President Obama's debate quip about the U.S. military's dwindling need for "horses and bayonets" sparked a heated defense on Tuesday of some of those lesser-known tools of modern warfare.
After the president's sarcastic attack on GOP rival Mitt Romney went viral, some Republicans pointed to the U.S. Marine Corps website and its photo of a snarling warrior stabbing a stack of tires. The OKC-3S Bayonet is "the weapon of choice when shots can't be fired," the site says.
Other Romney supporters pointed to examples of U.S. Army Special Forces on horseback during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
Military historians told the Daily News that both bayonets and horses can be valuable, but they also agreed with Obama's larger point.
"You don't measure the greatness of a military by the end number of pieces of hardware you possess. You judge it by the capability it possesses," said John W. Hall, an assistant professor of U.S. military history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Romney argued in Monday night's debate that the military has been shrinking dangerously under Obama, noting that the U.S. Navy "is smaller now than at any time since 1917."
Obama shot back that Romney "maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works."
"You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.
Geoffrey Wawro, the director of the University of North Texas Military History Center, said he thought Obama's point was "exactly right."
"Referencing the 1916 U.S. Navy makes no sense," he said. "It's a question of apples and oranges."
While the military is still stocked with bayonets, their usefulness peaked during the Revolutionary War.
In fact, the need for bayonets in battle was sliding even by the Civil War.
Wawro quipped they were mostly used to "open coffee cans and ration cans" during the 19th century.
Today, Hall said, "the bayonet is more of a contingency - what you do when you run out of ammunition."
The U.S. Army began scaling back its training with the weapons in 2010.
"You tend not to launch bayonet assaults that often," said Joe Glatthaar, who teaches American military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
(And in the rare cases they do occur ? like a British soldier's bayonet charge on Taliban fighters in 2011 ? they make headlines.)
Wawro said the Marines get bayonet training "for elan, morale, that sort of thing."
But I think it's far more intended as a knife than anything else," he added.
The number of horses used by the military, however, has shrunk without question.
"In 1938, the U.S. military spent more money on hay than gasoline, but that was the last year," said Glatthaar.
Last year's holiday movie "War Horse" dramatized the decline of horses in combat during World War I.
Military horses got a bit of a comeback in Afghanistan, where they were used for reconnaissance in remote areas trucks couldn't reach.
But even there, Hall noted, unmanned drones are beginning to do the intelligence work once aided by our four-legged allies.
klee@nydailynews.com
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