I had to quote you just so I could give you ups on the Kina Mutai reference. 
Aren’t Special Ops trained to use weapons more often then they are trained to use their bare hands? Sure they need to use hand to hand combat as a last resort, but they usually go on missions carrying M-16s.
The mixed martial-art guys train only for hand to hand combat. I think that would give them the edge.
I think that the spec-ops guys that have extra training could take them, in part because of the fact that they wouldn’t go into it looking at it as a competition. For them, it’s not a game, it’s life or death, and that’s a whole different world-view.
My brother was a member of the SEAL teams and an Army Ranger. When he was Navy, not only did he do the SEAL training, he lived with his Kung-fu master and trained constantly. And boxed for Navy on the side. And when he fought, he fought dirty. Whatever it took to win. There were no rules. And as important, he was trained that if you weren’t part of his team or his family, you were just breathing his air and taking up his space. Not that I think that’s necessarily a good thing, but it certainly honed his killer instinct.
Would my brother, at his peak, have beaten one of those guys? I don’t know. But I bet he knew people who could.
StG
Nice teeth, bro. I figured I wasn’t the only guy out here who spent time tearing hunks of raw beef with his teeth!
I occasionally ride the train with a guy whose son is an Army Ranger, currently stationed in Kansas, likely to be deployed soon. In the kid’s 1st year in the service, he put 20# onto his 160# frame. When he came home for leave, he commented that they didn’t have enough weight in their weight sets at home for him to work out with. This kid’s speciaty is hand-to-hand combat. They wanted him to be an instructor, but he didn’t want to be separated from his unit.
My commuting buddy tells me what his kid does during a normal day. Basically his job is to work out, to be the toughest mofo possible. 20 mile jogs with full packs, sleep deprivation, that kind of stuff. Then what do he and his buddies do in their off-time? They workout, of course. (Well, that and get tats!)
All I’m saying is, pound-for-pound, I’d assume this guy and other similarly situated guys could probably hold their own with just about any professional martial artist.
The modern competitive mma fighter trains all year round. If someone can tell me what uber leet ninja training sills the military does that are not available to other professional athletes I’d like to hear it. Competitive MMA fighters have a team of trainers, striking coaches, conditioning coaches, etc… Their resumes are extensive as well. You have MMA fighters with multiple belts in various arts, you have reigning and former world judo/shooto/etc… champions. Couture was on the US olympic wrestling team in the 90s. Randleman was 2 time champion for division 1 NCAA wrestling. The list goes on and on.
Spec Ops train all year long, typically anyway. It is a different type of training though, more for long distance endurance, be it swimming or humping (thats hiking at a fast pace for you of the sick minds).
SOME people in the Spec Ops are very good at what they do in terms of hand to hand. Most if not all are better than the average soldier, and certainly better than the average joe streetfighter.
Could they win in a fight against an UFC champ? Dunno, I would like to see the fight, but I would put my money on the UFC guy. He is much more used to taking hits, and he fights and trains to fight 10 times the time the Spec Ops is training. After all, Spec Ops have to spend time on missions. UFC guys only fight, eat and train.
This is a good stuff. For the record, as I’m sure most posters have figured out, I meant to include PRIDE and other formulas of MMA in with UFC.
I agree that the commando guys are nothing to sneeze at, but how many of them have actually tested their skills in the same way an experienced tournament fighter has? Does this type of military training involve actually having two guys beat the stuffing out of each other? MMA guys test themselves against other highly skilled fighters for a living. As they say, “He who lives by the sword is probably pretty f’ing good at it.”
It seems to me the best point against the MMA champ would be if he had to severely change his ground strategy (where it looks like fights are won to my untrained eye) with legal eye gouging and biting. I don’t know how much that fact changes things in reality.
With the pro-boxer (I’m thinking Tyson in his prime) would it be possible he could punch the MMA guy silly before the MMA guy could take it to the ground? I’m thinking Tyson coming out and landing a few quick blows and then it’s lights out for the other guy.
With the strongmen and extra-huge guys, I was thinking they might be strong enough to withstand the normal ground game of MMA. But I really have no idea if that’s realistic.
Anything is possible. One punch in the right spot will knock anyone out.
180 lbs Royce tapped out a 260 lbs Severns with an armbar. 6’5" 350lbs (all muscle) Bob Sapp was tapped out by a person over 100 lbs lighter than he was. Frank Mir broke the arm of Tim Silvia who had 7" and 30 lbs on him with an armbar.
I love these goofy “who would win in a fight to the death between____and____” questions. The right answer of course would be a guy, raised in a shaolin temple, then trained in a Thai orphanage by a blind master (who was then killed), who as an adult, decided to join the US military, became Spec Ops., engaged in secret training at a secret base where he was programed to kill 1000 different ways and lost his humanity until he met a new ninja master who introduced him to the secret underground world of cage fighting, where he met a girl who was the daughter of his former blind master, leading him to the US where he trained day and night for the UFC, so that he could avenge his master’s death on pay per view. There, I think I covered just about all of them.
There have been many quick submissions as well as knock outs. The short answer to the OP is NO. He can kick a lot of ass, but he would be FAR from the most dangerous person on the planet. Perhaps a better worded question would do better.
How so?
Anybody can get lucky. You have to have seen countless fights that ended in a really quick KO.
Disciplines that were represented in the early mismatched days of UFC never got a fair shake IMO. They would pit a “karate” expert against a huge grappler who would shoot on him, then ground and pound (or some variation of that). Schools like Aikido would never have a serious contender, simply because it’s a defensive sport rather than an offensive one.
I think it comes down to what kind of fight the guy is expecting, and also the rules. There isn’t a single guy in the UFC that can’t be put down by a well placed strike. There are conditions to that, rules to be accounted for etc.
I’m not suggesting that you are posing the current UFC (I’m assuming heavyweight) champ as being invincible, but almost all fighters can be beat.
I would certainly agree that any heavyweight champ in the UFC within the past few years is a highly formidable adversary. There is no answer now, nor will there ever be, about who “the most dangerous person on the planet in hand to hand combat” is. It’s waaay too subjective.
Judging by the answers here and my own meager experience in watching and participating in fights–I suppose my answer is that there is no ‘most dangerous person on the planet’. It’s all about matchups. Who are you pitting against whom? *This * Special Forces soldier may be able to take *that * PRIDE champion, but lose to a jail house thug who happens to have just the right stats to take him out.
Or… a ninja.
OK, I see what you are saying and I agree. I am not a “big fan” of UFC, nor am I a believer in “ninjas” like in the movies. My purpose behind the question was just to get insight as to whether or not someone who fights competitively, as a career, is indeed the best at it there is. As an analogy, I don’t think the best “street ball” basketball team could hope to hang with a well oiled NBA team, or even a decent NCAA team.
I know that anything can happen in a fight, I was just thinking in terms of a number of trials, with no memory, which would be an impossible experiment to conduct in reality.
Okay, I just skipped half this thread to hijack this. Maybe I haven’t followed you close enough, but you’ve done a lot of fighting?
Well…You specified “no rules” and “to the finish” in your OP, that kind of suggested this was a street fight to the death. However as I see your “Streetball/NBA” analogy this implies there will be rules, no?
If you are instead asking “Is there a non-professional MMA fighter that could beat the UFC Champion* in an MMA competition” no way in the long run. Anybody could land a lucky punch maybe once or twice but MMA fighters are way too well trained in their disciplines to be beaten on a consistent basis.
In fact as I understand it, UFC was originally intended as a competition to see not only who the most dominant fighter was, but also which disciplines were the most dominant (the best amateurs were the original invites). Obviously superior fighting styles are still a contentious issue and in order to even have a CHANCE these days you need to have to be trained in many of them.
*The best fighter in the world is probably not the UFC Champion but the Pride Champion Fedor Emelianenko. If UFC would get their head out of their ass and let Fedor fight in Sambo like he does every year, we’d be able to settle this once and for all. 
Fedor is generally considered to be one of the best MMA fighters there are. In fact many of the best fighters in MMA fight in PRIDE. Cro-cop and Rampage recently crossed over to UFC, but PRIDE still has some of the better fighters.
Now if the OP were to have asked “What percentage of men on the planet could stand up to Fedor in a no weapons street fight?” The answer would be “a handful at best”.
All MMA fighters know at least a few submission techniques, few know that many lethal blows and or maneuvers though. So, dangerous can be subjective in that manner also.
I believe the answer is the MMA fighter will win. MMA contests were invented specifically to pit fighting styles against each other. Many “bad ass” special forces guys have tried their hand at it with not much to show for it.
Here is a video of a working special forces (Ranger) teacher bringing his “worlds deadliest fighting system” to Mark Kerr.
Um, that was a “lucky” knee. I’m fairly sure that special forces guys are aware of using the knee as a weapon. This only proves to illustrate my point that every fight is situational and subjective. There is not now, nor will there ever be an invincible man. I say “lucky” meaning it was meant to be thrown, but the guy got caught. That doesn’t mean that he, or any who follow his methods are particularly vulnerable to knees, he just got sloppy that time.
The top UFC and PRIDE guys change every so often, but they are always very, very, formidable. To declare either champ “most dangerous person on the planet in hand to hand combat” is lunacy. The main objective in lethality (which is by definition the most dangerous) is to not be predictable. MMA guys train to either KO someone, or make them say “uncle”. Ninjitsu guys, and certain other martial arts train in limb breaking, eye gouging, headbutting, presure points, small digit manipulation, and various other things that MMA fighters are trained not to do. The ingraining of the rules would hamper an MMA fighter in a true “anything goes” match.
Think about this, if we take three guys A, B, and C.
Now lets say A can beat B in a fight the majority of the time and B can beat C in a fight the majority of the time. Although one might think this means that A could beat C in a fight the majority of the time, in real life that does not always pan out. A guy can be able to beat almost anyone but still have that one guy who for whatever reason can break down all his defenses and beat him even though that same guy might get his ass beat versus a lot of other people. So it doesn’t seem like anyone can ever truly be the best, there is always someone who can beat them, but that doesn’t make that other person the best either.