George S. Ledyard wrote:

The idea that it is all theory anyway simply isn't true. Untrained people may react in very different ways when put under stress. But the whole idea of military and police training is to make the training as close to the real situation for which you are preparing as possible. Then you do as much training as you can. If you have structired the training properly the student will respond in reality as he was trained to do, bypassing a lot of the conscious and even unconscious responses, and substituting automatioc reaction. The problem with most training programs is that they don't closely resemble the real thing. That is especially true of Aikido which has a very controlled method of training that does little to prepare the student for the down and dirty reality of the street. When we do training for the police we utilize the same armored assailants that the model mugging people use. The cops who have done the training have commented that it was the closest thing to being on the street and being scared that they ever encountered in training. The skills that we were imprinting in that training were exactly what later came when they hit the real situations out on the street. If the training is structired correctly it is quite possible to train most individuals to act fairly automatically. The more complex the level of the skills you are traiing the more amount of time it takes to do it. [/b]