for interest the last american bayonet charge was in korea. for british forces they have done then in Iraq at the battle for Danny boy witch i think was the last large use of them.
I didn't really read the entire thread because I didn't want to get into specific details of the logistics behind using melee weapons, but I had a few thoughts to add: 1) Melee weapons are clearly the better option from a short range. So give the characters a reason to be in short range. Maybe there are situations where the terrain is better for melee combat (tight corners, indoors, plenty of places to hide from gunfire), or maybe they are spies that go behind enemy lines and for the same reason a sword would be better. 2) Someone pointed out cultural or economic reasons as a possibility. Maybe you have a situation where mass gun lines are far more economical, but then you have a few mercenary types that use swords that are invaluable to the war because of how effective they are and they despite the fact that they rely on swords, they are more durable because of training. 2a) I honestly think you are looking too far into this because I don't think your reader is going to be reading the story and going "this doesn't make any sense, they are using swords when it's obviously more efficient to use guns". You could either make up a reason why people like to use swords. Any reason. Or just let there exist a world where people use swords and let the reader make up their own minds as to why they use swords over guns. It could literally by like what the guy said about religion being the reason. Maybe their religion says swords are cooler.
Melee combat in the future is probably most simply explained by defensive technologies becoming so good that you have to scale backwards. You could explain it like this: You have to downgrade weapons to not have electronics, so EMPs wont kill them, bringing them back a few thousand years (don't know your timeframe or even if earth is involved). Weapons could go so far back, that when your soldiers are using guns, to penetrate enemy armors with dummy weapons (non electronic), they have to use big, huge bullets, and have small clips or even just one bullet, making guns effectively fast reloading muskets. This could make melee very viable as dummy weapons would be big rifles, and small caliber projectiles would be useless against the futuristic armors soldiers are using. That is all to get to melee combat. I don't know exactly how you would have your combat be like, but you could have it be that there would be purely melee units, trained purely for close combat, almost like samurai. The dudes with the rifles would be like musket men, and have firing lines. This also makes trenches viable. This would also make it interesting to have some elite units that have the ultimate EMP dampening, so they could use electonic weapons, and thus fully automatic and smaller.
Another thing to think about is going the route of the Warhammer series. Everyone is wearing a couple tons of power armor. So, close range combat with energized melee weapons (vibro axe's, plasma swords, etc.) is a much more efficient method of murder than firing bullets for half an hour until someone's armor fails. Thats another way you could make it work.
Yeah, for the person who brought up the whole psychological aspect of it. I'm glad you have a psychology degree in 2012 but things in the distant future are completely different. As for Warhammer in particular. If you read some of the novels (I've read the one about Space Wolves cuz that's the army I played) the characters are normal in the begining. The tests and trials they go through to begin space marines... They essentially die and then are born again, completly changed and far from normal.
Thank you all for some great tips and advice, love it! I decided to go ahead and implement it. This could probably be discussed for a thousand years. But at some point you must convert thought to action and get it done. I believe it can be done, it's just a matter of how and getting it right. Everyone brought up many good points and things to keep in mind, thanks a lot for your time and effort! People are free to share more opinions and thoughts/suggestions. Will leave this open for other people who might want to implement melee into their world.
