{"id":8814,"date":"2018-12-05T07:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T07:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/?p=8814"},"modified":"2021-03-31T14:59:03","modified_gmt":"2021-03-31T14:59:03","slug":"aquatic-combat-tactics-evasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/05\/aquatic-combat-tactics-evasion\/","title":{"rendered":"Aquatic Combat Tactics: Evasion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Become An Aquatic Warrior<\/h4>\nLet's take the concept of \"Running the Gauntlet\"<\/em> as covered previously and apply it to aquatic environments. Any serious reading of the historical record (ancient or modern) will leave one hard-pressed to find examples of warrior cultures ignoring the ability of their warriors to maneuver in the water.\n\nI'm not talking about naval action, whether it be a ship-of-the-line under full sail or small SEAL teams operating in a Zodiac boat. I am talking about the ability of individual warriors to maneuver, attack, and survive in the water itself on a solo basis.\n\nThe solitary warrior's ability to swim \u2014 both on the surface and beneath the water \u2014 and to do so with stealth or evasive action under the load of carrying or towing weapons, to efficiently assault beaches, to wisely and efficiently abandon a sinking craft, to be able to resort to hand-to-hand\/close-quarter battles in a water-treading environment...That<\/em> is what I'm talking about.\n
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Aquatic Combat In History<\/h4>\nAll of these skills and tactics have been and are valued by warrior cultures around the world. From today's Navy SEALs to the Navy Frogmen of yesteryear, in Ramses II's rout of the Hittites on the Orontes River, the Franconians crossing the Rhine on their shields, and various tales of Algonquin tribes making stealth assaults via rivers during the bloody French and Indian Wars, we have tales of great warriors who valued aquatic ability in their warriors and possessed this ability themselves; Warriors such as Charlemagne, Barbarossa, Carl the Great, Otto II, and my Viking forebear, Olaf Trygvesson.\n\nWe know the value of individual water tactics in a martial sense from the Sagas of the Northlanders and from the accounts of ancient Persian warriors who were expected to swim strong and well with weapons held aloft. The Spartans considered good watermanship a must and the Romans trained legionnaires to swim both with and without armor.\n\nStories such as these abound regarding martial aquatic prowess, and yet today we see the esteem for water warriorship reduced to \"Oh, the SEALs are good swimmers\"<\/em> with nary hide nor hair of other contemporary schools of thought which embrace the practice in a warrior's sense.\n\n[dfads params='groups=292&limit=1&orderby=random']\n

Why Aquatic Combat Training?<\/h4>\nAdmittedly, most of us will not be storming the beaches at Guadalcanal or be expected to cross the Danube in full armor, but many of us do train for other unlikely eventualities, so why is it that this one is given such short shrift?\n\nAny of us could be expected to survive a car plunging from a bridge into a river. Many of us might experience the necessity of fording or surviving our new era of storm surge and flooding where we can even see landlocked Texans needing some aquatic ability.\n\nIncreasing our confidence in the water by improving our aquatic survival skills and adding aquatic training to our conditioning is simply one more wise feather to add to our training cap, not to mention a refreshing and invigorating way to capture another aspect of our historical warrior forebears.\n\nWith all of this in mind I offer the following drill\/training exercise\/conditioning challenge (one of many from our upcoming series on Water Warriorship).\n
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The Challenge<\/h4>\nGet yourself to the body of water of your choice (open water is ideal, but you can still follow along if a pool is all you have available to you) and do the following:\n