painandgreed said:
My appologies for hasty reading and typing. Given choice, yes, I think guns would be prefered weapons. The point I was trying to make (and mistakenly addressing) was that spears and swords still had a place on the battlefield well into modern times.
What I was trying to say was that, beginning with the invention of 'rifling' (roughly about the time of the American revolution), which extended the effective range of firearms out to that of a well used longbow, 'spears and swords' still showed up on the battlefield but increasingly had no place on it even though most commanders didn't quite realize it yet. Napleon did. He realized that the fundamental battlefield weapon of his day was the cannon, because it was the cannon ultimately that was doing the most damage. Even in the Napleonic wars, most bayonet charges were survived by the simple expedient of running away from them and that's assuming that the charge wasn't in fact suicidal, which it often was. By the American civil war, bayonets were an insubstantial part of the actual mass of the battlefield, but commanders kept ordering them anyway and getting men killed uselessly. It's been calculated that less than 1% of the deaths of the American civil war occurred as the result of any melee weapon at all, much less the bayonet which many experienced soldiers didn't use in favor of swinging thier gun like a club. Not that anyone in Europe paid attention to this, which is why in WWI you have officers ordering bayonet charges against not just repeating rifles but machine guns. That worked like, oh, 1 time in 1000. There have been about three bayonet charges in the last 50 years that worked, and they all involved elite troops charging irregulars and conscripts, and even then if you look closely at them, it wasn't so much that they worked because they were driving bayonet points into the enemy. They mostly worked by running up to point blank range of the enemy and unloading an automatic weapon in his direction, usually into his back because he was running away.
In reality, melee weapons have been increasingly obselete since the 16th century. Ask the Scots. However, the role of melee weapons on the battlefield has been for that entire time overrated. Even at little big horn, the Souix won not because (or not just because) of overwhelming numbers, but if you analyze the bullets in the ground you find out that the Souix were as well equipped with firearms as the US Cavalry (and Custer had left all his heavy weapons behind). If they weren't even someone as dumb as Custer probably would have won that battle.
The few times that melee weapons overwhelmed firearms are more or less equivalent to the few times that barbarians overwhelmed Roman legions. They achieved surprise, they hit a column on the march rather than deployed for battle, they weren't fought on the terrain of the firearm wielders choosing, and they had superior numbers. That's about the only chance you've got.
Rifles (and the like) are ranged weapons and spears are melee and serve two different functions. Ranged wins out because it can be done from hiding or with suprise, and it is easier for the attacker to retreat if need be. Close combat tends to be final one way or the other.
Ranged wins out for the same reason that Greek pikes got longer and longer. If the enemy is dead before he gets a chance to attack, you pretty much have an absolute advantage. Firearms obselete melee weapons to such a large degree because a) they take less skill to use effectively, b) they require more skill to defend against effectively, and c) they do as much damage as a beserker with a battle axe but they do it at 400 yards rather than 40 inches. Modern close combat means pointing a barrel at someone from 5' away and holding the trigger down. Knife work is relatively rare and accounts for an insignificant percentage of all casualties of war.