Is it viable to have a school for warriors or assassins that pits students against each other in lethal combat?

Question

There is an elite and secretive school of warriors known for its ruthless method of training. Very few students (only around 10%) ever complete their training; this is because the training is often lethal. However, those who do leave the school alive invariably become all-but-legendary. Their very names strike fear in the hearts of their enemies, for their capability in violent ways is unmatched.

The school's masters are of the opinion that it is not possible to train competent warriors unless students are given first hand experience in actual combat; the training in inflicting death must actually involve killing, or else it is nothing but playing games. Therefore, all students must pass three tests: the Test of Iron, the Test of Darkness and the Test of Blood.

During the Test of Iron all students are divided in pairs. Each pair is put on an arena and both students are told to fight a duel to the death.

During the Test of Darkness all students are divided into groups of three. Out of each trio: student A is told to assassinate student B within three days by any means possible, student B is likewise told to assassinate student C and student C is told to assassinate student A. However, A does not know who C is, B does not know who A is and C does not know who B is.

The Test of Blood is the ultimate test during which the whole body of students is divided into two teams. Each student knows the team they belong to. Each team has two weeks to score a decisive victory against the other team. It is expected that leadership of each team emerges spontaneously. It is also expected that both teams engage in a game of espionage, since students may lie to each other about the team they belong to. Finally it is expected that an actual field battle emerges between both teams.

Does this idea make any sense, or is it complete BS?

It might make sense because: - Well, it does seem that such brutal selection would be the only way to accurately judge the capabilities of the students as well as give them necessary experience. Non-lethal training is indeed, by necessity, quite far removed from actual combat. (Note: "accurately judge" not in the sense that always those who die are inferior to those who survive - luck is, obviously, too big of a factor - but in the sense that a master watching events unfold from afar can see what everyone does. It can only be seen if one can act under the threat of death (and not panic, freeze etc) if one is actually put under the threat of death, etc.) Usually it is better to have much more, though slightly less competent warriors, however, if absolute elite is needed, then perhaps this is the way to train such an absolute elite, isn't it? (eg for a guild of assassins or whatever)

It might be complete BS because: - Well, did this ever happen in history? Because if it did not then it seems likely there are important reasons I'm overlooking that do make this absolutely implausible.

Answer 1

What a Waste

The only way to train the perfect warrior or assassin is on the battlefield. The only way to become a master of killing your enemies is to kill your enemies over and over again. Only then is your training complete.

Kill your enemies. Do not kill your friends. From a logistics point of view, it is a waste of time and effort to train one hundred apprentice assassin, then have them fight to the death to get one master assassin.

Instead give jobs to these 100 apprentices. Assassinations. Espionage. Many of them will die in the field. But before they die, some of them will complete their contracts. You get some return for the effort training them.

At the end of the day you still get 99 dead apprentices and 1 grizzled master who completed all their contracts and perfected their skills. But you also get 99 apprentices worth of espionage done.

How do you tell the single survivor is a true master and did not just get lucky? That's part of the training, of course. When you send one apprentice to assassinate Count Fartface, you secretly send three more apprentices to observe. They are good at that sort of thing. After Lord Fartface's body is found, the three observers report back if it was a hard contract to fulfill.

Perhaps students killing each other is still on the table. But it is not advertised in the School Prospectus. Having a student assassinate their best friend is a way to ensure their loyalty. But it must remain a secret from the other students, or else they get a C- and not an A+.

On top of this, some of the students are moles from enemy countries, sent over to find out secrets. Getting rid of these counter-espionage agents is part of the coursework for the real students.

Answer 2

Elite warriors are born and made.

Elite special forces training programs tend to have a lot of washouts. That's because a lot of what makes them special is genetic. For example, they tend to have brain chemistry that lets them react better to stress. Upbringing is important of course, but for the best of the best, you want a good upbringing and good genetics.

Combat is messy. Hellish Quart is a good game for showing that sort of combat. Historically when two people duel, even if not to the death, both of them die a lot. Your training program, if it lacks magical healing, is realistically gonna just end in a lot of broken kids with ptsd and broken bodies.

To make it realistic, you need expendable chaff.

Gladiators certainly didn't kill each other all the time. Many of them had dozens of fights and survived each. As such, have the school buy slaves who have committed crimes or been captured by a foreign nation. These slaves, while expensive, aren't so expensive that they can't be killed. The students at this school can have lethal combat against them without you losing all the experience the students have.

The better students will be more experienced at fighting than random criminals or foreigners, and so will be less injured.

Answer 3

Such a scheme would be radically unstable

What you are training is negative concern for the lives of other members of the hierarchy. That is, other members of the same group are fixed as legitimate targets for killing. And that this produces advancement in the group.

So the result will be, graduates will view their instructors and officers as barriers to advancement. And they will have an ingrained tendency, filtered by the test, to kill those officers to advance.

They might bide their time. They might go on some missions. Then they will return to whatever the home base is. You need to house and feed these critters between missions. They will step out on you in the first moment they think they can succeed. The officer of the garrison will show up dead. And it's a toss-up whether the members of the garrison will side with the killer or the officer. And if they side with the officer the likely result is they start fighting each other.

Other Military Patterns Are Stronger

Contrast this with the methods that such groups as the US Marines follow. They explicitly do not want robots. They want individuals who are capable, but who will cooperate in their units. For example, a twelve man squad that is efficiently cooperating on a task will be far more effective. Much more effective than twelve soldiers who are not cooperating.

They train in these ideas with group tasks. Get everybody over this barrier. Get the intel and get everybody home. No man left behind. Sneak up on this bunker and blow it up then get everybody home. Guard your bunk-mate for two hours and then he guards you for two hours. Right down to giving units R&R at the same time so they go to the local bar and get drunk together.

They also train in loyalty to the hierarchy. This involves huge numbers of actions from the small to the large. Honor guard duty at parades. Saluting officers. Insignia and medals showing rank and special achievement. Sleeping in barracks with the whole group. Eating as a group. Dressing in uniform. Stories about loyalty and honor. Moving in unison when marching. Dress uniforms on special occasions. Public rewards and punishments in line with how well the troops follow the lessons. Rewards and punishment for the whole group based on the outliers in the group. The officer having a side arm to deal with deserters. And so on and so on.

A cohesive military unit has many advantages. They can spot for each other, this one going left that one going right. They can share intel. They can share equipment so that it is not necessary for each trooper to carry all their equipment types. Meds for this one, radio for that one, anti-mine equipment this guy, sniper rifle this guy, and so on. They can share training. This one speaking German, that one French, this one Russian, etc. They can rescue their own wounded. They can raise each other's morale.

Your scheme trains in the desire to kill everything that you can, friend or foe, because that gets you advancement.

The Marines train in the motto Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. Win and come home to a civilian life.

Trouble Recruiting

Military groups need new troops. This is necessary in any war. Soldiers die. Otherwise it's just a lot of shoving and harsh language.

If some large fraction of the recruits die in training, this will get known. And people will be very reluctant to sign up. So you will need to press gang them. Conscript troops have notoriously under performed through the centuries, particularly in comparison to volunteer armies.

Compare that with the Marines. The goal of the the Marines is explicitly to win then come home alive. Combined with such things as 4th of July parades and color guards on Memorial Day and such, recruiting is much less difficult. First Marines get all the training. Then they get all the glory. Then they get all the babes.

Answer 4

I'm going with the combat sport analogy

you don't get a good fighter by "fighting". You get good at fighting by training and sparring. If you keep sparring very hard all the time you will get hurt and you won't be able to train as hard as you can. However you need to be prepared to your first fight, so at some point the sparring should go a bit harder

So to become a good fighter there's a balancing mix of :

• having a great physical condition (strength, cardio )
• master the basic and more advanced techniques
• being able to behave like a fighter in a fight simulation (sparring)
• fight progressively better opponents

you don't get good fighter by killing them, you get dead bodies. What you want is a progressive system classification system like brazillian Jiu-Jitsu belts.

Answer 5

Is it impossible to imagine? No.

There are obvious problems with such a school.

How many would enroll knowing that there is a high probability that they will be killed before they graduate?

As you note, there would be an element of luck to the "exams". Which means that some number of excellent students would end up being killed by bad luck.

If students are regularly killed in training and exams, it's likely that many more will be injured, some to the point of being permanently crippled. So if only 10% survive, probably over half of those are useless as warriors because of crippling wounds.

But that said, would ANYONE volunteer? I'm sure some would. There are always some who believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are the best of the best and would win. Presumably there are rewards to graduating this school, so there would always be some who try it out of desperation.

I'd say your elimination rate is too high to be realistic. I'd go for an elimination rate of less than 50%. Even that would be brutal. But that's a detail.

Oh, one quibble about your description: In your "Test of Blood" you say that students know which team they are on, but can spy on the other team by pretending to be a member. But what does it mean to say they "know what team they are on" if they don't know who the other members of their team are? Do they just know the name of the team? If so, how do they know who to kill? How do they even know that they are spying on the other team and not on their own team?

Answer 6

If its brutality you want it is reasonably successful. The problem arises from what you teach your students.

Take the second and third test. It doesnt just teach your students to go out and kill people, but it teaches them to defend themselves as well. This is a problem with students who kill in self-defense in all tasks, as they'll not be able to do the assassin part only the self defense part. Way too many of the assassins you want would perish to such students, reducing the amount of legendary assassins that exit the school and adding a group of non-legendary assassins who got by on being hard to kill (and might use that to protect from legendary assassins instead).

Training an assassin in brutal face to face combat is a bit counter to its purpose. You may want to simply build a school for fighters who try to kill people by kicking in the front door or bumrush a targets bodyguards. What you want is someone who can infiltrate either socially or physically to achieve their objectives and kill someone.

A good system would probably split students into two groups: assassins and protectors. Protectors would be the chaff you mostly want to lose, as they wont be good assassin material. But they'll make EXCELLENT practice material. The students that have the sociopathic tendencies to kill people will be placed in the assassin group and tasked to kill the people in the protector group (the students will be unawares that they are classified in one group or another, they just know that some people might be tasked with killing other students).

The protectors will never graduate from the assassin school, but due to human nature also be the larger group than the sociopaths capable of actively killing fellow students. Protectors might become part of the teachers who help design the challenges or leave the school with a different doctorate if they are too successful to be used on the students.

This teaches the assassins to blend in, to infiltrate the social circles or to physically infiltrate and assassinate depending on the task given by the teachers. Higher marks are ofcourse given to students who assassinate their targets without tipping off anyone else who did it or how they did it. Post-graduate students might even have their identity given to their targets to increase the difficulty even further and increase chances of retaliation that they have to survive, all in a days work of a good assassin.

This gives you a far superior chance to train various skills. You can put a time limit on the assassination, give multiple targets simultaneously, warn targets they are targeted for assassination so they'll dig in or become a running target etc.

Answer 7

What you describe is the premise of the fighting school Tiger's cove (not sure about the English name) in the anime Tiger Mask: young promising an desperate boys would be hired and passed through a life threatening training to become killing machine wrestlers, whose combat earnings would be given to the association.

The training included fighting (of course with no safety rules) above lava lakes, having to jump on almost vertical walls over spike filled pits and so on, to ensure that only the thoughest would survive.

And it is also similar to how fighting animals are tortured before entering the ring, to ensure they are as combative and lethal as they can.

So, definitely possible.

Answer 8

In Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher series, boys that receive training at Witcher schools undergo grueling and demanding physical and mental challenges. The training is designed to produce highly skilled monster hunters known as Witchers, and has high mortality rates among the students; probably most of them are not able to complete it successfully.

Answer 9

As I mentioned in comics, there are games that are played IRL that simulate some of your tests (minus the actual killing). The Test of Darkness is very similar to a college game I played called "Spoons" (a variant of another game my father played in college called "Assassins" and the Christmas game of Secret Santa runs similarly but is slightly different). At either rate, all participants are organized into a list looping list such that Alice is the target of Bob, Bob is the target of Charlie, and so on. When we get to our last entry on the list (Zach) the list loops back to the top, making Zach's Alice's target. Once the game begins, if Bob eliminates Alice, than Bob receives Zach as a target. In order for Bob to win, he must be "last man standing" which means all other game participants must be eliminated. The "Spoons" variant was given the name because the process of elimination required all players to use plastic spoons that had been marked by the game organizers. Your spoon must be visibly held on your person. If you put down your spoon you became vulnerable to an attack by the assassin, confirmed by a tap to your body with their spoon, at which point you also turned over your spoon to them, so they could record your out with the game runners (There were safe zones, such as public restrooms as the game was co-ed and the players didn't want the girls going into the Men's Room and vice versa to make the kill.). The assassin variant allowed more creativity with weapons but the players had to name their weapon of choice and define what that weapon looked like. My father gave the example of naming a weapon "Land Mine" and defining it as "getting his target to step on a frisbee" or "Acid" which would be "dumping a bucket of cold water onto the target." And the "Secret Santa" similarity should be obvious. In all variants, the target may not be known to the player, and they have to discreetly figure out who their target is and then find an opportunity for an attack (in Secret Santa, it also requires identifying something the target might enjoy receiving as a gift).

One problem with your tests is that the point of having multiple tests in any course is to find who is the best overall at different skills and knowledge. Obviously if you have three "to the death tests", you're not screening your assassins for skills that might make them more well rounded because all tests are Pass/Fail and if you fail one, you can't possibly recover at another stage that you are good at. Someone who is poor in one on one combat that's tested in Test of Iron might exceed all others in the information gathering required in Test of Darkness but won't be able to demonstrate that because he lost a fight to the death (If you're a good assassin, is one on one melee combat really the skill you want to get good at? The good assassins' would never get to a point where they have to fight for their life). Similarly the final test is all about strategic thinking, which is not the same skill that information gathering and physical combat that the first two things taught. It's either tactical or strategic planning, which are different (tactics win battles, strategy wins wars. A battle might be a tactile loss, but a strategic victory (for example, you failed to assassinate the President, but the whole mission didn't care about assassinating the President because your guilds real goal was to assassinate head of security, thus allowing for their mole to ascend to that post and now can provide intel on whoever occupies the office of President moving forward. The President's death would have been Icing on the cake that is the head of security taking a bullet for the man.).

Now, one thing you could do is change these tests to Rules As Written "do not murder your students" but do not tell them that the death of a classmates that you had no part in killing will count as an elimination in all tests for all practical purposes. The guy you are slated to fight turns up dead in his dorm the morning of the test? Guess you win by default.

Your target in Darkness is found dangling from a rope and a suicide note is close by that details she can't handle the stress, well, guess her target goes to you, even if you clearly could not eliminate her in simulated tests.

Of course, you can certainly kill your classmates. That's not against the rules. Getting caught killing the competition is against the rules. And after all, if you're really the best of the class, you wouldn't never be caught.

Answer 10

Great Idea, but might need some extra stuff

Ah, training children in murder! The best strategy to get loyal and/or brutal shock troopers. The premise you describe reminds me a lot of the Dauntless from Divergent. I see three main problems with your idea, but they can easily be solved!

A Matter of Trust

The Problem- Like other contributors have said, the three Tests will force the kids in combat with each other, and make them utterly distrustful of each other. This is true to a point. Once the Test of Blood ends, the winning team will be closely bonded and have experience working together. The trust issue is not that they won’t trust the other students, but that they’ll distrust whoever is responsible for this heckish school. This will make them completely worthless to the leaders: if they don’t trust the ones they were made to fight for, why would they fight? The Remedy- While not all students at the schools in this world learn combat and espionage, all students learn loyalty. Brainwash them, and brainwash them good, from their first day of kindergarten to their senior year!

Wastefulness

The Problem- You’re training hyper-loyal and hyper-violent spies and murderers, but for them to advance in this structure they have to kill the other recruits. It’s a waste of potential, sure, but they’d probably die even if they didn’t have to fight their acquaintances. The real danger is that the constant fighting might promote the most detrimental emotion possible in this case- sympathy! The students that die only die because the teachers are pitting them against each other. Inevitably, one student will refuse to off their comrades, and upend your whole structure. The Remedy- Trick your students. Manipulate them by pulling cruel practical jokes that gradually become more severe and painful, and make it look like the other students did it. Soon, the students will start actually harming each other. Foster this hatred until the Test of Blood, while making sure none of the recruits get lethally harmed outside of the already-lethal tests. At the Test of Blood, claim that you’ve organized the students based on how they treated each other, putting kids who were locking horns on separate teams. This will make them violent to the other team and close-knit with the others.

Why would you do that???

The Problem- Uh oh, looks like nobody wants to send their kids to a school where eleven out of twelve students die! How are you going to get any assassins? The Remedy- This solution is derived from real-world history. The Ottoman Empire was one of the most formidable superpowers of the world from the Middle Ages to the Great War. They conquered plenty of Christian and Jewish states, but didn’t force their new subjects to convert to Islam. Well, kind of. On occasion, young boys would be drafted from non-Muslim families and become Janissaries. These soldiers became Islamic, were taught Turkish, and trained in warfare. Even though they were, in essence, slaves, they had a good reputation and could quickly rise in status. So, draft the kids at random, and present the risks plainly, but promise reward and glory (that they most likely won’t get)!

Answer 11

"Lethal" combat isn't really "Mortal" combat.... but that's just semantics!

The crux of the question makes it clear that death is not a possibility, but a probability at this academy, and the combat is indeed mortal combat (One of you WILL die).

I have a few issues with this premise...

1. Why would anybody sign up, when there are other academies who don't kill their students? Testing under mortal fear can be brought about in other ways, where no other students are put at risk. The actual real lethal training can be carried out in the real world in special secret ops against enemies.

2. You could lose the best warrior EVER because he got gassed to death while sleeping by a super-intelligent assassin warrior who will then die in combat training. Of the 90% of "drop-outs", there WILL be warriors who are outstanding in their field - not something you want to do.

3. A team always works best when the team members bring different strengths to the table. But this academy would output mostly lucky warriors with no real strengths (other than… strength).

4. Your warriors would come out of training not trusting their fellow warriors. It's likely they all used underhanded tactics to get where they are, and they know the others probably did, too. They were enemies in training, and that rivalry will follow on. So they would have very little trust or respect for each other. They would only care about self-preservation, which is very dangerous.

5. You can never simulate real-world scenarios. The real world is so unpredictable, it is the only place to really test your mettle. It would make way more sense to keep the lethal training for real-world ops. That way, life is lost purely because they weren't good enough, not because another warrior was better at this particular task.

Lastly

As a side note, in movies and games, we see the enemy carrying out this kind of ruthless mortal training. Why? Because they are dumb and have no morals and don't understand how to connect with their soldiers and give them self-worth, respect and something to fight for. They are just fearful meat-bag weapons. They have no identity. They are non-thinking fighting machines.
And they always lose.