Let’s be clear: I’m not a knife guy. I appreciate a good knife, but I’m not going to nerd out over steel and designers, etc. I do that with guns and guns only. However, I can spot dumb a mile away. It takes one to know one and all that. The Jagdkommando knife is dumb, and every few years, it becomes a meme that gets passed around subreddits like R/TodayILearned and various low-effort, low-information Facebook pages. The knife itself comes mired in various myths and appears to be the ultimate war crime stick. The truth is a bit simpler.
If you’re confused and have been spared from the world of the Jagdkommando, let’s introduce it. Microtech, maker of some of the coolest automatic knives ever, designed the Jagdkommando. It’s a fixed-blade fighting knife with three edges arranged in a twisted formation.
The knife looks cool, and it is certainly extremely well-made, but it’s not the best fighting knife ever.
The Jagdkommando – The Cold Hard Truth
Let’s get the first semi-associated myth out of the way. The Jagdkommando, like the actual special operations force, never used or issued this knife. The Jagdkmmoando guys are high-performing, elite special operators who wouldn’t be caught dead with this knife. Microtech chose the name for reasons that escaped me. Maybe it’s just because it admittedly sounds cool. Jagdkommando translates to mountain hunter, and that’s pretty rad.
The big myth around the knife is that it’s so dangerous that the Geneva Convention bans it! That’s not true. The Geneva Convention deals with how to treat sick and injured prisoners, civilians in war, etc. It doesn’t mention or ban any weapons, much less knives. The Hague doesn’t ban knives, and neither does the Convention on Conventional Weapons; in a world where bio-weapons, nukes, and other world-enders, no one cares about knives.
The claim that it takes an entire team of surgeons to fix it might be true, but I don’t know enough about medicine to disprove it. Admittedly, the three cutting edges likely create a vicious wound that’s likely tougher to clean up than normal wounds.
The Jagdkommando – Would It Work?
Anything sharp and pointy would work at least a little. Right? I’m sure it can cut and stab, but that doesn’t mean it can do it well. The tri-blade design, with its twisting blade, looks like a drill bit and likely functions as one. Have you ever stabbed anything with a drill bit? This knife would seem to require a twisting motion to have any sort of economy of motion.
The presence of three twisted blades means you exert more force to stab someone in a fight. Good luck getting the blade through a ribcage since it can’t slip through like a normal knife. The twisting blade design also seems like you have a very limited blade for slashing purposes.
Its use as a field knife would be a hassle. Cutting anything harder than an MRE open would be difficult. Don’t even get me started on sharpening the thing. It would suck as a field knife worse than it sucks as a fighting knife.
While it’s always wise to have a knife, assuming you’ll be in a knife fight is silly. Especially a knife like this that’s overt. I hate to describe it as tactical, but what else do you call a giant fixed-blade knife that’s clearly not meant to be a handy EDC blade? In the modern world, the use of a knife in a fight is extremely rare, and fixed blades are field knives more than anything else.
Finally, the Jagdkommando costs a small fortune. The full seven-inch blade model costs north of a grand. That kind of money would be better spent on a Ka-Bar or any other knife. Actually, it would be better spent on a Glock, but knife guys are gonna knife guy.
What’s the Point?
The Jagdkommando is a bit like those M1911s someone made from meteorite. They are cool-looking, expensive, and more like a piece of art than an actual useful item. Sure, it’s still a knife, but it’s not a super useful one. It’s art, and it’s fine to own if you want, but you’re not committing war crimes just by using it, and no convention ever banned it.
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