Wayne,

This with your student (I think we are talking the same guy) is exactly on point....you teach him mental and physical organization, strategic/tactical thinking re: movement in relation to confirmed adversaries, weapons acquisition and deployment, etc. The things that I think martial arts teachers can should be teaching.

He then adapts and applies it to his present professional reality. Here is where I think the lessons of the past have their most usefulness to modern day. I think it would be a mistake to attempt to re-engineer the ryu and teach "Takeuchi Tactical Handgunning," and to equate directly things found in the one with the other without the background in both.

But I am willing to bet that there is some great synergy that your student has discovered in both the obvious, and in some of the stuff that probably you or he never considered would be applicable in certain contexts, or that is hidden to someone that might not have ever been in a close fight, with weapons, wearing armor...traditional or modern.

The essentials that Den mentions are where the disconnect is - martial arts really don't teach that in a modern context, and context is important for the reasons we have already been discussing.

My observations with LE and citizen students is that LE has a much better grasp of Den's essentials, but on average much poorer physical skills and understanding of fight strategy and tactics, and the committed citizen martial artist understands physical strategy and tactics and skills, but is often not very comfortable with the awareness, threat evaluation and management, etc. within the modern context.

Good stuff, all.