From Sun Tzu to George Washington, quotes on military and fighting tactics often exemplify the old adage that “the best defense is a good offense.” The meaning behind this quote has been used to justify the premise that overly aggressive tactics and constant attack is the most effective form of engaging in all forms of battle. This can be applied to war strategy such as in preemptive attack or at the individual level to justify a primarily offensive strategy.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. – Sun Tzu
In man-to-man combat though (outside of lethal close proximity scenarios), and especially in loosely relevant modern day sport (like our own), this adage is often misconstrued and in fact, not the most effective way of winning. You’re familiar with examples of this.
We see this in Mexican boxers. These guys are known sluggers who are going to chase you down even if they take a bit of extra damage. Chavez (mexican) got beat by De la Hoya (mexican but raised stateside) who got beat by Pacquiao. All fights lost by those who were initiating and not the better counter attackers. And we all know know who beat De la Hoya and Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather Jr, a master of fight avoidance.
George Washington wrote in 1799: “…make them believe, that offensive operations, often times, is the surest, if not the only (in some cases) means of defence”
We see this in American wrestlers. American wrestlers are taught to move forward unrelenting in their attack. This builds a crazy level of baseline cardio and an extremely hardened mentality that launches beginner grapplers into at least the intermediate division of most submission grappling tournaments. And it should. But where do we see this strategy falter? Historically, it’s been at the Olympic level. The Soviet Union was the most dominant, so what were they doing? Why did and do American’s lose to modern day Russians? Ding ding, you guessed it. Defense. Kenny Monday beat Dave Schultz but Satiev made him look like he was in middle school. Most recentlyrecently, Sadulaev beat Snyder by tech fall.
). Below are some of his own tutorials. Jones was relentless with his leg lock attacks even looking like he tweaked Lo’s knee at one point on an inside heel hook. He rolled like he had nothing to lose and his leg attacks created enough of a scramble at one point to take Lo’s back and finish with a RNC. Keeping up his momentum he flying triangled the still great Murilo Santana in his next round.
