To those of you who are big fans of a guard for catching the other person's blade this assumes that you will be in a "knife duel" where both opponents have equal initiative versus a "knife fight". Most knife fights outside of the combat zone are ambushes prison style. If you think the film "The Hunted" accurately depicts knife fighting you are wrong.
Inside the combat zone I would submit that the knife was eclipsed by the suppressed pistol when the need to kill someone silently arises. Additionally, prior to drawing a knife to kill someone in the combat zone the Soldier or Marine would most likely shoot the bad guy or muzzle strike them, or butt stroke them to death or smash their face in with a helmet or radio or any other thing that is quicker to get to then a full sized combat knife.
To me the most important feature of a guard is to protect my hand from riding up onto the blade regardless of scenario i.e. stabbing or slicing or batoning or hacking or whatever. From a combat zone context again if I hurt myself using my knife then I am now a liability to the rest of my unit and their lives are in danger as now I am focusing on my own wound instead of on the enemy.
My thought is the only reason the guard on the Regulator needs to be enforced is to protect the Resiprene-C handle during heave uses such as batoning.
At the same time the cost of reinforcing the guard will be passed onto the buyer and may actually be more then the cost of sending the Regulator back to Scrapyard if the handle ever did indeed get damaged. So now you have to look at the cost of USPS versus the increased cost of the knife if the guard is reinforced.
