“Which martial art is best?” Ah, the old argument that never dies…
I really like what Dan Inosanto told me once.
Back when he was a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne there was a lot of rivalry between the soldiers who trained in the martial arts.
Some thought that boxing was the best, others argued for the supremacy of karate, others for judo, others for wrestling.
Then one day a guy came in and said that he could kick anyone’s ass so long as he could choose the location of the fight.
There were many people eager to take him up on his offer but the challenger simply jumped into the deep end of a pool.
Once in 7 feet of water none of his opponents could use any of their kicks, punches, throws, takedowns or submissions.
Instead they were all held underwater by the challenger until they gave up.
You see, this guy played water polo, a sport in which you essentially try to drown members of the opposite team. The pool was his home, and holding people under water was his strategy for winning in that environment.
Context is everything.
Trading punches with an attacker becomes a dumb idea when he outweighs you by 100 lbs. Grappling is probably a bad plan in a multiple attacker scenario. Drawing your knife at a family BBQ when Uncle Fred gets drunk and starts shoving people is the wrong strategy. And drawing your Glock to double-tap some off-his-med schizophrenic yelling at you from the sidewalk is also not cool.
Context is everything.
A technique has to be matched to the opponent, the environment, the available tools, the legal ramifications of taking action, the severity of the threat, and more.
That’s also why, from a self defense perspective at least, you want to be a bit of generalist. You want at least a few reliable striking strategies, a takedown strategy, a get-up-from-the-ground strategy, and a fight-on-the-ground strategy. You want to understand the basics of empty-handed combat, impact weapons, bladed weapons and firearms.
Being well rounded is useful because you can never predict all the potential contexts of a confrontation, and, as I said, context is everything.