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from the next-time-it-will-be-a-light-sabre dept.
The U.S. Army will likely replace its standard-issue sidearm with a Sig Sauer P320 pistol (with undisclosed modifications):
After a long and much-criticized search, the US Army has chosen Sig Sauer to produce its next generation of handgun, eventually replacing the current standard issue sidearm, the Beretta M9 pistol. "Following a thorough operational test, fielding of the modular handgun is expected to begin in 2017," the Army said in a statement announcing the decision Thursday.
The M9's three decades of service since 1985 has occasionally made it the subject of derision among members of the armed forces. "The joke that we had in the military was that sometimes the most effective use of an M9 is to simply throw it at your adversary," Sen. Joni Ernst, a former officer in the Iowa Army National Guard, said last week during the confirmation hearings for Ret. Marine Gen. James Mattis to be secretary of defense. [...] "The Army's effort to buy a new handgun has already taken 10 years and produced nothing but a more than 350-page requirements document micromanaging extremely small unimportant details," Senate Armed Services committee chairman John McCain wrote in a 2015 report on the program's problems.
The Army awarded Sig Sauer Inc. with a $580,217,000 contract. Also at Washington Post, Popular Mechanics, and RT.
More about the Modular Handgun System.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @08:01PM
The fact is, the US Army fought Nepo's great grand daddies in the Phillipines, and quite often had their asses handed to them. A big Moro tribesman might be shot a half dozen times with a .30 pistol round, and he would keep coming, hacking our soldiers to pieces with his big freaking blade. Sure, the tribesman was going to die of blood loss, sooner or later, but in the meantime, he just kept on killing.
Primarily because of Nepo's people, the army put out a specification for a sidearm, mandating that the bullet MUST STOP the most fearsome warriors on earth. Stopping power. When a man is shot, he is supposed to hit the ground. Follow up shots should be unnecessary, no coup de grace necessary. Bang - you're dead. End of story.
To be specific about the sequence of cartridges involved...
In 1870, the Army picked the first standard cartridge revolver, the S&W Model 3 in .44 S&W American, a markedly weaker cartridge than .45 ACP would be. (Until 1869, S&W had the patent on bored-through revolver cylinders, and was thus the only major manufacturer of cartridge revolvers until other manufacturers could develop their own models in the early/mid 1870s.) This was a top-break revolver, very user-friendly, but for mechanical reasons limited in what cartridges it could handle.
In 1872, with S&W's patents expired, Colt entered the Army's service revolver trials, and their Single Action Army (Colt SAA) in the very powerful .45 Colt was selected for issue as the M1873. As a solid-frame revolver, this didn't have the strength limitations of the S&W top-breaks, but was a pain to load.
In 1875, S&W received a contract to make a version of the S&W Model 3 chambered in the now-standard .45 Colt round, which required some changes to the latch mechanism to overcome the strength issues mentioned earlier. This gun, the Schofield revolver, was intended for cavalry use where the Colt SAA was too slow and complicated to reload on horseback. It turned out that even with the improved latch, it couldn't handle .45 Colt ammo, so it was made for a shortened version (.45 Schofield); the Army still bought some, and standardized on the shortened cartridge which could be used in both Colt SAAs and the new Schofields. The contract was terminated early, however, and the Colt SAA remained by far more widely issued, but they were both used, with the same .45 Schofield, for many years.
In 1892, the Army standardized on their first double-action revolver, the Colt New Army in .38 Long Colt. This cartridge was a huge step down from .45 Schofield (definitely weaker than .38 Special or 9mm; I'm not sure it's unfair to call it a .380 ACP equivalent, though .380 shoots much lighter bullets at much higher speed), but the revolver was ergonomically a big step up from the Colt SAA, with easy loading (it had a swing-out cylinder like most modern revolvers) and simple, fast double-action firing. However, the anemic cartridge proved incredibly disappointing in the Philippines. A few soldiers in the Philippines were still using .45 revolvers (both S&W Schofields and Colt SAAs), and seemed to be performing satisfactorily.
Three steps were taken to address the situation:
The point here is, the Army went from a very powerful cartridge (.45 Colt) to a slightly weaker, but still rather powerful one (.45 Schofield), then took a huge step down (.38 LC). Given that situation, the decision to jump clear back up to last-known-good ballistics (.45 ACP matching .45 Schofield) is not itself a bad one, but the initial huge step downward left a wide range of options unexplored; it's like if some police department switched from .45 ACP to .380 ACP, then complained their .380s had poor stopping power; we'd all be wondering why they didn't try 9mm or .40 S&W first, instead of jumping clear down to pocket-pistol rounds.
If the M1892 revolvers used during the Moro Rebellion had been chambered in a reasonable step down from .45 Schofield, such as .41 Long Colt, it's possible they'd have proven "good enough", and the M1911, whose predecessor was originally being designed in a .41 caliber round, might have been adopted with that cartridge. (It would be nice to think that this could have avoided a century of seesawing between .45 ACP/hot Magnum rounds ("it kicks too hard!") and 9mm/standard revolver rounds ("it doesn't put bad guys down!") that eventually resulted in the .40 S&W's current popularity as a compromise round, but I don't believe that for a minute...)