Thoughts on Martial Arts and LOAC

The other day, I posted an email from Major John Harwood of the U.S. Air Force in connection with the coming Lawfare Drone Smackdown. It reads in relevant part:

. . . you’ve established your own LOAC. “No drone can be attacked while it is on the ground either following a crash or during its battery-change-break.” In other words, when a drone is hors de combat, no deliberate targeting. There’s gotta be a law review article in here somewhere—do we as humans have an innate need to create laws to govern conflicts? Even the UFC (a mixed martial arts association) had to do away with its no-holds-barred approach. Is there any form of combat, or even mock combat, that does so without rules?

I've been thinking ever since about Harwood's point about martial arts. I don't follow the U.F.C., but I do practice both taekwondo and aikido. As Jack noted recently, I have a black belt in taekwondo, and I have been learning aikido for the past year or so as well--though I am still very much a beginner. Between the two, I take martial arts classes daily--sometimes more than once a day. And Harwood is here raising a profound question that I had never considered before: Is the LOAC really just a highly-formalized and developed system of combat rules that are somehow inherent in all systems of human conflict and combat? I have always kept my martial arts life and my Lawfare life pretty separate, but Harwood's email makes me wonder if that's an analytical error. Might it be more accurate, in fact, to say that martial arts is, ahem, a continuation of Lawfare by other means? Or vice versa. Harwood's email caused me to rewatch this video, which I posted to Facebook last year. It is the finals of the men's over-40 point sparring event at a martial arts tournament in Baltimore. I don't normally compete, but I had challenged a young friend of mine to enter the sparring competition at this tournament---to which I was taking a group of kids---and told her that if she did so, she could decide what event I had to enter. And thus, I found myself matched against a much bigger guy, incongruously wearing a polo shirt. "Finals" is a illustrious-sounding word---with its implication, particularly as the Olympics get started---of lots of preliminary rounds. In this case, there were only three entrants, so there was only one prior round---and one of the three of us (me, as things turned out) had to get a pass for the first round. So the finals turned out to be the only match I fought. Sparring can be dangerous. People are hitting each other---and kicking each other. The guy who lost the first round actually popped an Achilles tendon and had to be taken away in an ambulance. That said, notice how there is a clear LOAC of the fight. I'm not talking here just about the scoring system (one point for a punch that lands; two points for a kick that lands; the winner is the one who reaches five points first). I'm talking also other rules---all of them rigorously observed by two people who have never met before and thus have to at some level trust that the other will abide by them:

• All hits are waist-level or higher.
• Nobody uses knee or elbow hits.
• When the referee calls a break, both fighters break immediately. Nobody tries to sneak in a last hit.
• Nobody hits to the back or to the back of the head.
• The referee--along with two judges--functions not only as an arbiter of scoring (for which there is no analog in LOAC) but as an ICRC-like arbiter of legality. (You can see the two judges and the referee consult at one point in the video).
• Combatants bow to each other after the match.

In some ways, the combat rules of aikido practice are even more interesting. Aikido is a grappling art---involving mostly throws, pins, and holds, not strikes. It is militantly non-competitive. There are no tournaments. It's also by design a purely defensive system; it concerns itself almost exclusively with effective and elegant responses to attack, not with maximizing the effectiveness of the attack itself. The goal of most aikido attacks is thus to compel proper defensive technique. And the relationship between the attacker and the defender is, consequently, oddly non-adversarial---but something of a partnership. One is hitting the other, or grabbing him---or striking him with a staff or a wooden sword---and should be doing so earnestly. But the strike is never with the actual goal of landing the blow (though this can certainly be a collateral consequence of practice). Aikido practice is more like a live-fire drill. And this fact gives rise to certainly highly-specialized LOAC rules. For example:

• When a hold or pin begins to hurt, the person subject to it slaps the mat and must be immediately released.
• The speed of any attack must be calibrated to the skill level of the defender.
• The attacker must not be thrown at an intensity level or speed beyond his or her skill level in taking falls.

You can see these rules in action in this brief video about the studio at which I practice (I do not appear in it):

To understand why this sort of LOAC of practice is so important, watch a few minutes of this:

In both aikido and taekwondo, willfully violating the essential LOAC of the art is deeply frowned upon. This is principally for reasons of safety, but I don't think it's only for reasons of safety. There's nothing unsafe, after all, about failing to bow to an opponent (though there is something unsafe about an opponent so incapable of controlling anger and emotion that he can't bring himself to bow after he's lost a match). There's an element of martial arts LOAC that's centrally about civilized behavior, norms, and rules in the midst of uncivilized activity--which is exactly what the LOAC itself is about.

All of which is to say that I think Harwood is on to something here. There is something deep in humans that makes us want structured rules of combat. I'm not sure if anyone has ever written a law review article on LOAC and combat arts and sports. But it strikes me as a good and interesting topic for some eccentric comparative law scholar somewhere. Among other things, a comparative analysis of different martial arts LOACs would be fascinating--and a great excuse to visit dojos and studios of different types.

Off to aikido practice...