Kartr_Kana wrote:Out of fashion as a primary weapon, but not out of fashion as a back up weapon. One of my senior Marines was in Fallujah and while clearing rooms somehow got jumped by an insurgent. With his weapon knocked away and grappling in close quarters he pulled out the bayonet strapped to his flak jacket and stabbed the insurgent. Don't remember if he stabbed him to death or if he just stabbed until the guy got back and then one of his buddies shot the insurgent. Ironically he was an Anti-Armor Assaultman which are the modern "bazooka men" and has fired off more rockets than you would believe.
That last hardly surprises me.
I think it comes down more to how we choose to
describe the role of knives in combat than disagreement over what it is. Do we call them "handy backup weapons?" Or do we call them "used mostly as tools and occasionally as a desperation tactic when the shit hits the fan?" It can amount to the same thing, but with different rhetoric and attitudes.
Simon_Jester wrote:They stay 'in fashion' in fiction because they're iconic and because (bullet time gun kata absurdity notwithstanding) it's a lot easier to create choreographed, dramatic fights between guys with knives or swords than it is between guys with guns. People still carry them in war zones because they're tools, not for fighting- the closest you come to "fighting" with edged weapons in this day and age among heavily armed forces is when Third World militia start massacring people with machetes to save bullets.
Or when you're clearing houses and suddenly find yourself in hand to hand combat. It seems unlikely in modern warfare, but war is such a chaotic and random thing that the likelihood of improbably events like hand to hand combat becomes a much more probably possibility.
I was thinking more in terms of... call it 'systematic' fighting: an armed body that decides
preferentially to engage in combat with sharp bits of metal. Individuals needing to do it because Murphy just kicked a big hole in the plan isn't quite the same thing.
Personally I find this an invalid argument since it uses the French Army as an example.
I kid I kid, however I do not think that brightly colored pants and bayonet training are the same kind of "modernization". One you have an absurdly impractical and possibly fatal uniform on the other hand you have a method of killing the enemy that isn't practical under most situations, yet could become necessary under the right circumstances.
I intentionally picked an extreme example.
My point is that "elements within the military protest this change" is very much
not the same thing as "this change is a bad idea." So I don't pass judgment on that basis alone.
Simon_Jester wrote:I think it comes down to "give some diehard commando type a pointy bit of metal, and he will create situations that require him to use it." Aside, of course, from the specialized role of being used for assassination at close quarters.
Diehard commandos and regular grunts are hardly the same thing. We disliked carrying bayonets in Iraq because it was another piece of gear we had to keep track of. No one wanted to get into a bayonet charge (except a couple nutters who thought it would be "cool"), but we did understand that they could save our lives if we somehow wound up in hand to hand combat.
I have no problem with this observation whatsoever.
The instances of bayonet charges reflect the actions of nutters- what I was calling "diehard commando types," people who
want that kind of combat enough to go out of their way to get it- or groups of desperate men, and so they are extremely rare.
Individual use of edged weapons reflects the actions of individual desperate men and are merely rare, because an individual is more likely to wind up in a desperate situation than a group is.
Simon_Jester wrote:Also, as the antitank rocket matured into a routine form of infantry support weapon, the defensive usefulness of the bayonet has arguably gone down- it's more practical for hostile infantry to literally blast you out of your position than it was during the Second World War, and far more so than it was before that point.
In the 19th century, if infantry in a defended position ran out of ammunition and chose to hold with the bayonet, as long as they had any kind of worthwhile cover there was very little the attacker could do about it unless they had a lot of artillery handy. Even during the World Wars, the attacker's options were still basically limited to "call for artillery support" or "send the troops in to clear you out room to room." Today, they can lob RPGs at you; you can't really reply to that with a stick, be it ever so pointy.
Not entirely true, yes we now carry "lightweight" rockets capable of leveling buildings, but you can't just use those indiscriminately. If you're just going to blow up every house that has someone inside shooting at you, you might as well just level the whole area with aerial and artillery strikes. However like we saw during the Pacific Campaign it is possible to be dug in deep enough that bombardment won't kill you. At some point you have to send in infantry to root out the enemy and in tight spaces like houses or caves there is a good possibility you might find yourself in hand to hand combat.
True. The point I was aiming for wasn't so much "this makes defending a position with knives and spears obsolete." It was "this makes it a lot more difficult to get away with defending a position with knives and spears."
Again, it takes edged weapons out of the province of group tactics and into the province of what individual soldiers do in unusual circumstances. Before World War One, holding a position after you'd run out of ammunition by bayoneting anyone who came into it was a very viable tactic- there were really no man-portable weapons for blasting a large body of men out of an enclosed space without taking them on man-to-man at close range.
During the World Wars that started to change- armored support, grenades, rocket launchers, all made the plan of "defend this position to the knife" less useful for groups.
One guy hiding in the closet and jumping out with a machete might still accomplish something against one enemy- though he's most likely going to get killed by the others; this is not a very survivable tactic, even compared to the very high casualty rate among 19th century soldiers who defended their positions to the bayonet.
But while one guy with a machete can at least hurt the force attacking the building by taking advantage of surprise, a platoon holding a building with machetes are likely to be denied their heroic last stand- if a
whole building is packed with people who jump out at you with machetes, sooner or later the enemy is going to back up and bring heavy weapons** to bear, and most of your swordsmen wind up dead before they get any chance to fight back.
So hand to hand combat becomes something that only a few percent of the frontline forces ever get involved in, because formed units who try it as a last-ditch tactic wind up getting cut to pieces to relatively little effect... and the majority of the casualties on both sides in close combat wind up caused by heavy weapons, rifles, and grenades, even if bayonets show up once in a while.
*More or less.
**This includes grenades, which are 'heavy' in effect for terms of what I'm talking about, but not in terms of doctrine in that they're not handed to specialist "heavy weapons teams."
