Article 1/5 of FWC Wing Chun versus Krav Maga

What Was Krav Maga Actually Designed For?

Before asking whether Krav Maga is effective, it helps to ask a more basic question: what was it originally designed to do, and who was it designed for?

Today, Krav Maga is known around the world primarily as a civilian self-defense system. People join Krav Maga schools to learn how to deal with punches, grabs, chokes, knives, weapons and other potentially dangerous situations.

But the system that eventually became modern Krav Maga was shaped largely by a very different environment:

military training.

Once we understand the problem the military was trying to solve, many of Krav Maga's characteristics begin to make much more sense.

Krav Maga did not appear from nowhere

The history of Krav Maga is often told as the story of one man: Imi Lichtenfeld.

Lichtenfeld was an accomplished boxer and wrestler who experienced violent antisemitic confrontations in Bratislava during the 1930s. Those experiences helped shape his understanding that competitive fighting and uncontrolled street violence were different problems.

After eventually reaching Mandatory Palestine, Lichtenfeld became involved in training Jewish defense organizations and later served as an important close-combat instructor in the newly established Israel Defense Forces.

But the historical picture is more complicated than simply saying that Imi invented a complete new martial art and then gave it to the military.

Practical close-combat training already existed within organizations such as the Haganah and Palmach. It included material drawn from boxing, jujutsu and judo, knife fighting, stick fighting and other forms of military combat training. The term Kapap was associated with this broader practical approach.

Lichtenfeld became one of the important instructors within this environment and later a central figure in the development of what became Krav Maga.

This distinction is important because Krav Maga was not created by inventing every movement from scratch.

It developed by selecting, adapting and organizing existing fighting methods around a practical requirement.

And increasingly, that requirement was military.

The military did not need martial artists

When the IDF was established in 1948, soldiers needed some ability to fight at close range.

But a soldier has a lot to learn.

Weapons handling, fitness, tactics, fieldcraft, teamwork and many other skills are generally more important to a soldier's job than becoming an expert unarmed fighter.

There simply isn't unlimited time available for martial-arts training.

The objective therefore could not realistically be:

Turn every soldier into an expert fighter.

It had to be much closer to:

Give soldiers useful close-combat skills within the limited training time available.

That is a completely different design problem from creating a martial art someone might study for twenty years.

And it helps explain one of the most interesting developments in early military Krav Maga.

Sometimes improvement means removing techniques

In 1953, an IDF professional committee headed by Lichtenfeld reviewed the existing close-combat material and reduced the scope of what was being taught to soldiers.

Historical research into the surviving material reports that the committee was tasked with selecting approximately 35 techniques from the larger curriculum.

That number is interesting, but the thinking behind it is even more important.

The military already had access to plenty of fighting material.

Boxing existed.

Jujutsu and judo existed.

Knife and stick methods existed.

There was no shortage of techniques that could be taught.

The real problem was:

There was too much to teach.

So instead of asking:

What else can we add?

the military had to ask:

What does a soldier actually need?

Which skills justified the limited training time available?

Which solutions could be learned reasonably quickly?

Which material could be removed without significantly reducing the soldier's ability to deal with the situations that mattered?

Seen this way, simplicity was not necessarily a limitation of early Krav Maga.

Simplicity was part of the design.

Krav Maga was only part of the soldier's fighting system

There is another important point that can easily disappear when military Krav Maga is discussed as a martial art.

The soldier's primary way of fighting is not empty-handed Krav Maga.

A soldier has weapons.

He has equipment.

He has comrades.

He has military tactics.

He is also being physically conditioned for combat.

Krav Maga exists inside that much larger system.

This changes the problem considerably.

A soldier may need empty-hand skills because something has already gone wrong.

Perhaps an opponent has reached him before he can effectively use his weapon.

Perhaps someone is attempting to take his weapon.

Perhaps he has been grabbed.

Perhaps the distance has suddenly collapsed.

Perhaps he faces a close-range attack and cannot immediately use his normal tools.

At that point, the objective is not to demonstrate sophisticated martial-arts ability.

The soldier needs to solve the immediate problem, regain an advantage and continue functioning.

Seen from that perspective, Krav Maga's emphasis on direct solutions to immediate threats makes considerable sense.

Why physicality and aggression make sense

Krav Maga also has a reputation for being highly physical and aggressive.

Its military background again provides important context.

Military Krav Maga does not exist in isolation.

The person learning it is also being trained physically and psychologically as a soldier.

Fitness, resilience, decisiveness, the ability to continue while tired and the willingness to act physically when necessary are being developed by the larger military training environment.

Research observing the IDF's close-combat instructor training gives an unusually clear example of this. In the final “fights” training session, instructors in protective equipment were required to face consecutive opponents and continue until they could no longer fight.

The purpose was clearly not simply to test whether they remembered particular techniques.

It also tested whether they would continue functioning under exhaustion, discomfort and pressure.

Modern IDF descriptions similarly emphasize the physical side of Krav Maga training, including quickness and developing a stronger body.

So the requirement isn't simply:

Know what to do.

It is also:

Be physically and psychologically capable of doing it decisively when required.

For military training, that is logical.

A relatively simple action performed quickly, aggressively and with commitment may be more useful to a soldier with limited hand-to-hand training than a technically sophisticated solution requiring years to develop.

Krav Maga did not have to solve everything

This may be one of the most important points when trying to understand the original design.

Krav Maga did not have to turn the soldier into a complete unarmed fighter.

It didn't have to replace his weapon.

It didn't have to replace military tactics.

It didn't have to replace his physical conditioning.

And it didn't have to occupy years of his training.

It had to fill a particular gap:

What can the soldier do when close physical contact creates an immediate problem that his normal tools cannot solve quickly enough?

That is a much narrower requirement.

And once we view Krav Maga through that lens, its design becomes quite elegant.

Take existing fighting knowledge.

Remove unnecessary complexity.

Keep a relatively small number of useful solutions.

Train them physically.

Teach decisive action.

Expose the practitioner to pressure.

And then return to the much larger job of training the soldier.

Was Krav Maga well designed?

This depends entirely on what we expect it to do.

If we judge early military Krav Maga by whether it could turn someone into a highly sophisticated unarmed fighter, we may be judging it against a requirement it was never intended to meet.

A better question is:

Could it give soldiers useful close-combat ability without taking too much time away from everything else they needed to learn?

Seen from that perspective, the military's movement toward simplification is particularly interesting.

Instead of endlessly collecting techniques, the design pressure appears to have moved in the opposite direction.

Take what is useful.

Remove what isn't necessary.

Keep the solutions relatively simple.

Train them hard enough to be usable.

For its intended user and purpose, that is a very logical approach.

Then the user changed

In 1964, Lichtenfeld retired from military service and increasingly devoted himself to adapting and teaching Krav Maga to civilians.

And this changed the design problem.

The student was no longer necessarily a soldier receiving a limited amount of close-combat instruction as one small part of military preparation.

A civilian might train Krav Maga every week for years.

A long-term curriculum therefore developed. Ranking structures appeared. The amount and variety of material could expand. More situations and more specialized solutions could be introduced.

None of that necessarily made civilian Krav Maga worse.

But it did make it different.

The original military pressure had been toward reduction:

How much does this soldier really need to learn?

Long-term civilian training creates almost the opposite question:

What should someone learn next after they already know the basics?

And that leads to a much bigger question.

A military solution becomes a civilian system

What happens when a method shaped by limited military training time becomes something civilians practice for five, ten or twenty years?

Should progress mean learning more situations and more solutions?

Should the original small core simply be practiced more deeply?

How much should a civilian system depend on the physical conditioning and aggressive mindset that make sense in a military environment?

And are the situations faced by soldiers actually the same problems that civilian self-defense should prioritize?

Those are separate questions.

And they deserve to be considered separately.

Because before judging Krav Maga as a modern civilian self-defense system, it is worth understanding something important:

The environment that originally shaped it was trying to solve a very specific problem.

That may also be the most useful lesson from its history.

When evaluating any martial art or self-defense system, perhaps we shouldn't begin by asking:

“Does it work?”

A better place to start is:

“What was it designed to do, and who was it designed to do it for?”

Only then can we ask whether that design still fits the problem we want to solve today.

https://www.idf.il/en/articles/2023/a-brief-look-into-the-methods-of-krav-maga/

https://kravmagafinland.com/en/history/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095327x10372598

https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/training-and-preparation/elite-soldiers-fight-it-out-in-idfs-first-ever-krav-maga-tournament/