disconnected from the realities of war.

None of this proves that discussion itself is inherently therapeutic. But it does suggest that social isolation after war may carry genuine psychological costs, particularly when combined with the collapse of warrior identity, shared purpose, and communal understanding.

The problem, however, is that modern trauma culture often moved from this valid insight to a much broader and less supported assumption: that repeated emotional retelling of traumatic events is itself inherently curative.

Over time, serious problems emerged with that assumption.

Research on Critical Incident Stress Debriefing gradually found that compulsory emotional retelling after trauma often failed to reduce PTSD and, in some cases, appeared associated with worse outcomes (Bisson et al., 1997; McNally et al., 2003; Rose et al., 2002).

This did not mean that social support lacked value. Nor did it mean that all post-trauma discussion was harmful.

But it did undermine one of the deeper assumptions inherited from early twentieth-century psychological culture: that emotional disclosure itself is inherently curative.

Part of the problem may lie in the nature of memory itself.

Modern neuroscience increasingly understands memory as reconstructive rather than reproductive. Human beings do not retrieve memories like files from storage. Memories are partially rebuilt each time they are recalled, and emotional framing, repetition, social reinforcement, and narrative interpretation all influence how memories are reconsolidated and integrated into identity (Loftus, 1997; Nader & Hardt, 2009).

An uncomfortable tension therefore emerged within modern trauma theory.

The same processes that can reduce shame and isolation may also unintentionally strengthen traumatic narratives if repeated discussion progressively organizes memory around helplessness, betrayal, moral contamination, or permanent psychological damage.

In other words, traumatic memories are not merely discussed.

They are interpreted.

And those interpretations may matter profoundly.

That may be especially true for moral injury, where the central issue is often not fear alone, but the meaning attached to actions, obligations, guilt, responsibility, and identity after war.

The same combat experience can be framed through radically different post bellum narratives. A veteran may come to understand his actions primarily through frameworks of duty, tragic necessity, sacrifice, restraint, and service. Alternatively, those same experiences may become organized around shame, helplessness, betrayal, moral contamination, or permanent psychological damage.

Because memory is reconstructive rather than fixed, these moral interpretations may become increasingly integrated into identity over time (Loftus, 1997; Nader & Hardt, 2009).

This may help explain why experienced combat veterans often speak differently among themselves than modern therapeutic culture sometimes expects. Veteran discussions frequently focus less on emotional catharsis and more on mission, leadership, competence, responsibility, loyalty, necessity, and consequences. The purpose is often not emotional release alone, but moral orientation.

The distinction between emotional honesty and emotional destabilization may also help explain why some modern therapeutic language surrounding ‘vulnerability’ can feel psychologically mismatched with warrior culture. Combat organizations depend heavily upon trust, emotional connection, and mutual reliance, but they also depend upon competence, emotional regulation, and confidence that individuals can continue functioning effectively under extreme stress.

Within warrior environments, emotional openness is therefore often interpreted through the lens of reliability and functional capability rather than emotional disclosure alone. Experienced combat veterans may openly discuss fear, grief, guilt, or moral burden within trusted groups while still maintaining identities organized around competence, responsibility, and duty.

Such an approach differs substantially from cultural models that treat emotional exposure itself as inherently therapeutic or morally virtuous. The issue is not whether soldiers should be emotionally honest. The issue is whether emotional processing strengthens or weakens the warrior’s sense of agency, identity, cohesion, and capacity to continue functioning meaningfully within the group.

Too much emotional suppression may produce isolation, alienation, and moral disconnection. But emotional exposure framed in ways that undermine competence, reliability, or warrior identity may also become psychologically destabilizing.

The challenge is therefore not choosing between stoicism and vulnerability as abstract ideals. The challenge is developing warrior cultures capable of integrating honest moral discussion with continued strength, agency, and social trust.

Understanding this problem requires moving beyond purely clinical models of trauma and examining the broader moral and cultural systems through which societies prepare warriors for war and reintegrate them afterward.

If moral injury is shaped partly by how war is interpreted and integrated into identity, then mitigation cannot simply begin after psychological damage has already occurred. Nor can it rely entirely upon clinical intervention after the fact. Increasingly, research on moral injury suggests that the condition is deeply connected to meaning, identity, betrayal, guilt, shame, and moral interpretation rather than fear-based trauma alone (Frankfurt & Frazier, 2016; Litz et al., 2009; Shay, 1994).

Human beings have probably always required systems that morally orient warriors before, during, and after war. Historically, warrior cultures often embedded violence within broader moral frameworks centered on duty, loyalty, communal protection, religious obligation, and honorable service. These systems did not eliminate grief, guilt, or tragedy, but they frequently provided warriors with a socially intelligible framework capable of placing violence within a larger moral structure.

Modern militaries devote enormous resources to preparing soldiers tactically for combat while often providing comparatively little systematic preparation for the moral realities prolonged warfare inevitably produces. This omission matters because war regularly places human beings inside situations involving conflicting obligations, civilian risk, uncertainty, restraint, revenge impulses, survival pressures, and tragic tradeoffs in which no morally pure outcome exists.

A mature warrior culture should address this honestly before combat rather than pretending morally painful situations can always be avoided through training, precision, or technological superiority alone.

Leaders are responsible not only for preparing soldiers tactically for combat, but also for preparing them morally for the tragic realities war inevitably produces. Research consistently shows that ethical leadership, unit cohesion, trust, and organizational legitimacy strongly influence both psychological resilience and moral injury outcomes among combat veterans (Molendijk, 2018; Williamson et al., 2021). Jonathan Shay (1994), drawing heavily on Homeric literature and Vietnam veterans, argued that moral injury often emerges not simply from violence itself, but from betrayal of “what’s right” by legitimate authority in high-stakes situations.

Preparation before combat therefore should not resemble simplistic propaganda about “good guys” and “bad guys,” nor should it romanticize violence or deny the existence of atrocity, failure, or legitimate guilt. Instead, it should involve honest moral discussion grounded in the realities of warfare itself.

Commanders and senior leaders should openly discuss morally difficult combat situations before deployment, including civilian casualties, failed identifications, conflicting duties, detention operations, revenge impulses, restraint, and the burden of command decisions. Scenario-based discussions and historical vignettes may be particularly valuable because they allow soldiers to think through morally difficult situations before experiencing them personally. The purpose is not to eliminate distress. The purpose is to reduce moral shock and disorientation when tragedy inevitably collides with reality.

A soldier who already understands that war may involve tragic choices between competing obligations may be less likely to interpret those experiences afterward as evidence that he has become uniquely evil, psychologically broken, or morally irredeemable.

But preparation before combat is only part of the problem.

There must also be a post bellum process capable of helping warriors reintegrate morally after prolonged exposure to organized violence.

Importantly, this does not necessarily mean endless emotional excavation or mandatory therapeutic disclosure sessions. Research surrounding Critical Incident Stress Debriefing and related early psychological interventions found that compulsory emotional retelling shortly after trauma often failed to reduce PTSD and, in some cases, appeared associated with worse outcomes (Bisson et al., 1997; McNally et al., 2003; Rose et al., 2002).

None of this means social support lacks value. Social isolation following combat clearly appears associated with elevated psychological distress, particularly among National Guard and Reserve soldiers who often disperse rapidly back into civilian life after deployment (Milliken et al., 2007; Thomas et al., 2010). Soldiers who spent months or years living, fighting, and surviving alongside the same men may suddenly lose daily contact with the very people who shared the moral and emotional burden of war.

The issue, however, may not simply be whether veterans discuss combat after returning home.

The deeper issue may be how war is framed when they do.

The same combat experience can ultimately be integrated into identity through very different narratives. A veteran may come to understand his actions primarily through frameworks of duty, tragic necessity, sacrifice, restraint, and service. Alternatively, those same experiences may become organized around shame, helplessness, betrayal, moral contamination, or permanent psychological damage.

Those interpretations matter because repeated recall does not simply preserve memory. It reshapes it.

Historically, many warrior societies developed communal mechanisms that helped accomplish reintegration through storytelling, ritual, public honor, mourning, religious interpretation, continued service, and incorporation into a stable warrior identity larger than the individual himself. Anthropologists and historians have repeatedly observed that warfare in traditional societies was often embedded within broader communal and moral systems that structured both participation in violence and reintegration afterward (Gray, 1959; Keegan, 1993).

Modern societies often do the opposite. Many veterans experience abrupt fragmentation after war through loss of mission, tribe, status, structure, and communal identity. This fragmentation may contribute substantially to the moral disorientation many veterans experience after prolonged combat exposure.

Modern societies increasingly outsource violence to a very small warrior class while simultaneously lacking a widely shared moral framework capable of helping either civilians or veterans understand prolonged participation in organized violence.

The problem may therefore not simply be trauma exposure itself.

The deeper problem may be moral and social dislocation.

Human beings likely evolved to psychologically metabolize violence within coherent tribal, social, and moral systems rather than as isolated individuals detached from communal meaning and shared identity.

The answer to moral injury is therefore probably neither silence nor endless emotional excavation.

It may instead require the reconstruction of coherent warrior cultures capable of morally orienting men before, during, and after war: cultures that acknowledge tragedy without surrendering to nihilism, recognize guilt without collapsing into permanent shame, preserve restraint without denying the necessity of violence, and allow warriors to return from war not as morally contaminated outsiders, but as men who carried part of the burden of protecting their society and still possess a meaningful place within it.

References

Bisson, J. I., Jenkins, P. L., Alexander, J., & Bannister, C. (1997). Randomised controlled trial of psychological debriefing for victims of acute burn trauma. British Journal of Psychiatry, 171(1), 78–81. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.171.1.78

Crews, F. (1995). The memory wars: Freud’s legacy in dispute. New York Review Books.

Frankfurt, S., & Frazier, P. (2016). A review of research on moral injury in combat veterans. Military Psychology, 28(5), 318–330. https://doi.org/10.1037/mil0000132

Freud, S. (1957). Repression. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 141–158). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1915)

Gray, J. G. (1959). The warriors: Reflections on men in battle. Harper & Row.

Grossman, D. (1995). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. Little, Brown and Company.

Janet, P. (1973). L’automatisme psychologique. Arno Press. (Original work published 1889)

Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2005). Shell shock to PTSD: Military psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War. Psychology Press.

Keegan, J. (1993). A history of warfare. Alfred A. Knopf.

Lifton, R. J. (1973). Home from the war: Vietnam veterans—Neither victims nor executioners. Simon & Schuster.

Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clinical Psychology Review, 29(8), 695–706. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003

Loftus, E. F. (1997). Creating false memories. Scientific American, 277(3), 70–75.

McNally, R. J., Bryant, R. A., & Ehlers, A. (2003). Does early psychological intervention promote recovery from posttraumatic stress? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4(2), 45–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/1529-1006.01421

Milliken, C. S., Auchterlonie, J. L., & Hoge, C. W. (2007). Longitudinal assessment of mental health problems among active and reserve component soldiers returning from the Iraq War. JAMA, 298(18), 2141–2148. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.298.18.2141

Mitchell, J. T. (1983). When disaster strikes…The critical incident stress debriefing process. Journal of Emergency Medical Services, 8(1), 36–39.

Molendijk, T. (2018). Toward an interdisciplinary conceptualization of moral injury: From unequivocal guilt and anger to moral conflict and disorientation. New Ideas in Psychology, 51, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2018.04.006

Nader, K., & Hardt, O. (2009). A single standard for memory: The case for reconsolidation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(3), 224–234. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2590

Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. Routledge.

Rose, S., Bisson, J., Churchill, R., & Wessely, S. (2002). Psychological debriefing for preventing post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD000560

Shatan, C. F. (1973). The grief of soldiers: Vietnam combat veterans’ self-help movement. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 43(4), 640–653. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.1973.tb00823.x

Shay, J. (1994). Achilles in Vietnam: Combat trauma and the undoing of character. Scribner.

Thomas, J. L., Wilk, J. E., Riviere, L. A., McGurk, D., Castro, C. A., & Hoge, C. W. (2010). Prevalence of mental health problems and functional impairment among active component and National Guard soldiers 3 and 12 months following combat in Iraq. Archives of General Psychiatry, 67(6), 614–623. https://doi.org/10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2010.54

Williamson, V., Murphy, D., Stevelink, S. A. M., Allen, S., & Greenberg, N. (2021). The impact of trauma exposure and moral injury on UK military veterans: A qualitative study. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), Article 1869387. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.1869387

When I was the Commandant of the United States Army Combatives School, we used to sell t-shirts that said:

“We both know why you don’t like Combatives.”

The phrase spread through the Army because soldiers immediately understood what it meant. Not that Combatives was inconvenient. Not that it was ineffective. Not that it required resources or scheduling effort. It meant that fighting exposes people.

Combatives strips away rank, excuses, verbal confidence, and carefully managed self-image. It forces soldiers to confront a brutally simple question in front of their peers: can you physically dominate another determined human being in a violent encounter, or will you be dominated by them?

Many people are uncomfortable discovering the answer.

Over time, the socially acceptable way to avoid that discomfort became the language of “safety.”

“Combatives is too dangerous.”

At first glance, that sounds responsible. Military leaders absolutely should care about injuries and readiness. Injured soldiers cannot train, deploy, or fight. But if safety is truly the concern, then the Army should apply the same evidence-based standard to all physical training activities rather than selectively applying it to the one directly connected to interpersonal violence.

That is where the argument against Combatives begins to collapse.

The modern Army already accepts substantial orthopedic injury risk throughout military culture. Running and Road marching produces injuries. Airborne operations produce injuries. Obstacle courses produce injuries. Weightlifting produces injuries. Recreational athletics produce injuries. The Army accepts those risks because leaders believe the benefits outweigh the costs. The real issue, therefore, is not whether the Army accepts injury risk. It clearly does. The real issue is why Combatives is so often treated as uniquely unacceptable despite data showing injury profiles comparable to or lower than many culturally accepted activities.

The deployment medical literature from Iraq and Afghanistan is especially revealing. Studies examining medical evacuations during Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom found that approximately 75–83% of evacuations were due to disease and non-battle injuries rather than direct combat wounds (Cohen et al., 2011; Knapik et al., 2013). This surprises many people because public imagination associates wartime medical evacuation primarily with gunshot wounds and explosions. The reality was far different. Modern deployments generated enormous numbers of orthopedic injuries, musculoskeletal disorders, sports injuries, overuse injuries, and training-related injuries severe enough to remove soldiers from theater entirely.

Among these non-battle injuries, sports and physical training consistently ranked among the leading mechanisms associated with evacuation from theater. Importantly, the literature tracked “physical training” and “basketball” separately. Physical training referred to organized conditioning activities such as running, calisthenics, and unit PT. Basketball was categorized independently. And among sports-related evacuation injuries, basketball accounted for approximately 24%, making it the single largest identified sports-related mechanism associated with evacuation from theater. All regular organized physical training accounted for only approximately 19%, weightlifting approximately 17%, and football approximately 16% (Knapik et al., 2013).

These were not minor injuries treated at sick call. These were injuries serious enough to require transportation through the evacuation system, consume surgical resources, require rehabilitation, and reduce operational manpower. The most common injuries included sprains, fractures, dislocations, and major knee injuries. The knee alone accounted for roughly 26% of evacuated injuries.

Yet despite this, nobody seriously proposed removing basketball from military culture.

Why?

Because everyone intuitively understood that the Army accepts injury risk from activities believed to contribute to morale, cohesion, fitness, aggression management, and competitive spirit. Basketball’s benefits were perceived to outweigh its costs, so the injury burden was culturally accepted.

Combatives, however, is judged differently.

The numbers become even more surprising when examined carefully. If approximately 75–83% of medical evacuations were non-battle injuries, and sports and physical training represented a substantial portion of those injuries, and basketball alone accounted for approximately 24% of sports-related evacuations, then basketball-related evacuations represented a surprisingly large burden within the wartime medical system.

Using conservative assumptions illustrates the point clearly. If approximately 80% of evacuations were non-battle injuries, and sports and physical training represented roughly 20% of those non-battle injuries, and basketball accounted for 24% of sports-related evacuations, then the calculation becomes:

0.80 \times 0.20 \times 0.24 = 0.0384

Under this conservative model, basketball would account for approximately 3.8% of all medical evacuations from theater.

That is an extraordinary burden for a recreational activity inside combat zones.

Now compare this to gunshot wounds. Combat casualty literature from Iraq and Afghanistan consistently found that explosive injuries dominated combat trauma, while gunshot wounds represented only one subset of combat injuries. Typical combat injury distributions showed blast injuries accounting for approximately 70–80% of combat trauma, while gunshot wounds accounted for approximately 15–25% (Belmont et al., 2010; Cross et al., 2011). If combat injuries represented approximately 20% of total evacuations, and gunshot wounds represented approximately 20% of combat injuries, then gunshot wound evacuations estimate to:

0.20 \times 0.20 = 0.04

or roughly 4% of all evacuations.

This comparison must be understood carefully. It does not mean basketball was “more dangerous than combat.” Combat trauma included blasts, fragmentation wounds, burns, crush injuries, multiple fatal injury categories, and devastating polytrauma. But it does strongly suggest something many people will find deeply uncomfortable: basketball-related medical evacuations may have approached the same general order of magnitude as gunshot wound evacuations during portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The idea that grappling-based Combatives is uniquely dangerous is also not supported by the sports medicine literature. Studies examining Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, wrestling, and other grappling arts consistently show injury profiles comparable to, and often lower than, many conventional athletic activities. A recent systematic review examining Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu injury epidemiology found injury rates around 5.5 injuries per 1,000 training hours, with most injuries involving orthopedic problems such as knee injuries, shoulder injuries, elbow injuries, neck strains, and joint sprains (Freitas et al., 2025). Most importantly, the overwhelming majority of injuries were musculoskeletal rather than catastrophic neurological trauma.

The mechanism of injury also differs substantially between grappling and sports such as basketball. Basketball injuries are frequently accidental, explosive, and non-consensual in timing. They result from awkward landings, sudden directional changes, collisions, falls, and non-contact ACL ruptures. Nobody taps out before tearing an ACL.

Grappling-based training, by contrast, possesses several built-in safety mechanisms. Properly supervised grappling environments rely on graduated resistance, positional control, instructor supervision, controlled intensity, and tap-based stopping mechanisms that allow participants to stop exchanges before catastrophic injury occurs. This is one reason why concussion exposure in grappling sports is dramatically lower than in striking sports and often lower than in many contact team sports.

The argument that Combatives is “too dangerous” therefore often functions less as a scientific argument and more as a cultural one.

Combatives uniquely exposes fear, competitiveness, physical inadequacy, aggression, dominance hierarchies, and emotional discomfort under pressure.

And because of that, discussions surrounding Combatives often become emotionally distorted in ways not consistently applied to other military activities. The Army does not eliminate every activity that produces injuries. Road marching, airborne operations, obstacle courses, field exercises, and unit athletics all generate orthopedic injury risk. In each case, the institution debates, mitigates, modifies, and manages that risk because the activity is believed to contribute to readiness. Combatives should be evaluated by the same standard: not whether injury is possible, but whether the readiness value justifies the risk and whether the program is designed intelligently enough to control it.

The real debate, therefore, is not about safety.

It is about whether the institution values controlled training in interpersonal violence enough to tolerate a level of risk it already routinely accepts elsewhere.

Combatives does not merely teach techniques. Routine Combatives training is one of the few leadership tools available that can systematically inculcate a unit with a genuine warrior ethos rather than a performative one.

It develops confidence under pressure, aggression management, emotional control during violence, resilience during chaotic physical struggle, and comfort with physical dominance contests. These are not abstract psychological traits. They are trainable behaviors directly connected to battlefield performance.

More importantly, Combatives creates an environment where competence and courage become difficult to fake. A soldier can cosplay warrior culture through uniforms, tough talk, tattoos, motivational language, and carefully managed professional identity. But live grappling exposes reality very quickly. It reveals who remains calm under pressure, who can impose their will physically, who quits under stress, who can continue functioning while exhausted, uncomfortable, embarrassed, or dominated, and who possesses the confidence to engage another human being aggressively at close range.

This matters because the Soldier’s Creed does not say:
“I stand ready to discuss conflict in a collaborative professional environment.”

It says:
“I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.”

That statement implies more than technical proficiency with weapons systems. It implies psychological comfort with controlled violence, physical dominance, and aggression under life and death pressure.

Combatives training gives leaders a practical mechanism for developing and evaluating those attributes inside a controlled training environment. It creates a culture where warrior ethos becomes tied to demonstrated behavior rather than performance theater.

A military culture increasingly uncomfortable with controlled interpersonal aggression will eventually struggle to produce soldiers psychologically prepared for violent confrontation.

That baseline matters because close combat is not a rare cinematic contingency that occurs only after weapons fail or ammunition runs dry. Modern Combatives engagements occur primarily because soldiers fight in confined spaces where human bodies physically collide. Buildings, trenches, vehicles, alleyways, stairwells, detainee operations, and crowded urban terrain compress violence into grappling range almost immediately.

When soldiers enter an 8-by-10-foot room occupied by a determined enemy, it isn’t a marksmanship contest. It’s a fight. The question is not simply who can shoot more accurately. It is who can even bring their weapons to bear inside a chaotic, compressed, rapidly entangling human collision.

That fight will involve creating opportunities to shoot, weapon retention, controlling the enemy’s ability to access or employ their weapons, striking, grappling, positional dominance, and the ability to continue functioning aggressively while another human being is physically resisting often within arm’s length.

The post-deployment research from Iraq and Afghanistan strongly reinforces this reality. In one of the most important studies conducted on the subject, Peter Jensen of the Center for Enhanced Performance at West Point analyzed 30 post-combat surveys administered to U.S. Army soldiers returning from deployments between 2004 and 2008. Out of 1,226 soldiers surveyed, 216, approximately 19%, reported using hand-to-hand combat skills during at least one combat encounter (Jensen, 2014).

That finding should not be surprising. Modern militaries do not send soldiers into buildings, compounds, tunnels, vehicles, and densely populated urban terrain because they intend to kill everyone they encounter. If that were the objective, cruise missiles and air strikes would often suffice. Soldiers are sent because modern warfare, even in a peer to peer engagement, requires discrimination, restraint, physical control of human beings, and the ability to dominate complex environments occupied by civilians, detainees, noncombatants, and actively hostile enemies simultaneously.

And once human beings are compressed together inside confined spaces, violence rapidly becomes physical. Weapons become entangled with bodies. Access to angles and lines of fire becomes contested. Soldiers lay hands on people because controlling human beings physically is an unavoidable component of modern close combat.

This is why Combatives engagements occur so frequently in urban operations, detainee handling, vehicle extractions, room clearing, crowd control situations, and other confined-space encounters. The forcing factor is not usually the absence of weapons. The forcing factor is proximity.

That number alone, 19% of Infantry Soldiers reporting using hand-to-hand combat skills, should permanently end the myth that Combatives is some exotic “last resort” skill irrelevant to modern warfare. If anything, several major trends suggest the importance of close combat skills is likely increasing rather than disappearing.

The world is becoming increasingly urbanized, concentrating conflict into dense cities, apartment complexes, industrial zones, subterranean infrastructure, and crowded human terrain where violence naturally compresses into confined spaces. At the same time, the proliferation of drones, persistent surveillance, precision fires, and networked battlefield sensors is making movement in open terrain increasingly dangerous. Modern soldiers spend more time concealed, moving through structures, using cover, operating in restricted spaces, and attempting to avoid detection from above. Those conditions repeatedly force human beings into sudden, chaotic, close-range encounters where physical control, weapon retention, grappling, and the ability to dominate another person at arm’s length become critically important.

In many ways, modern technology is not eliminating close combat. It is channeling it into tighter and more physically entangled environments.

The findings become even more significant when the type of fighting employed is examined. Among the soldiers reporting close combat engagements, grappling techniques accounted for approximately 72.6% of reported techniques used. Weapons-based strikes such as muzzle strikes accounted for approximately 21.9%, while striking alone, punching and kicking, represented only about 5.5% of reported techniques (Jensen, 2014).

In other words, the battlefield overwhelmingly pushed soldiers toward grappling problems. There must be a reason why we didn't shoot them from across the room, or they didn't shoot us, and that reason is why we grabbed them, or they grabbed us. That is why Combatives always involves grappling.

The soldiers’ descriptions further indicated that these engagements occurred across a wide variety of operational contexts, including close combat inside urban terrain, detainee operations, crowd control situations, and confined-space encounters where bodies, weapons, and terrain became physically entangled (Jensen, 2014).

Subsequent combat feedback studies involving Army Combatives instructors reinforced the same themes. Experienced instructors with combat deployments consistently emphasized the importance of automatic fighting skills, adaptability under stress, and large volumes of live training. They repeatedly identified the psychological dimensions of close combat, fear management, aggression control, functioning under pressure, and confidence during physical violence, as central to battlefield success. (Jensen, 2017)

This is one reason virtually every military force in the world continues to maintain some form of close-combat training despite dramatic advances in technology. The battlefield repeatedly compresses human beings into physical contests for control of space, weapons, and bodies.

Combatives training prepares soldiers for that reality while simultaneously giving leaders a mechanism for building a genuine warrior culture grounded in demonstrated behavior rather than symbolic performance. A unit that routinely trains together under controlled physical pressure develops a fundamentally different relationship with fear, aggression, accountability, and confidence than a unit that merely discusses warrior ethos abstractly.

The evidence is clear. The Army already accepts substantial orthopedic injury risk from recreational athletics and conventional physical training. During Iraq and Afghanistan, basketball alone accounted for approximately one-quarter of sports-related evacuation injuries from theater, making it the single largest identified sports-related evacuation category in the deployment injury literature. The cumulative evacuation burden associated with basketball may even have approached the same general order of magnitude as gunshot wound evacuations during portions of the wars.

Yet basketball remained universally accepted because the institution believed its benefits outweighed its risks.

The same evidence-based standard should apply to Combatives.

The data do not support the claim that properly supervised grappling-based Combatives training is uniquely dangerous.

What Combatives uniquely does is expose fear, weakness, competitiveness, and physical inadequacy in a public way.

Which is why the old t-shirt slogan still resonates years later:

“We both know why you don’t like Combatives.”

References

Belmont, P. J., Goodman, G. P., Zacchilli, M., Posner, M., Evans, C., & Owens, B. D. (2010). Incidence and epidemiology of combat injuries sustained during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Journal of Trauma, 68(1), 204–210.

Cohen, S. P., Brown, C., Kurihara, C., & Plunkett, A. (2011). Diagnoses and factors associated with medical evacuation and return to duty for service members participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom. The Lancet, 378(9798), 1431–1438.

Cross, J. D., Ficke, J. R., Hsu, J. R., Masini, B. D., & Wenke, J. C. (2011). Battlefield orthopaedic injuries cause the majority of long-term disabilities. Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, 19(Suppl 1), S1–S7.

Freitas, T. T., et al. (2025). Epidemiology of injuries in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athletes: A systematic review. Sports Medicine Review.

Jensen, P. R. (2014). Hand-to-hand combat and the use of combatives skills: An analysis of United States Army post-combat surveys from 2004–2008. Center for Enhanced Performance, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY.

Jensen, P. R., & Goodman, S. (2017). “Combat Feedback from U.S. Army Combatives Instructors.” Infantry, July–September 2017, U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence, Fort Benning, GA.

Knapik, J. J., et al. (2013). Nonbattle injuries during U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military Medicine, 178(5), 495–502.

The bayonet assault course emerged during World War I as a direct response to the unprecedented demands of industrialized mass warfare. Britain, France, Germany, and eventually the United States suddenly needed to raise and train millions of soldiers in extraordinarily short periods of time. They did not have the expertise nor the time necessary to turn ordinary civilians into genuinely skilled fighters through Combatives training. So instead, armies developed scalable systems of psychological conditioning designed to manufacture aggression, offensive spirit, and willingness to close with the enemy as rapidly as possible.

That is where the modern bayonet assault course came from. Soldiers charged trenches, stabbed dummies, threw grenades, screamed battle cries, and ran obstacle courses designed less to produce true close combat experts than to emotionally condition massive conscript armies for offensive violence. It was never primarily a skill-building system. It was a mass-production morale and aggression tool created because industrial armies needed millions of soldiers immediately and could not realistically build real fighting proficiency at that scale in the time available.

The same basic logic later produced the invention of the pugil stick. In the 1950s, Dr. Armond H. Seidler, working with the Marine Corps, developed the system as a way to simulate aggressive close combat competition without the time investment required to build genuine hand-to-hand fighting skill. The idea was brilliant from an institutional perspective. You could get recruits competing physically against one another almost immediately. You could create aggression, stress, chaos, and esprit de corps without having to spend months teaching boxing, wrestling, or grappling. It provided many of the emotional and cultural effects of fighting while dramatically reducing the skill requirement.

And that is exactly why bureaucratic military organizations keep rediscovering these things.

Because symbolic aggression is institutionally easy.
Real fighting is hard.

The irony is that the modern United States Army no longer faces the constraints that produced these systems. We are not the trench armies of 1916 trying to mobilize millions of terrified civilians for the Somme. We are a relatively small, long-service professional force that has already possessed a modern Combatives system for over twenty years specifically designed to rapidly teach functional fighting ability through live grappling, sparring, and competitive training, and to intigrate it into how we fight in trenches, rooms, and other confined spaces that are the forcing factor for close combat on the modern battlefield.

And yet every few years, the same people crawl out of the woodwork trying to resurrect bayonet assault courses and pugil sticks as the answer to rebuilding the “warrior ethos.”

Why?

Because bayonet assault courses and pugil sticks allow people to cosplay aggression without the accountability of actual fighting.

Combatives is different.

Combatives is a Level I Soldier task. It has been in the Soldier’s Manual of Common Tasks for decades. During the height of the Global War on Terror, it was mandatory in institutional schools, mandatory in unit training plans, and available throughout the force. Any soldier, NCO, or officer who spent twenty years in the Army without learning even basic fighting skills did not do so because the Army failed to provide the opportunity.

They avoided it.

And everyone knows why.

Because the moment you step onto the mat, all the theater disappears. Rank matters less. Your two mile run or twelve mile foot march time matters less. Your carefully cultivated image as a “warrior leader” suddenly becomes testable against reality. You must be who you say you are.

A private with six months of grappling experience can expose you in front of your peers.
A skinny kid who wrestled in high school can expose you.
A 16-year-old girl who trains Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu can expose you.

And if that thought makes someone uncomfortable, that discomfort is exactly the point.

Running for miles is hard.
Deadlifting is hard.
Obstacle courses are hard.

None of those things require you to confront another human being trying to physically dominate you while everyone watches.

Combatives does.

That is why so many people who enthusiastically talk about “warrior ethos” spend their entire careers quietly avoiding actual fighting training. They want the appearance of warrior culture without the emotional risk that comes with genuine combat proficiency.

We will always be in a war over the soul of the Army with the people who want it to be a triathlon club with cosplay.

The profession of arms is built around violence. A soldier who intentionally avoids learning how to fight while embracing every symbolic performance of warrior culture is fundamentally unserious. If you can complete a twenty-mile approach march, dominate every endurance event at the Best Ranger Competition, scream your way through a bayonet assault course, and then get rag-dolled by a teenager with six months of jiu-jitsu training, you are not the embodiment of the warrior ethos. You are an endurance athlete in a camouflage costume.

One of the most revealing things about the Army’s recurring fascination with bayonet assault courses is that during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bayonet itself had already quietly disappeared from actual combat kit.

At United States Military Academy, The Combatives Committee in the Department of Physical Education, reviewed Department of Defense combat photography from Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008. Across thousands upon thousands of operational photos, we could not find a single image of an American soldier carrying a bayonet as part of his combat loadout.

Not mounted on the rifle.
Not attached to kit.
Not carried operationally.

The soldiers and their commanders themselves had already voted on the relevance of the bayonet. They left it behind because it was bulky, awkward, and largely useless for modern combat realities.

But symbolic warrior theater survives because it is emotionally safe.

Real fighting is not emotionally safe.
That is precisely why it matters.

Recently, the West Point Combatives Team competed against the Navy Jiu-Jitsu Team under submission-only rules associated with Eddie Bravo.

There were highly skilled fighters on both sides. That should be said up front. The technical level was high, the pace was aggressive, and the athletes were committed to finishing fights. And, for the record, Army won, again. ;-)

But that’s not the interesting part.

What stood out was how both teams fought.

Across the matches, there was a consistent pattern: aggressive pursuit of submissions, but relatively little emphasis on controlling the opponent. Positions that are traditionally considered dominant in a fight, because they allow you to strike, disengage, or impose damage, were often passed through or abandoned in favor of immediate submission attempts.

From within the rule set, this made sense.

Submission-only formats reward finishing. They do not reward positional control. They do not reward maintaining dominant position unless it leads directly to a submission. And they do not account for striking, something that is always present in real fighting.

This did not happen in a vacuum. When submissions re-emerged in the wake of the early UFCs, they captured people’s attention. They looked like a kind of magic fight-ender, sudden, technical, decisive. Entire systems began to orient around that moment. Submission-only formats are, in many ways, an extension of that fascination.

But that focus obscures something important.

In actual fighting, the ability to control and dominate an opponent physically often matters more than the ability to finish them instantly. This is one of the reasons wrestlers have consistently transitioned so well into MMA. Wrestling is built around controlling another human being—taking them down, holding them there, and imposing position. That turns out to be directly transferable to fighting in a way that many submission-focused systems, by themselves, are not.

So the athletes adapted.

They fought for what mattered in that environment.

And in doing so, they revealed something important.

In an upcoming article I am going to examine the major submission grappling rule sets in use today, their structure, their incentives, and their utility as tools for training fighters. That discussion will include systems like International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation, Abu Dhabi Combat Club, and submission-only formats like the one used in this match. It will also include an examination of the Army Combatives competition rule set and why it was designed the way it was.

But before we can evaluate any of those systems, we need to understand something more fundamental.

Rules are not neutral.

They do not simply regulate competition. They shape how fighters train, what actions they default to under pressure, and what they will do when they later find themselves in a real fight. Over time, they reshape the structure of the art itself, selecting for certain behaviors, reinforcing them, and allowing others to disappear.

If you don’t understand that mechanism, you will misunderstand everything that follows.

You will look at a system and see techniques, without seeing the incentives that produced them. You will see athletes, without understanding why they fight the way they do. You will argue about realism without recognizing that every competition system with live energy is perfectly realistic, within the environment created by its rules.

So before we can have a meaningful discussion about modern grappling competitions, and their relationship to fighting ability, we need a foundation.

We need to understand how rule sets evolve, how they reshape the arts they govern, and how the relationship between training and fighting changes over time.

That is what this article is about.

Starting Point, Fighting

All martial arts competition systems begin with a simple, practical purpose: to encourage and measure real fighting ability. They are created as training tools, structured environments where practitioners can test themselves against resisting opponents, refine their skills, and develop the attributes required to prevail in violence.

At the outset, the purpose is clear: the rules exist to prepare fighters for real combat.

But the moment competition takes hold, something begins to change.

Competitors, quite rationally, begin optimizing for victory within the rules they are given. Not for fighting in the abstract, not for some distant real-world application, but for winning this match, under these conditions. Coaches refine strategies that produce consistent results. Athletes specialize in what works. Organizations formalize and clarify rules to ensure fairness, repeatability, and spectator understanding.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the purpose inverts.

The rules no longer serve to prepare fighters for real combat. Fighters begin to train to win the competition within them.

From a training perspective, competition is always a selection mechanism. It tells people what matters. If the competition rewards takedowns, athletes develop takedowns. If it rewards positional control, they become masters of control. If it rewards submissions, they hunt submissions relentlessly. And if it does not reward something, striking awareness, weapon control, disengagement, that skill will atrophy or disappear.

Not because athletes are ignorant, but because they are rational. They train to win.

Over time, this produces a kind of evolutionary drift. Techniques that succeed under the rule set are selected, refined, and amplified. Techniques that do not are discarded, even if they remain effective in actual combat. The system becomes increasingly efficient at producing winners of the game, and increasingly indifferent to anything outside of it (Poliakoff, 1987). Competition selects for what it rewards.

This pattern has repeated itself across martial cultures and across time.

All martial arts competition systems begin with a simple, practical purpose: to encourage and measure real fighting ability. But if you want to understand how they drift, how the game slowly replaces the fight, there is no better place to start than boxing.

Because boxing has already gone through the entire cycle.

The Bare-Knuckle Era: Fighting as the Foundation

Early prizefighting in England operated under what became known as the London Prize Ring rules (Broughton, 1743/1997). These were not “sport” rules in the modern sense. They were closer to a negotiated framework for settling violent disputes under some degree of order.

A round did not last a fixed amount of time. It ended when a fighter went down, whether from a strike, a throw, or simply being knocked off balance. After that, there was a short rest period, and the next round began when both fighters came up to the “scratch” line at the center.

Wrestling was allowed. Clinching, trips, and throws were part of the game. Fighters could seize each other, off-balance each other, and send each other to the ground to end a round. Striking was central, but it was embedded within a broader understanding of fighting.

And perhaps most importantly, the hands were bare.

That single fact shaped everything.

Without gloves, the human hand becomes a fragile weapon. The skull is hard. Knuckles break. Cuts open easily. A poorly placed punch could end not just the fight, but a fighter’s .career, and livelihood. There were no modern orthopedic interventions, no surgical pinning, no reliable rehabilitation protocols. A broken hand was often a career-ending injury (Gorn, 1986).

So fighters adapted.

They punched differently, more vertically aligned fists, more measured shots, fewer punches or combinations. They targeted the body more frequently. They valued positioning, balance, and control because reckless exchanges carried enormous cost. The pace was slower, but the stakes of every exchange were higher.

In other words, the rules, minimal as they were, still reflected the realities of violence.

Why the Rules Changed

The shift away from bare-knuckle fighting did not happen because people suddenly misunderstood fighting. It happened because of practical pressures.

Bare-knuckle fights were brutal, unpredictable, and often prolonged. They produced severe facial injuries, broken hands, and public discomfort. They were also difficult to regulate and commercialize. For the sport to survive, and grow, it needed structure (Gorn, 1986).

Enter the Marquess of Queensberry Rules (Queensberry Rules, 1867).

These introduced timed rounds, mandated the use of gloves, and restricted wrestling. The stated purpose was to civilize the sport, make it safer, and make it more appealing to spectators. Gloves reduced superficial damage to the face. Timed rounds created rhythm and predictability. Removing grappling simplified the contest into a more easily understood form.

But each of these changes carried second-order effects.

Gloves did not just protect the face, they protected the hands. And once the hands were protected, fighters could strike with far greater force and frequency without fear of immediate injury. This opened the door to combinations, headhunting, and sustained exchanges that would have been prohibitively risky in a bare-knuckle context.

The anecdote often told about James J. Corbett, “Gentleman Jim,” captures this transition. Corbett, who bridged the bare-knuckle and gloved eras, preferred to fight under the newer rules in part because gloves protected the hands and allowed a longer career. He built his style around that reality, using footwork, distance, and repeated clean strikes rather than the slower, more cautious exchanges of bare-knuckle fighting. Where earlier fighters had to preserve their hands, Corbett could afford to use them. He is often associated with the shift toward the more technical, movement-based style that defines modern boxing (Gorn, 1986).

Gloves were not just a safety measure. They were an economic one.

They allowed fighters to fight more often, extend their careers, and build a profession rather than a series of one-off brutal contests.

The Technical Transformation

Once gloves, timed rounds, and restricted grappling were in place, the evolutionary pressure shifted.

Fighters began optimizing for what worked under the new rules.

Head movement became more pronounced because gloves allowed fighters to throw far more punches to the head without breaking their hands, making prolonged exchanges at punching range increasingly common. High guards developed because gloves could absorb impact. Combinations flourished because the hands could survive repeated contact. The jab emerged as a central tool, not just to strike, but to control distance and accumulate scoring.

At the same time, other elements disappeared.

The integration of grappling vanished. In bare-knuckle boxing, the clinch was still part of the fight. Fighters wrestled for position, off-balanced one another, fought for underhooks and head control, and used trips and throws to put opponents on the ground and end rounds. The transition between striking and grappling was fluid because it still reflected the realities of fighting at close range. Under modern rules, the clinch became something different, less a fighting position than a temporary interruption in the action, quickly broken up by the referee. The ability to off-balance and throw an opponent, once a normal part of boxing, became illegal. The emphasis on conserving the hands diminished. The strategic pacing of bare-knuckle fighting gave way to the rhythm of rounds and judges’ scoring.

The sport became increasingly specialized around gloved striking exchanges, timed rounds, and the demands of modern competition.

But it also became something different.

A modern boxer is an extraordinary athlete, optimized for a specific environment: gloved hands, timed rounds, no grappling, and a scoring system that rewards clean strikes. Within that environment, the level of skill is unmatched.

But the system was no longer evolving around the realities of fighting. It was evolving around the realities of competition under the rules.

None of this was accidental. None of it was the result of confusion or failure.

It was the natural outcome of competition as a selection mechanism.

Once the rules changed, fighters adapted. Once fighters adapted, the techniques evolved. Once the techniques evolved, the identity of the sport shifted. And over time, the connection to the original purpose, measuring and preparing for real fighting, became less direct.

Winning the game replaces winning fights as the goal.

And boxing, perhaps more clearly than any other martial art, shows how and why that happens.

Judo: From Character Development to Spectator Optimization

If boxing shows how a fighting system evolves over time, Judo shows how it can be reshaped when its purpose changes.

Because judo did not begin as a sport built for spectators. It began as a developmental system, designed by a teacher with a broader aim.

Jigoro Kano was first and foremost an educator. He served as principal of the Tokyo Higher Normal School, which was Japan’s leading teacher-training institution, and later became part of what is now the University of Tsukuba, and later held senior roles within Japan’s educational ministry. His work in jujutsu was not simply about preserving techniques or winning fights. It was about developing people (Kano, 1932; Bennett, 2015).

Kano’s stated principles, seiryoku zen’yō (maximum efficient use of energy) and jita kyōei (mutual welfare and benefit), make this clear. Judo was designed as a method for cultivating disciplined, capable individuals who could apply effort intelligently and act constructively within society. The conscious path was technical mastery. The designed effect was character.

Competition had a role in this system, but it was not the purpose.

It was a tool.

Through randori, practitioners tested themselves against resistance. They learned timing, balance, and control. They experienced failure, adapted, and improved. The rules made this possible at scale by reducing catastrophic injury while preserving enough realism to develop skill.

In that environment, the rules served development.

Throws, pins, chokes, and joint locks all had a place because they reflected real control over another person. The system remained broad because the goal was not to produce specialists in a narrow domain, but well-rounded practitioners shaped through pressure and practice.

This is what we would now call a developmental sport.

The goal is to build the character of the people who participate.

The Shift in Purpose

As judo spread internationally and grew in popularity, a second purpose emerged.

It became a sport.

And at the highest levels, particularly with its inclusion in the Olympic Games, it became part of something else entirely: the entertainment ecosystem.

This shift matters because it changes the incentives.

Professional and Olympic sports are, in practical terms, part of the entertainment business. Professional and Olympic sports are, in practical terms, part of the entertainment business. Their purpose is to gain and hold the attention of an audience in order to sell tickets or advertising. To do that, the sport must remain entertaining to watch. That creates pressure for visible action, clear scoring, decisive moments, and a pace that keeps spectators engaged.

This places a premium on qualities that are not necessarily aligned with the original developmental purpose:

Clarity over complexity.
Pace over depth.
Spectacle over completeness.

None of these are inherently wrong. But they are different.

And once they become dominant, the rules begin to change to support them.

Rule Changes Under New Incentives

In the Olympic era, judo rules increasingly emphasized what was most visible and compelling: the clean, decisive throw.

Ippon, the perfect throw ending the match immediately, became the ideal. It is dramatic, unambiguous, and easily understood by spectators.

To support that outcome, other elements of the art were gradually constrained.

Groundwork time was shortened. If progress was not immediate, the referee stood the athletes up. This reduced long, complex exchanges on the ground that were difficult for audiences to follow.

Leg grabs, once a normal part of judo, were restricted and eventually banned. Techniques that led to lower, more defensive stances or slower engagements were discouraged in favor of upright, dynamic throwing exchanges.

Penalties were introduced to enforce engagement and prevent passivity, ensuring that matches maintained pace and visual action.

Each of these changes made sense within the new purpose.

But the purpose had changed.

Posture as the Telltale Sign

Nowhere is this shift clearer than in posture.

In a real fight, especially one that includes strikes, upright posture is functional. It allows mobility, awareness, and the ability to strike while defending against strikes. A bent-over posture exposes the head, limits vision, reduces the ability to generate power, and creates vulnerability, particularly to knees and upper-body attacks.

The fighting systems that Kano drew from operated within that reality. Even when grappling, posture was shaped by the ever-present possibility of being struck.

But once striking was removed from judo competition, that constraint disappeared.

From a purely grappling perspective, a lower, more defensive posture became effective. It protected against throws, lowered the center of gravity, and made it more difficult for an opponent to establish control.

So athletes adapted.

And then the rules intervened.

Penalties were introduced for excessively defensive posture. Competitors were required to remain upright, to engage, to maintain the visual and structural form associated with throwing.

But this posture was no longer being enforced by the underlying logic of fighting.

It was being enforced by the rulebook.

The system had to recreate artificially what had once emerged naturally.

Grip Fighting and the New Game

At the same time, another system expanded to fill the space left by the removal of strikes: grip fighting.

In a real fight, distance is governed by the threat of being hit. Engagement is shaped by urgency. You cannot stand in front of an opponent and methodically work for control without consequence.

In judo, you can.

With striking removed, athletes developed an intricate system of grip acquisition and control. Matches often hinge on who establishes dominant grips, sleeve, collar, inside control, over-the-back positions. From these grips, throws are launched with precision.

It is highly technical and highly effective within the rules.

But it exists because the environment allows it.

The absence of strikes removes urgency. It allows prolonged engagement at close range, where both athletes can work deliberately for positional advantage without immediate consequence.

What emerges is a new equilibrium, one optimized for the rule set, not for fighting.

The Result

Modern judo produces extraordinary athletes. The level of timing, balance, and explosive power required to execute high-level throws is exceptional.

But it produces them within a narrower slice of the original system.

The breadth that once reflected a general approach to fighting has been shaped into a specialized sport, one defined by the demands of competition and, at the highest levels, by the demands of spectatorship.

The Lesson

Judo makes the broader principle unmistakable.

Competition does not just test an art. It reshapes it.

Change what the competition rewards, and athletes change how they train.
Change how they train, and you change how they fight.
Change how they fight long enough, and you change the art itself.

Kano’s original system used competition as a tool for development, for building capable practitioners and, ultimately, strong character.

Modern judo, at its highest levels, uses competition as a product, optimized for clarity, pace, and audience engagement.

Both produce excellence.

But they produce different kinds of excellence.

And unless the original purpose is actively preserved, it will not remain the guiding force.

It will be replaced, first by the logic of competition, and then by the logic of entertainment.

Wrestling: How Rules Split a Single Tradition into Different Fighters

If boxing shows long-term drift and Judo shows deliberate reshaping under new incentives, Wrestling shows something just as important:

You can take a single, deeply rooted tradition, and by changing the rules, produce entirely different kinds of athletes from it.

Because wrestling did not begin as a narrow sport. It was one of the oldest and most universal forms of fighting.

A Fighting Art with Its Own Culture

Across Europe, wrestling was not just a pastime, it was a foundational fighting skill.

Medieval combat systems included grappling as an essential component. Knights trained in it because weapons fail, distances collapse, and fights go to the clinch (Anglo, 2000). Historical accounts, even stories like the famous challenge between the kings of England and France, where Henry VIII and Francis I met during the Field of the Cloth of Gold and engaged in a friendly wrestling match, reflect a cultural understanding that a warrior, and by extension a ruler, should be physically capable of dominating another man (Richardson, 2013). These were not only sovereign leaders, but warriors by profession. The fact that such a contest really took place illustrates how deeply embedded grappling was in elite martial culture. When Francis reportedly threw Henry, the moment carried symbolic weight beyond the match itself. It was a public demonstration of physical competence, status, and personal capability, traits expected of men who commanded armies and ruled states.

Wrestling was embedded in that world.

It carried its own culture, one tied to strength, toughness, and direct physical contest. It was not separate from fighting. It was part of it.

Later, in the 19th century, this tradition continued through catch-as-catch-can wrestling. This was a rough, practical form of grappling where the goal was simple: control the opponent and finish the match, either by pin or by submission. Joint locks and other finishing holds were legitimate tools. The system still reflected fighting, even as it became more organized.

This is the point of departure.

Because from here, modern wrestling diverges, not by accident, but by design.

Folkstyle: Character First, Fighting Second

American folkstyle wrestling emerged from the rougher catch-as-catch-can tradition, but it was transformed inside schools and colleges into something more developmental than combative. The goal was not simply to preserve fighting skill. It was to build young men.

The likely central figure here is Edward C. Gallagher. Gallagher was born in Kansas, but made his mark at Oklahoma A&M, later Oklahoma State (Oklahoma Historical Society, n.d.). More than simply developing techniques or organizing competitions, Gallagher helped shape collegiate wrestling into a developmental system aimed at building toughness, discipline, resilience, and character in young men. Wrestling was no longer merely a method of fighting. It became a tool of education and formation. The emphasis shifted toward conditioning, perseverance, self-control, and the ability to continue under pressure, qualities schools believed were valuable far beyond the mat.

The rule structure that became collegiate wrestling was formalized through men like Gallagher and Raymond G. Clapp of Nebraska, who published collegiate wrestling rules in 1927, just before the first NCAA wrestling championship in 1928 (Clapp, 1927).

The crucial change was the gradual removal of submissions and other painful finishing holds as wrestling moved from rough catch-as-catch-can contests into schools and collegiate athletics. Earlier catch wrestling traditions had allowed a wide range of joint locks, neck cranks, toe holds, and “punishment holds,” with victory coming by either pin or submission. As amateur and collegiate wrestling developed in the early twentieth century, those techniques were progressively restricted or eliminated in favor of positional control and the pin.

Importantly, these techniques had to be specifically prohibited because they were still widely known within wrestling culture. The rule books did not ban imaginary techniques. They banned techniques wrestlers already understood and used. Early collegiate rules contain long lists of prohibited holds, strangles, twisting leg locks, punishment holds, and potentially injurious submissions, precisely because wrestling still retained much of its older catch-as-catch-can inheritance.

By the time collegiate wrestling was formally standardized through NCAA competition, however, the developmental purpose of the sport had become clear. The emphasis was no longer on finishing an opponent through pain or injury, but on controlling him physically, breaking him down positionally, and demonstrating dominance through effort, conditioning, and perseverance. The 1951 NCAA wrestling guide reflects this mature form of the sport: the pin remained the decisive ending, while numerous dangerous holds and submission techniques were prohibited (NCAA, 1951).

That made the sport safer for schools, but it also made it more grueling. Without submissions as a quick finish, the wrestler had to dominate positionally, maintain control, and break the opponent over time. That served the developmental purpose extremely well.

Freestyle: Olympic Incentives, Dynamic Outcomes

Freestyle wrestling emerges from a different set of pressures, those of international competition and the Olympic movement (United World Wrestling, 2016).

Here, the goal is not just to test athletes, but to present a sport that is engaging, understandable, and compelling to a global audience.

The rules shift accordingly.

Instead of prioritizing sustained control, freestyle emphasizes exposure, turning an opponent’s back to the mat, even briefly, for points. High-amplitude throws are rewarded. Matches are structured to encourage action and scoring.

So athletes adapt.

They become explosive. They take more risks. They develop techniques designed to create immediate scoring opportunities rather than prolonged dominance.

The result is a fast-paced, dynamic form of wrestling that is exciting to watch and effective within its rules.

But it is shaped by those rules.

Greco-Roman: Aesthetic Constraint, Technical Specialization

Greco-Roman wrestling followed a different path. It was not merely a safer version of wrestling. It was also an aesthetic project.

United World Wrestling credits Jean Exbrayat, a soldier from Napoleon’s army, with establishing basic rules for “flat hand” wrestling, including the prohibition on holds below the waist. Exbrayat distinguished this style from rougher strongman contests that allowed striking, dangerous holds, or pain-compliance techniques (United World Wrestling, 2016).

The later name “Greco-Roman” reflected the 19th-century desire to connect the sport with classical antiquity. The point was not historical accuracy. The point was image. The style was meant to look upright, noble, and classically beautiful, similar to how wrestling was portrayed in Greek and Roman artwork.

The technical consequence was enormous. Remove attacks below the waist, and the entire sport becomes upper-body wrestling: clinches, lifts, throws, body locks, and par terre turns. Modern rules still preserve that distinction: Greco-Roman forbids grasping below the beltline or using the legs offensively, while freestyle permits leg attacks and trips.

CONCLUSION

What emerges across these systems is not confusion, but consistency.

Competition does not drift randomly. It drifts predictably.

It selects for what it rewards.

And what it selects becomes what the art is.

Boxing shows how safety and economics reshape technique.
Judo shows how purpose reshapes rules.
Wrestling shows how rules reshape athletes.

In every case, the mechanism is the same.

Athletes adapt to what wins.

And over time, what wins defines the system.

The only real question is whether that system remains aligned with its original purpose, or whether, as so often happens, winning the game replaces fighting ability as the goal.

References

Anglo, S. (2000). The martial arts of Renaissance Europe. Yale University Press.

Bennett, A. (2015). Kendo: Culture of the sword. University of California Press.

Broughton, J. (1743/1997). Broughton’s rules of boxing. (Reprinted in modern collections of early boxing regulations).

Clapp, R. G. (1927). Collegiate wrestling rules. University of Nebraska.

Gorn, E. J. (1986). The manly art: Bare-knuckle prize fighting in America. Cornell University Press.

Kano, J. (1932). Judo: The contribution of judo to education. Journal of Health and Physical Education, 3(5), 37–40.

National Collegiate Athletic Association. (1951). Official NCAA wrestling guide. NCAA.

Oklahoma Historical Society. (n.d.). Edward C. Gallagher. Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. https://www.okhistory.org

Poliakoff, M. B. (1987). Combat sports in the ancient world: Competition, violence, and culture. Yale University Press.

Queensberry Rules. (1867). Marquess of Queensberry rules. London.

Richardson, G. (2013). The Field of Cloth of Gold. Yale University Press.

United World Wrestling. (2016). Wrestling 101: Origins and facts about Greco-Roman wrestling.

https://uww.org