What sets aikido apart from all martial arts is a policy of non-competition: we must protect life, even the life of the attacker. It is skill, practice, community, a living tradition, way of living, and way of being.
We practice conflict to learn how to protect life and to develop character. Together.
Aikido is practiced in pairs who alternate roles between attacker and defender. The journey to learn effective attacks demands also learning to fall safely. The collective skill in a dojo is either limited by or enabled by the level of skill in falling.
HTML5 webm https://lfi.wiki.dbbs.co/assets/pages/-aikido-is-unique/lfi-conf-2023-aikido.webm an after-class practice at Boulder Aikikai with Eric attacking Jonathan with munetsuki to practice and to demonstrate high falls.
The media portrayal of martial arts primes you to look for a display of domination in this video. The practice is instead a playful joint activity. Notice the smiles on our faces. Notice the ease in our body language. Jonathan's movements have nothing of the caricature of Hulk Smash. Eric reaches for the ground rather than bracing for impact. On display is movement, balance, agility, cooperation, trust, and friendship not strength, concussion, nor abuse. It looks more like dance than combat, though it is neither of those things, and closer to the latter.
It takes a very long time to develop this level of skill. It takes a long time to also develop the shared trust.
Notice also Eric's mean-time-to-"failure". He gets up, attacks and falls four times in the 20 second segment for an MTTF of 5 seconds. The full recording was 2 minutes and 20 falls: MTTF of 6 seconds. This was filmed after about 2 hours and 15 minutes of normal class in 2016. This is not his fastest performance, but it is the only one on record.
Failure is always a normative judgement that depends on context. The context primed by popular media would see these attacks having failed. However, the purpose in creating this recording was to show-off to friends as part of raising awareness for suicide among veterans.
Each fall here is a success. Eric's skill in falling is a gift to himself and to his aikido friends so that each can learn from more intense practice. It is a gift to his students for the experience and practices he shares as they develop these skills for themselves.
See also How Complex Systems Fail, by Dr. Richard Cook. #18. Failure free operations require exposure to failure 
> Recognizing hazard and successfully manipulating system operations to remain inside the tolerable performance boundaries requires intimate contact with failure. More robust system performance is likely to arise in systems where operators can discern the “edge of the envelope”. This is where system performance begins to deteriorate, becomes difficult to predict, or cannot be readily recovered. In intrinsically hazardous systems, operators are expected to encounter and appreciate hazards in ways that lead to overall performance that is desirable. Improved safety depends on providing operators with calibrated views of the hazards. It also depends on providing calibration about how their actions move system performance towards or away from the edge of the envelope.