Combat Pragmatist/Real Life: Difference between revisions
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* Snipers in general either are this trope or on the receiving end of this trope. Many snipers try to have a consistent pattern when killing the enemy, such as shooting the first in line, to make no one want to lead a patrol, to ruin enemy moral. Of course, snipers are often attacked with artilerly barrages.
* The normal form of combat between tribal peoples is a function of thievery or assassination. When they fight honorably they have elders waiting to call it off if things get to hot. In other words it is a duel or a tournament rather then a battle.
** More complex societies with professional
* One reason frontier warfare is so brutal is that people are fighting for their own purposes rather then those of their governments. That is they are interested in direct possession of land, portable property, mates, slaves, etc. Those have two common settings:
*# Not serious. Low-risk petty raids, especially cattle rustling, or what amounts to skirmishes between neighbor gangs venting steam and showing off. Nobody is interested in fighting to the death or wants to wind up in a vendetta, so it's mostly limited to hit-and-run and warning shots. Occasionally someone is killed, but this may go on indefinitely with less than one fatality per fight on the average. The rest of time these groups may trade (one variant was described as "the townies cheat the nomads, the nomads steals back in raids about as much"), and neither wants the relations to sour too much.
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** Likewise rulers are interested in controlling realms not in personally farming them. And corpses [[Captain Obvious|can't pay taxes.]] While soldiers are just fighting either because it is a job (for privates) or because it is the [[Family Business]] (for officers especially aristocrats). Thus the reason they fight comparatively honorably is that it is in their interest.
**And equally when that tacit agreement wears thin it is sometimes because of an import of concepts from the frontier like race paranoia or "living space" or whatever.
=== Specific ===
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* George Washington was a warfare Pragmatist. Launching a major attack on ''Christmas morning'', when the enemy was sure to be drunk/sleeping/both, is only his most infamous act of dishonorable warfare. Many historians have attributed the American victory to this.
** One wonders how else you'd expect to beat a town-full of [[Badass]] [[Mercenaries]]. They also had heard the Americans were coming, and didn't care. Bad idea.
*** Actually, the Hessian commander put his men on
* The North Vietnamese also took advantage of a day that was a holiday when they launched the Tet Offensive on January 30th, 1968. That was Tet, the first day of the New Year, probably the most important holiday of the Vietnamese calendar. On top of that, they had previously announced that they would honor a two-day ceasefire to allow the celebration of the holiday. Given the scope of the attack, they never had any intention of honoring that ceasefire. Worse still, they didn't attack soldiers: they attacked ''camera crews'', hoping that the footage sent back to America would lessen morale at home. It was at that point that the war really started to be perceived negatively by the public.
** They also used many other effective tactics. Littering the woods with booby traps designed to wound soldiers so when the others came to rescue them the Vietnamese would shoot them. The tunnel system drew a platoon of Americans with a small force and then had reserves pop up out of the ground and destroy them. They also [[Honey Trap|used prostitutes as spies]].
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* The specialty of the Sardinian military and its Royal Italian successor was more fighting dirty than fighting fair. The Sardinian Army had little money or space for actual cavalry, so they trained the Bersaglieri, fast running light infantry trained to quickly form an infantry square, repeal cavalry charges and then ''charge the cavalry as it pulled back to regroup, [[Up to Eleven|possibly on the flank]]'' (they actually charged Russian cavalry busy attacking French infantry at the Battle of the Chernaya, routing the Russians). During [[World War II]], the Italian Alpini (mountain troops) ski troops got a scary fame in Soviet Union due their habit of popping out of nowhere in the middle of the night, gunning or bombing down everyone and everything they saw and run away. During [[World War II]] the Italians infiltrated the American embassy at Rome as soon as they heard of Pearl Harbor to steal the American diplomatic codes before the local copies were destroyed, with a radio interception unit giving Rommel an edge due a very talkative American military aide at Alexandria (part of the reason Rommel lost at El Alamein was that the British found out, kicked the military aide out of Egypt and had the Americans change all their codes at once). The Italian Navy during both World Wars had a nasty habit of torpedoing or mining enemy ships in harbour (the Austrians during [[World War I]] didn't suffer damage as they knew about Italians loving to fight dirty and were prepared. The Royal Navy didn't expect that, and lost two battleships, a tanker and a destroyer, the latter as collateral damage, in a single raid before wising up) and arming patrol motorboats with torpedoes ([[Crowning Moment of Awesome|they sank the Austrian flagship after stumbling on it, with another Austrian ship filming what had happened]]). Oh, and that part about dropping bombs from air being originally a war crime? The Italians pionereed the art of bombing enemy troops while knowing that.
*One weird subversion was in the great Truk raid preceding the [[World War II|Marianas Campaign]]. After the striking power of Japan's Truk base had been eliminated and a pitiful convoy was fleeing, [[The Spock|Admiral Spruance]] [[Out of Character|of all people]] took off after them personally in a battleship like a [[New Meat|wet-behind-the-ears]] Ensign [[Glory Hound|starving for glory]] even ordering bombers away so he could have his kill. No logical explanation seems to have been given other then that Spruance thought he had achieved enough dominance in the battle area to indulge a little sentiment.
* Themistocles in Ancient Athens was not only a [[Combat Pragmatist]] but a shining example of a [[Sleazy Politician]]. He was perfectly willing to trample the reputation of rivals by rumor mongering in a way fammmiliar to modern Westerners. From the martial (or the "minervan" to reference the goddess of Athens known for smart fighting) point of view, Themistocles turned away from the tradition of bronze clad hoplites killing each other on foot in a [[Let's Fight Like Gentlemen|manly manner]] armed with gear they had paid for. He thought that kind of thing was still all very well in its place but had to be augmented for an enemy [[Outside Context Villain|like the Persians]] with the Middle Eastern style of bureaucratized warfare. So he used a [[Deus Ex Machina|lucky silver strike]] to buy a fleet. The trick? A fleet costs gobs of money-but when you have gobs of money you can spend it on anything you want which is less true about olive farms. Not only that but it could utilize the landless simply by putting them on an oar. This became a force multiplier because it made all of Athen's citizens, and even hired foreigners military assets. Finally it was an operational force multiplier because once sea control was gained (a bit of a bother as Phoenicians and Medized Greeks were [[Worthy Opponent|no slouches]]) the Persian army ashore was trapped with a limited amount of supplies. While the Greeks could cruise all around the Eastern Mediterenean, pillaging, supporting would-be rebels, and basically just making trouble.
*[[Combat Pragmatism]] was the cause of a lot of social changes in US history. As manpower has to be gotten somehow an appeal has to be made to minorities. And while discrimination often persisted it had to be downplayed to attract recruits and get them to fight well. Even the Confederacy discussed freeing and recruiting slaves on the grounds that they A) disliked invaders more than they disliked slavery (not likely but an
== Martial Arts ==
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* [[wikipedia:William E. Fairbairn|Major William E. Fairbairn]]. Taught, among other things, sentry elimination to commandos. See [[Combat Pragmatist/Quotes|the quotes page]].
**By the way the combat style ''he'' invented was learned as a cop on the [[Wretched Hive|streets of Shanghai.]] Figure the rest out.
**As in similar examples, Fairbairn was teaching boys who used [[Good Old Fisticuffs]] for status-sorting how to kill (and of course girls who had their own ways of status sorting). His methods were disliked because they simply did not belong in a schoolyard.
* [[Miyamoto Musashi]]. Musashi probably would have used a gun if he had one available and the other guy didn't. "Fight FAIR!" is never really emphasized in his book.
** He'd have been willing to use a gun as though it were surprising. History shows that Samurai generally were pretty pragmatic on this and many other points.
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* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110808065944/http://jkdtalk.com/showpost.php?p=12683&postcount=10 This poster] on the Jeet Kune Do Talk forum used one of the [[Squick|grossest]] and [[Humiliation Conga|embarrassing]] but effective [[Improvised Weapon]] ever when he was attacked while using the urinal: [[Urine Trouble|his own piss]].
* [[Capoeira]]. [[Depending on the Writer|Depending on who you learn it from]], Capoeira can encompass anything from the standard showy but slow acrobatics, sweeps and kicks to slapping opponents' ears to disorient them, headbutts to the groan, concealed weaponry, tackles, takedowns, and more. "Cheapshots" just before a match proper aren't unheard of from savvy Capoeiristas who see an opponent without his guard up at all times.
== Other Forms of Combat ==
* Humanity's advancement is a decent amount of testament to this trope, honestly. If there's no way you can kill a larger animal with your bare hands, use a sharp rock. When your opponents are using sharp rocks, lash a sharp rock to a stick to create a spear. When your opponents are using spears, ''throw'' the spear, making it a javelin. When your opponents are using javelins, attach feathers and shoot them out of a bow, making them arrows. And so on...
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