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The longevity of the bayonet is something of a puzzle. It cannot be explained by standard accounts of military-technical change, according to which weapons are rendered obsolete and replaced by more lethal alternatives in a continually operating dialectical process of innovation and counterinnovation. Bayonets are, after all, very simple weapons. Their technical capacity for killing and wounding rests on nothing more sophisticated than a sharp steel point. Conversely, the last two centuries or so have witnessed rapid developments in other forms of weaponry, with the result that death is now routinely dealt out at long ranges. As such, bayonet fighting has become a rarity and the proportion of casualties due to such events is tiny, quite frequently nonexistent, in the context of modern wars. And yet bayonets are still manufactured in large numbers, rifles are still designed to accommodate them, and soldiers in modern armies routinely train with themand carry theminto battle. Only in 2010 did the U.S.Army finally dispense with bayonet training, and its lead has not been followed by the Marine Corps, or for that matter the British Army.1 Why is this? Have armies the world over simply been responding to some atavistic urge when they encourage recruits to stick dummies in basic training, or is there some method in their apparent madness?
In what follows I want to suggest that some answers to these questions become evident once we appreciate that the technical characteristics of the bayonet are minimally implicated in establishing its effectiveness as a weapon. On the contrary, its value in this regard is almost (if not quite) wholly attributed to it during bayonet training. In other words, the real "point" of the bayonet is not located at its steel tip. Rather, it is conjured out of a collection of social practices among which the physical artifact is embedded. The purpose of these practices is to forge strong associations between bayonet and aggressive behavior, thereby bolstering the moral fortitude of soldiers in times of battlefield crisis. The bayonet's lethality in relation to more technically sophisticated weapons emerges as incidental in this context, while the attachment to it displayed by modern armies is revealed as something other than an atavistic quirk needing to be stamped out by modernizing initiatives.
Military Technology
