Martyrdom in Combat: Balancing Strategic Benefit and Cultural Significance

Author: Pendekar Hussein (Founder of Total Urban Survival and Pencak Silat Sharaf)

Martyrdom, often revered as the pinnacle of selfless sacrifice in the context of warfare, has deep historical, religious, and cultural roots, in many societies around the world. While the willingness to die for a cause is an undeniably powerful force and plays a vital role in decisive combative action, it is crucial to understand the inherent strategic weakness associated with martyrdom for martyrdom’s sake. This article delves into the intricacies of this reality and explores the benefits of cultivating a mentality that prioritizes the survival of combatants while still acknowledging the sheer power the willingness to die for what you believe in provides to a combatant. I truly believe that survival is not only an asset, but a strategic imperative for any combatant in man to man, small-scale, or large-scale conflict, as it ensures the continuity of knowledge, increases adaptability, and better protects the valuables I.e. loved ones, land, etc, that the combatant is ultimately fighting for. Simply stated, survival is accretive. The longer you can survive, the better you’ll be at combatting other humans.

The Paradox of Martyrdom

Martyrdom often takes on a sacred dimension. It symbolizes unwavering commitment to a cause, often religious or nationalistic, and lifts the martyr to the level of hero in the eyes of their community or nation. However, from a strategic perspective, martyrdom of the combatant can create nasty vulnerabilities and skills gaps that diminish the lethality of his force and ultimately lead them to combat loses. When dedicated combatants willingly embrace death as a path to martyrdom, each loss results in the extinguishing of valuable knowledge, experience, and skills that if harnessed and shared, would create a much stronger fighting force to face the enemy in the second round of hostilities. This is why the loss of a committed fighter can significantly weaken a group's operational effectiveness in the short term and the fighting morale of the group in the longterm as losses rack up and defeat seems inevitable. Therefore, the aim of dying and being martyred by itself should never be the primary vision for a combatant but rather a byproduct of successful engagements which ultimately lead to the fate of death for that combatant.

Their Is no Better Teacher Than The Survivor

The survival of knowledgable combatants, especially in non-conventional warfare such as resistance wars against significantly more powerful enemies, carries profound implications. In such conflicts, surviving combatants have the opportunity to learn from their experiences and their enemy’s, adapt to the evolving nature of battlefields, and share their insights with junior warriors in the successive engagements. These survivors become the repositories of accumulated knowledge and expertise, thereby playing a pivotal role in maintaining the cohesiveness and strength of the group. By staying alive through multiple engagements, they transform into battle-hardened veterans capable of making critical decisions and devising sophisticated strategies. Essentially, the longer they can remain alive, the more valuable they will become to the people around them and the less affected they will be with the combative environment itself. This concept can also be witnessed in martial arts. The masters that fought multiple fights, and survived, ended up creating extremely functional combative curriculums that lived long after their individual demise. 

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), active in Sri Lanka, provide a compelling case study as well. The LTTE fighters, rather than embracing martyrdom, placed a premium on survival. This emphasis on staying alive allowed them to accumulate invaluable knowledge and experience over decades of conflict. They evolved their tactics, developed a robust network, and became an incredibly potent force. The enduring conflict showcases the impact of fighters who prioritize survival in protracted non-conventional warfare. This does not mean that they didn’t embrace death, they most certainly did, but it was not their primary objective in combat.

Khalid Ibn Walid at the Siege of Damascus

The early Muslim battle commander, Khalid Ibn Walid, was another excellent example of this concept. He actively engaged the enemies of the State in repeated large-scale warfare, small-scale skirmishes and raids, and even in single-man duels. In all of these altercations, he was 100% ready to become a martyr, but he never recklessly put himself in harms way in order to force martyrdom upon himself as if it was some sort of medal to be won. To the contrary, he also put a premium on survival, and when faced with overwhelming odds fighting the Romans toe to toe where other commanders had already run towards obvious martyrdom, he successfully performed tactical retreats, learned from the situation, and lived to fight those same Romans again and defeat them decisively in the near future. The community reprimanded him for his “mistake” but his commander, the Prophet Muhamad (SAWS) himself, understood the strategic implications of the decision and never did. Khalid’s actions were calculated, and his successive experiences in war made him one of the most effective commanders in the early Muslim army who set the strategic groundwork for the conquest of the entire Middle East and North Africa. Until today, his pragmatic approach to embracing martyrdom while still placing a premium on living to gain experience provides a great example to students of strategy. Khalid Ibn Walid died in his bed with hundreds of battle scars all over his body and an ocean of tactical and strategic knowledge passed to the next generation of commanders who came after him.

The More Experience You Have The Better you Are At Handling Conflict

Combatants who prioritize survival tend to exhibit greater resilience and adaptability in the face of adversity, because violence tends to diminish in effect the more a combatant is exposed to it. The first experience is the hardest, but the seventh or tenth is rarely as daunting. So their accumulated experience equips them to make informed decisions under extreme pressure, very quickly, which significantly contributes to the overall effectiveness of a fighting force. As combatants gain experience through surviving multiple encounters, they learn to anticipate enemy strategies, analyze evolving dynamics, and fine-tune their own tactics. This adaptation not only strengthens their own resolve but also enhances the efficiency of their group.

In the Middle East conflicts, the resistance groups Hamas and Hezbollah embody the epitome of survival-focused thinking. Operating in Lebanon, Hezbollah faced a series of conflicts with the Israeli Occupation Forces, including a major escalation in the 2006 war with Israel. The group's fighters displayed remarkable adaptability and resilience, surviving multiple engagements and evolving their tactics to counter Israeli military superiority. Their ability to adapt, learned through survival, contributed to their enduring presence and influence in the region. If the bulk of the Hezbollah special forces had run towards martyrdom mindlessly, the Israelis would have simply mowed them down and moved on. But their focus on staying alive, gaining combat experience, and disseminating that experience to the rest of their ranks is what has classed Hezbollah as one of the most effective non-conventional warfare forces in the region, and some would argue, on earth. The same can be said for Hamas but on a much smaller scale due to the Palestinian people being under a decades-long military occupation by Israel. This raging conflict has dealt so much misery to the people on both sides, but has served to sharpen Hamas’ fighting capabilities once they realized that volunteering for Israeli bullets made for great funeral processions but nothing in terms of tactical capability. The realization that a living combatant with multiple experiences fighting was far more valuable to the cumulative capability of the group was a turning point for their ability to fight a far superior adversary while employing minimal resources at their disposal.

My Final Thoughts

In combat, the idealization of martyrdom simply for martyrdom’s sake, can inadvertently undermine a force's operational effectiveness. So embracing the strategic significance of survival is not merely a tactical shift but an imperative if you truly care about the longterm success of your side in a conflict. Survivors act as the bridges between the past and the future, passing on their knowledge and skills to the next generation of combatants. These survivors exhibit an extraordinary ability to cope with complex and protracted conflicts. Therefore, the cultivation of a survival-oriented mentality coupled with a delayed-martyrdom mentality, as we saw from the example of Khalid Ibn Walid, becomes not only a strategic advantage, but a necessity for success if a conflict is protracted. It also rounds out martial arts training to provide it with the experience needed to train the next generation with combative skills that are functional and based on the realities of actual conflict, rather than what is perceived to be “real” by instructors who lack experience facing true violence. My words should never be construed as discrediting instructors who don’t have real violence experience, rather like with all professions, having experience matters. And it makes you far more effective at what you do than those who lack it. That’s why I will never win a basketball game against Michael Jordan regardless of how many times I practice in my backyard: experience matters. Lastly, emphasizing the importance of survival without discounting the incredible power that comes with the willingness, and often happiness, of sacrificing oneself for a greater cause, is something that deserves deep thought and contemplation.