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01/04/2017 The Law of Unintended Consequences

Author: Paul Brennan

…On the subject of scanning I have seen students being taught to hit someone and then immediately stop and quickly look from side to side. This is a technique taken directly from Fairbairn’s firearms programme. The principle may be sound in a firearms encounter but my concern is that in hand to hand combat this technique introduces muscular tension and interrupts the natural flow of movement necessary to avoid being hit, move onto the next target or effect an immediate escape. As far as I am aware (I am of course happy to be corrected) Fairbairn did not advocate or teach the side to side scan in a non-firearms situation as a tactic for dealing with multiple attackers. His preferred solution was constant movement and attack until you are out of danger. To paraphrase Fairbairn himself when talking about multiple attackers “your object is not so much to kill your opponents as to get quickly away from them so that you do not get killed”.

The stop and scan principle is an example of how we may take a technique or principle from one context and find unexpected problems when we try to apply it to another. For example I have seen a gun disarm technique demonstrated where the person demonstrating the technique grabs the weapon and moves it off the line of fire…so far so good. However, he then repeatedly hits the person holding the handgun in the face. The momentum of a genuine attack would push the gunman away from you making it highly likely that the weapon would naturally put you back in the line of fire. It was explained to me by a former Israeli special forces trainer that this technique was seriously flawed and that flaw was based on a failure to understand the operational context in which the original technique was used. In response to a series of kidnappings and murders of Israeli servicemen by bogus taxi drivers, special forces operatives were trained to pose as vulnerable servicemen and allow themselves to be picked up by taxi drivers. If a gun was then pulled on them they were trained to push the weapon off the line of fire and then repeatedly strike the gunman until he was subdued. In a highly confined space such as a taxi this makes perfect sense. Unfortunately in an open space where space and gravity can work against you this same technique can be fatal … not necessarily for the person with the gun!

To be safe in combat learn to apply the principle of constant movement whilst scanning and beware the risk of unintended consequences when assessing and evaluating technique. What works in the controlled environment of the dojo or the ring often fails to translate onto the street. To the uninformed observer cricket and table tennis both use similar principles but you would look silly trying to hit the ball backhand with a cricket bat.

©Paul Brennan 2015

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