Lately I read "The Lamb Method for Police Baton." You can find it online. The author, a street cop, has two targets you are to aim at, the collarbone, and the knee. He shows several ways of attacking them to disable your opponent. (This was written in 1970, when breaking a few bones was considered a less brutal alternative to beating somone over the head with your nightstick until he no longer resisted arrest. Different times for sure.)
I also saw on Youtube some Michael Janich knife work, in which he shows his "master technique" which consists of three targets to cut, the tendons on the inside of the forearm, the biceps-triceps above the elbow, and the quadriceps above the knee.
In both cases, the tactics are structural attacks on the mechanical workings of the body. In both cases the idea is to wreck the opponent's ability to use his arm and to take away his mobility.
This much specificity about how you are going to take out your assailant is a bit of a departure from the long litany of attacks upon various targets I learned in Asian martial arts, some of them attacking the chi.
What I want to know is whether this narrowly focused and anatomy-based approach seems sound and useful, and whether adapting something like it to unarmed self-defense seems sensible and feasible.
Thanks!