Perhaps as long as mankind has known conflict, we have attempted to measure and test martial skill in some way other than sending young men out against the rival tribe to do actual battle. This task is made difficult to the point of impossibility by the complexity of the military problem. Success in battle depends on a diverse combination of skills and competencies. Some, like marksmanship, can be measured precisely; other more complex skills, like the ability to navigate, are difficult to measure. Some of the most vital skills are beyond measure. Things like leadership, judgment, and devotion to duty, for example, are about as measurable as love.
In light of this, the more complex skills are broken down into measurable ones, and the immeasurable ones are set aside, and the assumption made that in the course of mastering a multitude of simple, measurable skills, the complex, immeasurable ones will be learned as well; or, if an individual is unwilling or unable to learn the unquantifiable, he will be weeded out through the process.
Three ways have been devised to measure this skill, the first of which is comparative, or competitive.
The first Olympic Games were an early attempt to do this. Overall martial skill was divided into smaller subskills, like javelin, sprinting, distance running, wrestling, etc. Success was measured by competition with other athletes. The path of achievement is the improvement of ranking among competing peers. IDPA and MMA would be modern examples of this system. The competition model’s flaw, is that it only measures skill by comparison to another athlete, thus making it a clumsy model to measure either skill, or even the progress in gaining skill. If you improved your ranking, did you get better, or did your competition get worse?
I once heard someone say, “These soldiers today wouldn’t stand a chance against the boys who stormed Normandy.” This is a nonsensical statement that demonstrates the problem of the competitive model. The boys who stormed Normandy didn’t have to fight an insurgency of Afghan tribesmen, and the soldiers of today are not fighting the Third Reich. John McDermott won the first Boston marathon with a time that wouldn’t qualify him to enter that same race today. Then again, he didn’t have the training and diet of today’s athletes, and today’s athletes did not have to survive a childhood with out antibiotics.
Which brings me to the second method for measuring skill- the metric.
This is the clock and the yard stick. The fact that we even know how fast John McDermott ran the Boston marathon is due to the rather modern development of timepieces that made recording his race worth doing. Now, an athlete or martial artist can measure even the smallest sub-skills of a task with great precision. Performance can be compared with a standard. The Combat Handgun Master qualification is an example of this. The Civilian Marksmanship Program shoots are another. In the CMP, a score of 280 out of 300 is a gold medal, thus it is theoretically possible that every shooter on the line could score gold. More importantly, a shooter who previously scored bronze at 262 can strive to improve his personal ranking and break into silver at 273. The score gives the student the ability to compete with his own performance and the medal system gives a path of achievement goals.
The drawback of metric based training is that it is even more unreliable for measuring those more complex skill sets. The Handgun Combat Master test can be scored, but how do you score land navigation? Yet, land navigation is a popular competitive sport.
The third method is perhaps the oldest of the three: Apprenticeship.
In ancient times, war was taught through apprenticeship. An example from medieval Europe that most are familiar with, is the scenario of a young boy apprenticed to a knight as a page. As his skills increase, he is made a squire, and is eventually dubbed a knight himself. The belt system of karate is, similarly, an apprenticeship system. The criticisms of apprenticeship are twofold. The first is a criticism of the quality. The ranking of a student is dependent entirely on the judgement of the master, in many cases with no measurable standard whatsoever. This system, with no competitive rankings and no metrics to measure, may actually be the best way to develop those unquantifiable skills like leadership, judgment, and devotion to duty. The rank system serves not to grade a student’s abilities, but to mark his efforts in the way and to show the master’s recognition of a student’s efforts. If a karate master holds his student back from testing to the next belt for a longer period of time than is customary, the belt rank gains value for the student, because he knows the master will not award it until he believes the student is ready. While it is true that all men are fallible (even martial arts masters), it should be noted that the reputation of a master rides on the performance of his students, and in the medieval example of the knight and his squire, his very life and success in battle might depend on it.
The second criticism of the apprenticeship method is that it requires a high teacher/ student ratio and takes years to complete. Historically, warrior apprentices started as young as ten to twelve years of age in order to complete their training by the time they were of a military age. Such a system is not well suited for mass production, and thus fell out of favor beginning in the early nineteenth century when armies began to be raised and equipped on an industrial scale. However, with the end of the Cold War, we are seeing the resurgence of smaller professional armies drawn from a warrior class of society. This may lead to a resurgence of apprenticeship as martial training.
Having discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each method we see, each is particularly valuable for learning certain aspects of martial skill.
But what of the ranking systems that each employ? How valuable are the rankings? Is a third degree black belt equivalent to a pro MMA fighter? Or an accomplished IDPA competitor to someone who has achieved Combat Handgun Master? The problem is not with answering this type of question, the problem is with the question itself. The question assumes the rank system is a measure of the martial qualities and ability of the rank holder. The strange irony is that the student that sees his rank as such is least likely to ever achieve that which he seeks. The student who sees the rank system as a path to mastery, striving for excellence all along the way, will indeed reach mastery, whether that path lies through competition, metrics, apprenticeship, or any combination of all three.
Thus the measurable is only of value when joined with the immeasurable. The rank system is of great value to the martial artist who uses it as a path of study, and strives for excellence along that path. But the student who sees the rank as a goal in itself achieves nothing. For by working through the measurable path of rank, while striving for excellence the student also attains the immeasurable qualities.
Rank plus excellence is everything, rank without excellence is nothing.
american fyrd 