The chosen topic for today examines the question that often comes up in the minds of martial artists, martial art fans, teenagers, and movie-buffs. And this was the question I posed to my then Shotokan Karate master at the tender age of 16 (in the intersection of all the aforementioned categories): "How would a special forces guy fare against a Karate master?"
By Karate masters then I invariably meant Japanese Karate masters who were both objectively superb and far enough to be seen even more so. My own master's answer was soberingly simple and something along the lines of "Not very well. A master is on a way higher technical level". The response both reassured and disappointed me. On one hand, I was practicing Karate, so I wanted to believe this style is superior to the alternatives. On the other hand, everyone knows that special forces guys are the ultimate badasses. They can snap a guy's neck with one move, drive his nasal cartilage into his brain (a la Con Air/The Last Boy Scout), crush his windpipe, or just go full Jason Bourne and demolish 3 people in 2 seconds.
So let's dig into the question: who would win a match between Batman and Captain America an average Navy SEAL (for the sake of brevity, from now on I will just use SEAL for any special forces guy) and an average professional MMA-fighter/boxer/Thai-boxer/grappler? (I have elaborated my not very falttering opinion of traditional martial artists at length earlier). I see three ways to approach the question, two of which require some research and the third one some thinking. So, the first is looking for some hard evidence supporting either case, which doesn't require expertise neither in martial arts nor in military training programs. The second is is to check the opinion of people who know both SEALs and martial artists, or maybe are both of those. And the last is taking a look at the training regimes of each side, and trying to deploy some common sense. Those who read the previous blog posts will feel the following somewhat redundant, but repetition is the mother of learning.
Let's try the evidence-seeking approach first. What would constitute hard evidence? Obviously, the aggregated result of a series of matches between the creme of martial arts practitioners and SEALs. We are past the age of gladiators and fight-to-the-death matches, so the rules should disqualify dangerous techniques (eye gouging, punching in the throat, biting, etc), but allow for everything else. MMA-rules satisfy these criteria. If there is a sufficient number of matches under these rules, the statistics would give us the best possible answer to this binary question - the probabilistic one. One or two examples are not enough. You might say that you know a SEAL who kicked the ass of the local MMA champion last Saturday in a bar you frequent. I might respond that I know of two occasions when the SEAL's ass got handed over to him by my friend's Kung-fu teacher. Individual cases mean almost nothing. The loser could be drunk, had a bad day, slipped accidentally, and so on. Or the winner is such a natural talent that he would beat 9 guys out of 10, even if the only hand-to-hand education he ever received was on the schoolyard. On the other hand, if there were 100 such matches between SEALS and professional fighters, and the SEALs won 68 of them, that would say something uncontroversial.
Unfortunately, there is no such evidence for either case. Some ex-SEALs ended up in combat sports, but not enough to draw conclusions from their performance. The first approach is quickly discarded.
The next way of exploring the question is to learn whether there is a consensus among people who know both worlds. My experience in this area is limited, as I only know about one high-profile person who fits the descriptions. Jocko Willink is a former Nacy SEAL, black-belt BJJ practitioner, and all-around combat sportsman (not to mention children-book author, motivational speaker, and podcaster with a huge audience). He covers a lot of related topics in his podcast and he mentioned on multiple occasions how easily he overcame his sparring buddies in the Navy with only a blue belt in BJJ. He is also asked a lot about which martial arts he finds the most effective. Wrestling, BJJ, boxing, and Muay Thai I heard him mention most frequently. I never heard him saying anything about military-variant hand-to-hand combat styles.
How much is his opinion worth? Jocko is certainly legit. He is too high-profile to be able to avoid being exposed if that wasn't the case, either as a fraud or a fool. He has also recorded countless interviews with both SEALs and martial artists, so to me he seems to represent the consensus. But if anyone can point to well-known people voicing opposite opinions, I'm interested.
I left the common sense approach till the end, as it will be the lengthiest. My common sense tells me to compare both sides' relevant skillsets and physical abilities, and try to infer the result from there. Assuming this is the right way to go, what exactly should we look at? In a fight, you can say there is a small number of major factors. These are (and we are talking about very broad concepts): mental toughness, physical abilities, and technical skills. How do martial artists and SEALs compare in these?
On the mental toughness front, SEALs must be superb. Their training is famously grueling and the military has all the incentives to filter for people who never give up, never back down, and carry through the mission, whatever it takes. I honestly don't know how that compares to the fighter's resolve who are regularly willing to step into a cage to confront someone who wants to beat them bloody and unconscious. Let's call it even.
Mental toughness has another component besides the will to endure. Which is the length someone is willing to go at hurting his opponent. Again, I suppose SEALs are second to none at this. These guys are prepared to literally kill at command, after all. But UFC fighters regularly pound their opponent's head on the ground with full force until the referee pulls them off. It's hard to imagine how to surpass that level of aggressivity and brutality. Let's call this one even, too.
What about physical strength, as in punching power, stamina, the capacity to absorb damage? Or reflexes, natural agility, explosiveness? These are attributes of a sportsman. No military training substitutes for them. SEALs are certainly selected for people who are above average for most of these, but I doubt too much spent time of their training spent on improving on them - apart from the obvious emphasis on physical fitness.
And then, finally, technical skills, in which it's also reasonable to include some physical skills that correlate with them. A Navy SEAL training is less than 18 months long. During that the candidates, apart from rigorously improving their fitness level, learn to use every kind of weapon invented by man from knives to bazookas. They learn parachuting, seamanship, diving, laying and disabling explosives, interrogation techniques, navigation, basic medic-skills, handling radio equipment, survival in water, cold, and wilderness, tactics, you name it. They are pretty busy. Let's assume that they have a one-hour hand-to-hand combat session squeezed in every single day. That would amount to around 500 hours of training, gross, and I think this number is a big overestimation.
Let's compare it with a competitive boxer's or Thai-boxer's training regime. Most start in their childhood years. Some champs started much later, so being very charitable to SEALs in this comparison, a competent amateur county-level sportsman has at least 3 years of training behind him (10, much more frequently). And we are not even talking about professional fighters here. Let's deduct the strength & conditioning + warm-up and bagwork components from their training, they probably still have 5 hours of technical training every week. That's around 250 hours per year, which surpasses the SEAL training, often many times over, by the time they are ready for competing. Not to mention that even their auxiliary training regime is focused on fighting as opposed to general fitness.
In short, the sense of timing, rhythm, and distance, the tactical skills, reflexes, speed, punching power, and endurance of a competitive combat sportsman is just on a whole different level than a soldier's. And his technical skills are simply beyond comparison. A SEAL might practice a right hook a thousand times during his training. A rookie professional boxer has done it ten times more than that.
To wrap it up, in the ring the average SEAL stands no chance. If special forces people knew a way how to train more effectively for conventional one-to-one fights, those training methods would be adopted by coaches in the world of sport. I already hear the objection "Oh, but the military of course keeps those training techniques secret" - give me a break. Only in the movies. Nothing which is shared with thousands of people over the years stays secret for long, especially if it were very much in other people's interest to learn them. In the world of martial arts, there is money, ambition, and - most importantly - genuine unsatisfiable interest to explore new styles and techniques. And as a matter a fact, there is no specific special forces hand-to-hand combat training curriculum. It's something that changes all the time and it's mostly determined by the particular instructor - you can check it on Wikipedia or listen to interviews with SEALs.
What about a fight in real life? I think, in a real-world fight, the SEAL training would give an edge. Absolute ruthlessness and the acceptance of serious injury on your part are not natural for ordinary humans, not even for UFC fighters. But it wouldn't be enough to make up for the skill difference. And about the windpipe-crushing and nose in the brain punches? You really shouldn't watch so many movies.
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