[Slater]

Is there still a case to be made for the bayonet on today's battlefield, or has it's day passed?

[Bruz]

Is there still a case to be made for the bayonet on today's battlefield, or has it's day passed

I do not even think we need a soilder on the battle field anymore, I would rather see them safe in a bunker with a joystick and electronics like satelites and drones. They are still needed for urban combat however, and if I were in said combat I would want a good knife first, but would like to be able to attach it to an extention though, like a rifle...

[mete]

The were a couple of bayonet charges in WWII but today the bayonet is just a multipurpose knife And don't ask me why a bayonet lug on a gun freaks out the antis,I am not a pschiatrist.

[Shooter973]

Still relevent? NO!!!! A good field knife is useful but not on the end of a rifle any more. It was intended to make a weapon out of a single shot rifle after the shot was fired. No use now days as a combat weapon.

[Dirty Bob]

Let me start by saying I was never issued a bayonet. In the Navy, we used the M-14, and the bayonets stayed in the ship's armory. I've also never fired a shot in anger. The closest I ever came to facing an enemy with a rifle in my hands was the day we were target shooting on the flight deck of the USS RENTZ (FFG-46) and were interrupted when a Soviet Bear bomber flew over, taking pictures of our antennas to see if we had any new systems!

I can think of a few uses for a bayonet, but they don't include bayonet charges or fighting on with an empty rifle. A bayonet *might* be useful guarding/herding prisoners, but imagine what it would look like when a journalist takes your picture!

No, what I would use it for would be looking under objects, etc. It might keep you far enough away from a booby trap to survive. I've also heard the idea that it helps keep dirt out of your rifle's muzzle if you drop it. I *don't* buy that argument!

Now, is a bayonet worth its weight to an already heavily-loaded soldier? I don't think so.

I handled one of the current bayonets for the M-16 and found it overly heavy for what it does. I'd rather have one of the following:
* an extra bottle of water or an extra canteen
* an extra magazine of ammo
* a Swiss Army knife and an airweight .38 revolver.

Take care,
Bob

[para.2]

Maybe it's just because "that's the way we did it", but I feel bayonets are an excellent tool for the individual infantry soldier. Our SOP was to have bayonets fixed whenever doing close ambushes, raids, deliberate or hasty assaults, trench clearing, MOUT, EPW (prisoner-of-war)operations, etc. Essentially, anytime we might come into close contact with the enemy. IMHO, it was mostly useful from a PSYWAR perspective. We felt like badasses, and it translated into added aggressiveness, and it made the enemy try to avoid contact with us at all costs, nobody wants to get stuck.
On a side note, the infantry soldier is, and always will, be essential to military operations. You can "bomb it into the stone age" with video, joysticks,drones, etc, but if you ain't standing on it, you don't own it.

[Andrew Wyatt]

a soldier needs a sheath knife anyawy. it might as well have the bayonet hardware on it.

[Sir Galahad]

In basic training, the bayonet training was some of the best for instilling that your ultimate job, people, is to kill other people. You might push a button to do it, but you're killing that guy just the same as if you bayonetted him. You might even be a cook, but feeding the people that do the killing is still being an accessory to the fact. The "Spirit of the Bayonet"... Bayonet training was my favorite out of everything. Uses in the modern age? Of course. Guarding prisoners (who gives a tinker's damn what the press thinks of it?), searching houses and buildings, and crowd control. When a mob is looking at cold steel and loaded rifles, they're less likely to try a rush. The whole "bayonet lug" phobia is a sort of gut-level fear by hand-wringers of knives. There doesn't need to be a bayonetting; these clowns instinctively fear knives and because people like them address their fears by seeking to ban that which they fear, they ban the bayonet lug. That way, they are "less scared" of the weapon.


" 'Scuse me while I slip this thing on..." :evil:

[Crimper-D]

Soldiers will be fighting with 'Pikes' for a long, long, time to come.
A bayonet dosen't run out of ammo just when you are getting overrun,
and something sharp at the end of a pole is better than a knife or bare fists even closer in.:p
Recent pic from Iraq of a squad of infantry holding back a crowd of angry locals with Fixed BAYONETS on the ends of their M16's. = No shots fired, no one got too close to the steel. An unsheathed bayonet speaks a threat that negates translation!:neener:

[Sunray]

When the M16 was first issued, the bayonet would actually radically change the POI when fixed. The barrel would actually bend a tick. In WW I and II, bayonets were used mostly for opening cans and cutting firewood. They're mostly just traditional. If you look at the design of most military rifles now, bayonet fighting is the last thing you'd want to do with said rifle. They're just not made to withstand the battering. The troopies still need to open cans and cut firewood though.

[goon]

I read somewhere that bayonets for the Finn M-39 are very rare. This is because the Finns threw them away in the field. They considered them so useless that they weren't worth their weight, and they preferred to carry a Pukko style knife for up close work instead.
That was during the Winter war. No one will dispute that the Finns were among the most effective fighting forces ever so I value their opinion.
Given the choice, I would rather have my Leatherman for the usual tasks, and a decent combat knife for when things go south.

[Joe Demko]

Bayonets are still useful for preventing cavalry from charging right over you. Horses don't like getting stabbed either.

[Nightcrawler]

If you guys think a bayonet is useless, why does a soldier need a "good field knife"? A GI may not "need" to fix bayonets very often (but as was said, many times they do it), but it will be a VERY RARE day indeed when he drops his rifle to fight with a knife. Not to mention the fact that the vast bulk of the military doesn't get any combat knife training. 99% of all the can opening, MRE slicing, twine snipping tasks out there could be solved by a simple folding pocket knife or one of those multitools. No need for a large, fixed-blade knife for opening MREs.

So, if you say the troops should have a good field knife, why not modify it slightly so you can mount it to the weapon when the situation calls for it?

But for me...give me a bayonet for any close combat situation, especially indoor or trench fighting where someone could get the drop on you. Having that felon slicer on the end makes it more difficult for a badguy to snatch your weapon from you.

It's damned intimidating, if nothing else.

[c_yeager]

At the very least a bayonet instills a sense of tradition and pride into a soldier. And there IS a psychological effect on the enemy. Lots of people, believe it or not arent all that afraid of getting shot. But, getting cut is an almost primal fear for nearly everyone. I think para said it best. If it makes a soldier feel a concection with his predecessors then its going to make him want to strive to their almost mythic level. I consider it the same as teaching soldiers hand to hand fighting techniques. It probably has little to no use in the field. BUT it instills a "warrior spirit" in the men. And this is always a good thing.

[wingnutx]

bayonet fighting is the last thing you'd want to do with said rifle.

That doesn't mean such a situation won't be thrust upon you.

Troops in Iraq have made good use of bayonets in the past couple of months. Mobs that might crowd into a line of GIs with rifles have stayed back from said rifles when there was cold steel affixed.

[M67]

A bayonet *might* be useful guarding/ herding prisoners, but imagine what it would look like when a journalist takes your picture! OK, here's a tip: Let's say you're a group of drunk Swedes visiting Norway on Constitution Day and you have an urge to make the front page, all you have to do is "P" off the guard in front of the royal palace... :D

[owen]

Bayonets are excellent for mob control. No sane individual will run into a wall of blades, and a phalanx of infantry with fixed bayonets can generally push a crowd wherever they want, without hurting a soul.

Bayonets are the spiritual stepchildren of spears used by Hoplite infantry, and closed rank drill is still the basis of military training.

Molon Labe

Owen

[bad_dad_brad]

Well, I will let you all be the judge.

Marines in Najaf Iraq doing crowd control:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030721/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_us_shiites&cid=1514&ncid=1473

[Alan Smithiee]

bayonets can have a wonderful deterrent effect when you are dealing with a crowed and you don't want volley fire to be your only choice, but the "right foot thump" (stomping with your right foot forward combined with a short forward thrust of rifle while in line abreast) with a bayonet equipped rifle can get there attention and maybe make them rethink if they REALLY want to be there......

[Cosmoline]

A bayonet on a modern assault rifle is a JOKE. It's a crappy little knife, really, and the ergonomics and weight of the rifle are all wrong for bayonet fighting.

Put a period bayonet on a Mauser or Mosin Nagant, though, and you have a VERY lethal weapon, part spear and part club. I've sunk mine deep into spruce trees with minimal effort.

Of course, the big old war rifles aren't relevant in most real life battlefields anymore--certainly not in close quarters battle.

[Andrew Wyatt]

the USMC is going to start issuing new bayonets soon that are larger versions of the kabar (and built by kabar)

The trend toward decent knives that are also bayonets is a good one.

[Lancel]

With a bayonet, you can never be out of ammo.

Larry

[Alan Smithiee]

and you don't have to reload a bayonet

[Teufelhunden]

I see bayonets as indispensable--and the rest of the higher-ups in my Marine Corps evidently agree with me (http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf/lookupstoryref/2003417204136) since we're getting a brand new baoyonet.

A bayonet is a tool and a weapon. Others in this post have already mentioned its utility as a tool, but as a weapon, on top of being more intimidating than a 62gr projectile, a foot of steel will cause a hell of a lot more damage in a shorter time span than a little chunk of copper, lead and steel. In areas where enemy contact is imminent and expected to be close, having a spear that shoots beat having a club that shoots...

-Teuf

Another article. (http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/archivepaper.php?f=0-MARINEPAPER-1549812.php)

[Cosmoline]

Hmm. I don't see anything about the quality of steel used. The coolest looking bayonet or knife is a POS unless it's high carbon steel. I've got short, weird little Finnish blades that nobody would consider "tactical," but they'll go through pigskin like butter, and my best will cut an entire turkey carcass clean in half with ONE MOTION, moving through bone the same as muscle and tendons.

My most lethal bayonet is an old, lean, rusty thing from a Turkish Mauser. It's as ugly as sin, but it's sole purpose in life is to dig deep into an enemy's heart, and that it will do better than any joke of a modern "mil-spec" blade with any polymer nonsense coating or foolish serration you care to put on it.

TRUST A RUSTY BLADE! Rust is a sign of quality :D

[RickT]

I think the bayonet still has its uses as described above. But it is tough to find a balance between a good bayonet and a good field knife...

Here's a cool quote I found somewhere:

I beg leave to remind the {Cavalry} Board that very few people have ever been killed with the bayonet or sabre, but the fear of having their guts explored with cold steel in the hands of battle maddened men has won many a fight.

- General George S. Patton, Jr.

Or perhaps the best mix of scary and useful:
http://home.flash.net/~mpisi/Pics/aayo_gorkhali.jpg

[SJ]

I was the author of the previous post, I have no idea why it was posted under RickT's login. Unfortunately I logged out to try to clear it up before I thought to edit the post...:confused: :confused: :confused:

[JShirley]

L1a1 (FAL) and kukri.

John, owner and ardent believer in both