I agree. One thing that many people don't really comprehend was how little combat occurred with swords vs how much occurred with spears and ranged weapons. The

I agree. One thing that many people don't really comprehend was how little combat occurred with swords vs how much occurred with spears and ranged weapons. The typical view of a samurai or a knight in heavy armor swinging a sword around is a view of that soldier at likely their last moments. They most likely had started with weapons that provided greater standoff from their opponents and only when those weapons were irretrievably lost would they have drawn their sword. Weapons form part of systems, and for thousands upon thousands of years, a pointy bit at the end of a long stick dominated most systems across the planet. The Ancient Chinese called the spear the "King of Weapons" and over the centuries developed a very large number of variants and included shield and armor. The Europeans likewise underwent a period of rapid polearm evolution from the Renaissance to almost WW1. Shaka Zulu, one of the great military minds of Africa became famous in part for reworking the traditional spears of the Zulu into hybrid spear/swords backed by shields in tight formations. Prior to this the Phalanx was a spear-first strategy, and the Roman Infantry worked with more flexible spear and shield configurations -- the gladius was not a deciding weapon and may have been kept so short in order to support close-in work behind the shield wall of a Roman formation. So dominate was the methods for employing spears in combat that armies that went all-in on firearms still marched in the same type of formations as they had with spears well into the 19th century. The World Wars finally broke that habit.