Articles
No Brain- No Gain
Louis Awerbuck
God didn’t Make Junk. Man, however, in his infinite stupidity has a penchant for taking the ultimate God-given machine-the brain-and relegating it to the battlefield scrapyard.
And now on to the tactics of fighting: There is one golden rule to fighting: "He who has the gold makes the rules." No more, no less. Since time immemorial tactics have been more important than weapon¬ry; that is why the pen is mightier than the sword (unless, of course, somebody destroys your printing press with a baseball bat or you take a typewriter to a gunfight). The trick is to know and fully understand that tactics have to progress and change as the fight progresses, irrespective of whether you have a prebattle plan or not, because you can bet your bottom dollar that something will go awry before the fight is over.
In fact, Napoleon said, "I have never had a plan of operations," and he did just fine until he met his Walerloo-and sooner or later we all do (death, taxes, and the bullet with your name on it). On the other hand, it's nice to stave off the inevitable for as long as possible. As Sir Winston Churchill so aptly put it, "Nothing is more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.", On the other hand I can personally do without Frederick the Great's "Rascals, would you live forever?"
What part of yes did he not understand?
Let's be honest. The ultimate objec¬tive is survival, and survival means win¬ning both the battle and the war. It means having the ingrained ability to be absolutely ruthless when required, tem¬pered with the ability to walk away if intelligence dictates that the latter is a more viable alternative to solving the immediate problem. The war is more important than individual battles, but losing the battles will cost the war. And then there's the age-old wisdom of the sages, all saying in essence the same thing: Brain power is more impor¬tant than firepower. All who earned suc¬cess in this field for several thousand years have stayed with this basic concept. Those who didn't have lost.
The seven military classics of ancient China (including the much¬vaunted Sun Tzu's Art of War), the Japanese art of war, Moltke's art of war, Machiavelli's art of war, and on and on ad nauseam. And still we don't learn. It doesn't matter how many guns you own or how well you shoot-if you have snot for brains, the only way you'll win is by luck.
There is no question that there have been many occasions when people have won on luck alone, and that lends the lie to the truth. For those who have had the misfortune to have been involved in multiple incidents, or those who have been forced (either voluntarily or invol¬untarily) into repeated situations by the nature of their profession or circum¬stances, this has become painfully apparent. You can practice and train 365 days a year, every year, and all you gain is an edge. But if you don't have the edge you run on luck alone, and there are very few bankrupt casinos or unoccupied cemeteries.
In the past decade, many institutions have sprung up, especially firearms related, that proclaim that you can become”gunfighter from hell" with several days' or a week's training. No you can't. You can learn marksmanship extremely quickly, and you can pick up one or two basic life-saving tactics. Fighting, on the other hand, is a life¬long study, and the longer you live the less you know. Fighting isn't learned by merely pounding 500 rounds of ammo into a stupid piece of paper or steel.
In war we must always leave room for strokes of fortune and accidents that cannot be foreseen. -Polybius
In 1944 Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart stated that the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the mind was to get an old one out. He was both right and wrong. The "old" ideas we need to get out are the relatively recent ones. The "new" ideas are new in name only-their tactical roots go back to the dawn of man. Survival fighting is based on thousand-year-old ideas-only the weaponry changes.
It's time to sweep the crap out of the chicken house, have a surgeon operate on our opto-rectumitis, and get back to the fighting man's creed:
No brain, no gain.
God didn’t Make Junk. Man, however, in his infinite stupidity has a penchant for taking the ultimate God-given machine-the brain-and relegating it to the battlefield scrapyard.
And now on to the tactics of fighting: There is one golden rule to fighting: "He who has the gold makes the rules." No more, no less. Since time immemorial tactics have been more important than weapon¬ry; that is why the pen is mightier than the sword (unless, of course, somebody destroys your printing press with a baseball bat or you take a typewriter to a gunfight). The trick is to know and fully understand that tactics have to progress and change as the fight progresses, irrespective of whether you have a prebattle plan or not, because you can bet your bottom dollar that something will go awry before the fight is over.
In fact, Napoleon said, "I have never had a plan of operations," and he did just fine until he met his Walerloo-and sooner or later we all do (death, taxes, and the bullet with your name on it). On the other hand, it's nice to stave off the inevitable for as long as possible. As Sir Winston Churchill so aptly put it, "Nothing is more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.", On the other hand I can personally do without Frederick the Great's "Rascals, would you live forever?"
What part of yes did he not understand?
Let's be honest. The ultimate objec¬tive is survival, and survival means win¬ning both the battle and the war. It means having the ingrained ability to be absolutely ruthless when required, tem¬pered with the ability to walk away if intelligence dictates that the latter is a more viable alternative to solving the immediate problem. The war is more important than individual battles, but losing the battles will cost the war. And then there's the age-old wisdom of the sages, all saying in essence the same thing: Brain power is more impor¬tant than firepower. All who earned suc¬cess in this field for several thousand years have stayed with this basic concept. Those who didn't have lost.
The seven military classics of ancient China (including the much¬vaunted Sun Tzu's Art of War), the Japanese art of war, Moltke's art of war, Machiavelli's art of war, and on and on ad nauseam. And still we don't learn. It doesn't matter how many guns you own or how well you shoot-if you have snot for brains, the only way you'll win is by luck.
There is no question that there have been many occasions when people have won on luck alone, and that lends the lie to the truth. For those who have had the misfortune to have been involved in multiple incidents, or those who have been forced (either voluntarily or invol¬untarily) into repeated situations by the nature of their profession or circum¬stances, this has become painfully apparent. You can practice and train 365 days a year, every year, and all you gain is an edge. But if you don't have the edge you run on luck alone, and there are very few bankrupt casinos or unoccupied cemeteries.
In the past decade, many institutions have sprung up, especially firearms related, that proclaim that you can become”gunfighter from hell" with several days' or a week's training. No you can't. You can learn marksmanship extremely quickly, and you can pick up one or two basic life-saving tactics. Fighting, on the other hand, is a life¬long study, and the longer you live the less you know. Fighting isn't learned by merely pounding 500 rounds of ammo into a stupid piece of paper or steel.
In war we must always leave room for strokes of fortune and accidents that cannot be foreseen. -Polybius
In 1944 Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart stated that the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the mind was to get an old one out. He was both right and wrong. The "old" ideas we need to get out are the relatively recent ones. The "new" ideas are new in name only-their tactical roots go back to the dawn of man. Survival fighting is based on thousand-year-old ideas-only the weaponry changes.
It's time to sweep the crap out of the chicken house, have a surgeon operate on our opto-rectumitis, and get back to the fighting man's creed:
No brain, no gain.
