NOTE: in the time it took me to write all of this (and answer an important phone call), ShooterMike posted his stunning contribution (You are very late indeed, sir, if you always provide such a learned and thoughtful response) and Crebral post his outstanding summary of the modern combat doctrine referenced by ShooterMike! (Yes, it's 10 pages, Mike, but probably 25% of the posts are my responses and grooming, which also serve to artificially inflate and bump the thread. Clever, no?) So the below response references primarily comments from page 9 and earlier, though it fits well in the context of these latest replies:
First of all, may I thank Thana for contributing the Dadao. While I normally shy away from the super-choppers (extremely tip-weighted whacking swords), the relatively short blade and comparatively huge handle on this one would go some way to alleviating its potentially unwieldy characteristics. It has no thrust, it seems, but it covers a lot of other ground, so it's a very valid contribution and something to think about.
Now, to Wraith and Kenyon: Life's
tough, ain't it? If only I could take my whole armory with me wherever I go--in a
portable hole, for instance, brother I would! Sadly, I have not that luxury.
You will note that everything on The List, even through Tier 4, will fit inside or strapped to the outside of a large duffel bag or multi-compartment bag. The only two exceptions are the animals, and they can carry themselves. Now, none of these items are going to be the ideal solution to their particular task. They are intended to be the ideal "survival" solution.
Take the knife, for instance. It is not going to be the perfect whittling knife, the artisan's tool of choice. Nor is it going to be the perfect knife for chopping through dense jungle undergrowth. It isn't a machete or bolo. What it
is is the one knife you will actually have with you, the knife you can guarantee, the knife you can promise yourself, will never be further away than, say, out in the parking lot when you are inside, or on your hip when you are walking the property. And in a typical survival scenario (seen
here), if that is the only knife you have, then that one knife will have to do a little of everything. And yes, though it isn't an ideal fighting knife, it may have to fight, too. (The combat knives discussed in the
other thread are of this ilk, not ideal fighting blades but good enough at that and everything else that might be asked of them. Please do contribute to the other thread if you have thoughts on that subject, as I am in the market for a survival knife as well, for my flight gear and Bug Out Kit both.)
Another example is the fishing kit. The typical survival fishing kit is a flat pack, a few inches on a side, containing a coil of high-test fishing line, a little wire leader, a few hooks of different sizes... and that's all. It's by no means my rig of choice for manufacturing bluegills or crappie off the spawning beds, nor for hunting the monster large-mouth along the reed lines. But I don't have room for a brim rod, an ultra-light spinner, a heavy spinner, three bait casters, a fly rod, and everything else in my tackle box. I have instead about two cubic inches and an ounce of weight to spare for a fishing kit that need do no more than provide another chance to eat, given any possible body of water.
The same absolute availability is a requirement of everything in Tier 1. These are the items you can guarantee go with you everywhere, and are never farther away than, say, the glove box of your truck. When you are out in the field, they are on your person, at an absolute minimum. The rest of the list, through tier 4, has the requirement that it fit within your Bug Out Kit. This is the one-bag's-worth of gear that you can grab at a moment's notice or that can travel with you easily whenever you go into the field. You can throw it into your pickup, you can throw it into your six-seat Cessna or the bush plane that's taking you up north, and otherwise it's in "the back room," ready to go in the event of a hurricane evacuation, a major earthquake, a bad winter storm, a flood, or political upheaval and zombies.
Now, your bug-out kit may be bigger than mine, and may be slightly different, but the list given, while it is mine, is not solely the invention of my imagination. It is based on the training I received from experts who teach at Naval Air Station Pensacola. It is a minimum, and I will probably have slightly expanded first aid kits and a few other odds and ends in the final product, but it won't deviate very much from that list, and it will satisfy every "slot" on the list at a minimum.
The next thing to notice is that each tier is (hopefully) optimized. The idea behind tier 1 is to carry only the items that I would absolutely need and couldn't "make shift" in the first twenty-four hours or so of finding myself stranded. Tier 2 is a dedicated survival kit and enhances my odds of survival with the addition of nothing more than a five-pound fanny pack. Tier 3 is more discretionary, but still man-portable, as in a backpack. Tier 4 includes the rest of the Bug Out Bag and should be sufficient to provide for indefinite survival with reasonable effort and minimum risk. In order to get a whole lifestyle in one bag like this (or in your glove box, as in Tier 1), the slot count must be minimized, with each slot filling the maximum number of roles. In this we come back to my original comment, which is that the item filling each slot may not be ideal for every different task, but you only get the one item, so your task is to pick the optimum compromise.
So, the survival sword? I don't leave home without a self-defense option if I can help it. That option is, ideally, a light automatic rifle, but circumstances (Commies!) conspire to prevent this from being practicable. I make do with a .45.
In a survival situation, though, every bullet is precious. I probably won't take a .45 as my first choice, but instead a small 10/22 rifle. The .22 LR cartridge is sufficient to kill anything in North America and most of the edible wildlife the world over at close range, without destroying small game beyond usefulness. (Remember, in a survival situation, squirrels will be much more a staple of your diet than elk, and you'll be doing a lot of your hunting with traps and snares which in other circumstances would be banned for their cruelty, but in a survival situation provide the hands-off, odds-maximizing utility that you need.) Additionally, the semi-automatic 10/22 allows me to rapid-fire in an emergency, .22 LR bullets can handle a space-saving tube magazine, unlike pointier high-performance rifle rounds, and I can carry a crap load of .22 ammo in the space and weight of two dozen larger rifle or pistol rounds. For all of these reasons, my ideal man-stopper pistol is likely not going to be high on my firearm priority list for the Bug-Out Bag.
Last but not least, mechanical things fail, and bullets run out. So even if I did have an ideal defensive pistol, I would only have it for a while, or intermittently, as repair and reload options presented themselves.
Thus, the Survival Sword: a personal, defensive sidearm, one that I can carry as I carry my pistol, but in a survival situation where my pistol may become unavailable. To review, this weapon will not be ideal for any one circumstance, any more than is any other item in the kit. However, it should be the optimum compromise, providing the
best performance across a range of options and
complementing the rest of the kit. I could take a spear, staff, or pollaxe for reach, but indoors I'd be shafted (if you'll pardon the pun). Besides, with the tools already listed, I can easily craft a wooden spear that will suffice for the vast majority of, well, spearing. I could take a knife for maximum agility, but I already have a knife, and brother, I do
not want to fight with a knife. Even more than I do not want to fight with a sword. It's just way too close and awful. I could take a machete, but I already have a beast-knife and a hand axe for chopping large limbs and trunks, so do I want to deny myself thrust and tip performance in a fight given that the only vegetation the sword would be asked to cut through would be light vines and underbrush?
Alternately, do I perhaps want a mace or hammer? Magnificent arguments have been made in their favor, especially against armored or very durable/resilient targets. On the other hand, I already have a hand-axe, and a sword is particularly efficient against human targets who are the most likely threat, and has the advantage of extremely easy, natural carry and fast deployment. So do I take a sword and not a mace, or do I take a mace and not a sword? That is the (admittedly unfair, but life is unfair, and survival is
really unfair) question.
It's one more item, my fall-back sidearm, strapped to my bug-out kit, and it's going to be a compromise. The question is, what is the best compromise?
The best one I've heard so far is something like the designs described by Wraith for a sword reminiscent of Cheness's Oniyuri, a twelve- to fourteen-inch hilt with a twenty- to twenty-five-inch blade, a straight tang, a sandwiched handle, and a slightly curved blade shape, constructed of the strongest, lightest material available, sparing no expense. The names Howard Clark and Jim Hrisoulas have been put forward as smiths for this weapon. It offers a variety of performance characteristics depending on the grip one takes. It offers decent tip velocity and cutting power with a lower grip and high agility and low radius of rotation (for confined quarters) with a high grip, and the saber or Katana-esque overall shape offers a deeply penetrating stabbing profile. Finally, in the spirit of true awesomeness, the straight tang could theoretically be affixed to a haft to create a spear- or Naginata-type weapon.
This sword is complemented by a hand-axe (which has a slot in Tier 3) carefully chosen to meet the specifications laid out by Taran and Napalm in their outstanding defense of haft-and-head weapons. This hatchet should be balanced and sized for fighting, with a robust blade capable of withstanding impact against armor and bone and a backed by a spike capable of overcoming the same. It should have a metal haft, and the haft and handle should be somewhat elliptical in order to provide directional alignment queues to the hand that wields it (with respect to aligning the edge or spike in the direction of the stroke). Finally, one's survival knife is always at the ready, the first and last accessory, ready to serve in any of its myriad uses including as a last resort in combat.
Now, specific to the latest ideas: First, Wraith, given the rule of minimization for a survival kit, we're under the assumption that I only have one knife. All of your fighting knife suggestions there make me drool, but the other demands which will be placed on the knife must be considered. I want to hear what you have to say about that, but since this thread is supposed to be about the sword, can I get you to pop over to the Knife thread next door and post your thoughts and knife submissions there? (I'm still in the market for a good survival knife, as I've mentioned before.)
Oh wait, you
already have.
Awesome.
Kenyon, you're exactly right, which is in the back of my mind as I select a weapon for melee combat. It has to be strong enough and nimble enough to effectively parry and defend against multiple such improvised clubs, blades, and bludgeons, all coming at me at once. It also should have comparable reach, so that I am not a too much of a disadvantage against any one of them.
ShooterMike, I have actually been looking at that particular sword in the A-Trim Tac line as a strong possibility. That's very close to the item in my imagination and I am not surprised that it is pleasing to wield. The design is a natural winner, expressing many of the best qualities of a Katana in a westernized saber package. Tell me, Mr. Mike, what you think of the idea expressed above of a sword with an extended, straight hilt
a la the Oniyuri. My analysis is that you lose only the least-utilized portion of the blade (absorbed into the tang and handle), but retain the overall length/reach of the weapon and gain a number of unique possibilities for manipulation and maneuver. Plus, y'know, the Naginata option if you want to get real crazy. (Might even have a proper haft made for it, so it bolts right in with the same bolt eyes that secure it to its grips.)
Regarding modern combat doctrine, anyone who wants to see a good example of this high, tucked-under-the-chin, extension-compression handling might rent or DVR some of the later episodes of Stargate: Atlantis and pay particular attention to the character named "Ronan Dex." (Get it? Ronan? Ronin? Yeah.) While he wields a somewhat beefy, oversized space-phaser pistol, the actor uses it in a manner that reflects obvious interest and training in real-world pistol combat. You often see his weapon hanging from his hands in the high, tucked position as he prowls through space-ship corridors or alien forests.
Anyhow, the overall doctrine of escalation-by-range is a major contributor to my central inquiry in this thread. It was with that in mind, as I considered my
BugOut Kit, that I turned my analysis to how the listed tools would fare in tactical and combat scenarios. If the tactical dimension is thrown into the overall equation, how does my kit fare and does it provide what I need?
My determination is that while Bigger Is Better (as one of my instructors put it, you want to wield the largest caliber you can shoot efficiently), the weapons must be subject to the same optimization process as everything else. If an item is to be included in the kit, it must be able to make a strong case for itself as either indispensable alongside the other members of the kit or else versatile and utilitarian enough to deserve a slot.
I'd love a carbine. (A SCAR in
6.5mm Grendel would be awesome, but that's another thread for another forum.) But even with a small round like the .223 (or the not quite as small Grendel), my ammo load is going to be limited. I can carry ten times as many bullets in .22 LR, making me self-sufficient for that much longer. And the fact is that at my skill level, I can kill a lot of things with a .22, say small Ruger 10/22 rifle, at any of the ranges at which the majority of combat and hunting takes place (under 50 yards mostly, under 100 yards almost always).
Even then, though, firearms are mechanical and bullets are finite. In examining my kit and considering a survival scenario in which I not only had to eek out a living but also had to occasionally put myself in harm's way, it occurred to me that a hand melee weapon, in the size range of a one-hand or hand-and-a-half sword, very tidily fits in the gap Crebral mentioned, between grappling and true ranged combat. Furthermore, its length and reach amplifies my ability to take advantage of the principle depicted in Crebral's second image and his discussion of it: that within 20 feet (21 feet is the typical legal precedent) a sheathed knife is as dangerous as a holstered gun. If a knife is so dangerous, imagine a sword, that much longer, and which can be drawn in almost as little time (far less time than it takes to traverse the 20 feet).
Given this and the fact that it is a more permanent resource than a gun, some kind of hand weapon seemed deserving of a place in my kit. My thoughts went immediately to sword. Taran, Napalm and others have made strong cases for maces, hammers, and axes as well. My latest thoughts are that a properly suited hand-axe (which already has a slot in the kit) and a properly designed sword would optimize my defensive array (within the bounds of the Bug Out Bag) and would each offer enough general utility and specific excellence to secure places in the kit.
And as mentioned, of course, if I know I'm in a theater of combat and will be for a long time, I will be using these tools to craft additional weapons such as a bow, spear, staff, shield, etc.
P.S.: If I'd known there were so many intelligent, useful people on web forums, I'd have been using them more often. I guess it was just a matter of figuring out where y'all were hiding.