Marketing
As an Aikido teacher and Police Defensive Tactics Instructor I have encountered a number of law enforcement / military training systems that purport to be "scientific". This is usually don to create the impression that the system being studied is not "martial arts" which require lengthy training and are made out to be too complex for teaching to personnel in a short-term situation.
What you encounter in these systems is:
a) A teacher who learned his techniques the same way the rest of us have i.e. the martial arts
b) A teacher who is a master at creating western scientific sounding terms to describe the concepts he has learned through his martial arts, military, law enforcement experience.
c) A teacher who understands the concept of the "Giffen Good" in microeconomics. That is an item that has a reverse demand curve in which the more it costs, the greater the demand. The creators of these systems invariably charge a price for their services that is far in excess of what the norm would be in their field.
Now this doesn't mean that the stuff is not good. Tony Blauer is a fine example of a quality product. It is expensive but is probably worth the price. Just remember that what you are paying for is Tony taking his martial arts experience, using his creative brainpower to play with different ways to train, and his incomparable ability to develop new vocabulary. The latter is most important because in this field you have to convince the administrators to hire you so you need to sound really cool. Use all the current buzzwords. It's all packaging.
There are plenty of folks around who know the same things. Peterson's claims that the Russians stole the Systema techniques from the SCARS system is laughable. What you notice about most of them is that they are broke. What separates the successful from the broke martial artist is marketing. Blauer, Petersen, Siddel etc. are guys who had the smarts to take their knowledge and repackage it so that it looked different from what everybody else was doing. People pay fantastic amounts of money to do these systems. Spending a lot of time being pissed off at them is like being pissed off at Billy Blanks for being smart enough to realize that there were a whole bunch of people that wanted to do martial arts without the "martial". Now he is a millionaire and we're not.
All of these guys offer a good product. I'd be happy to do any of these systems if I could get somebody else to pay for it. Just don't believe all the hype. Especially in Petersen's case it is exaggeration to the point of untruthfulness. At least you don't hear Tony Blauer spending all his time claiming that everybody else's stuff is dog doo and if someone else is doing something right he must have stolen it from him.
[Edited by George Ledyard on 10-13-2000 at 09:06 AM]
George S. Ledyard
Aikido Eastside
Defensive Tactics Options
Bellevue, WA