Guys in the field don't really buy old-school mankiller Fairbairn Sykes honkong knife fightin' pieces, they're for knife nerds who just like to shop online while they're stuck at work. The tomahawks were liked as door breaching, crate opening tools with a touch of mall badass. That ended up mythologized in GWOT media acting as if everyone kicking doors and dragging burka'd women out of bed at night to look for AK magazines was sneaking up on sentries and chopping the back of their skull in - in reality it was another ghee-whiz tool that had some moderate use and built status as a cool toy to have if you had the excuse for it. Handy for a lot of mundane tasks that other gear couldn't handle, which is what many of the fixed blade knives do. Problem with true fighting knives is that they're so purpose-driven you can't really do much else with them. A dagger makes a crappy hiking knife, middling skinning knife, and poor EDC piece....but it is damn cool.
The whole idea of a "combat knife" is somewhat silly in 2025, if anyone's honest about it. Even the best H2H knife fighter is coming away grievously injured in anything but a 'sneak up & slit throats' kind of knife fight, and the kind of operator who needed a Fairbairn in 1936 has plenty of tools to avoid needing it in the first place. There's maybe ONE guy in the seal teams who maybe dropped $500 for a fancy Gerber Mk II (IDK how much now, probably half) and actually used it on some goat herder while they were doing a raid, maybe. Probably not.
RT: https://poa.st/objects/55aa59d7-3158-40b7-ac03-00a0d8114644