SIG Sauer P320 Series–The U.S. Army’s New Modular Handgun, by Pat Cascio

by Pat Cascio, Survival Blog:

The Federal government is on the wrong track most of the time. If there is a hard, wrong, or difficult way to do something, they do it, nearly every time. I know this from first-hand experience when I worked for a large detective agency and we often bid on uniform guard services for the Federal government. It’s not quite as simple as being the lowest bidder, as many believe. There are a good number of loopholes involved in bidding on FedGov services, including whether your company has the capability to meet the requirements. They want to know if your business has enough cash flow, enough employees, and the list goes on and on.

When the US Military requested a new handgun back in the 1980s, the list of things that they wanted the gun to do were endless. After the first round of testing, none of the handguns had passed the testing procedures, and it had to be done all over again. Some gun companies opted out, and some new gun companies decided to give it a try. The end result was that Beretta won and supplied the Model 92, called the M9 in the military. They are basically the same gun, for all intents and purposes, with just a few slight differences. Of course, this led to protests over the bidding process and the final selection when one gun company accused the other of penciling in their bid price after hearing the others’ bids. Soon after, the military also adopted the SIG Sauer P228 9mm handgun for plain clothes CID officers, and it is called the M11.

Let’s fast forward to several years ago when the military decided that it needed another new handgun for the services. However, this time around, there weren’t too many bidders. I believe it was because the gun companies didn’t want to get involved in a selection process that could take years, maybe a decade since nothing moves fast when dealing with the FedGov. There were only a few gun makers willing to jump through the red tape and provide gun samples, based on the 300+ pages of requirements for the new handgun.

It was recently announced that SIG Sauer won the bid for the new “Modular Handgun System”. The military didn’t want just a single gun to do everything they think they wanted it to do; it had to be “modular”. You had to be able to change it to fit different missions, different sized people, and meet other requirements. For the most part, there is no one-size-fits-all, when it comes to just about anything.

Following the successful SIG P250 came the SIG Sauer P320 series of handguns. The military, in their finite “wisdom”, didn’t even spec what caliber of handgun they were looking for. Everyone assumed they wanted another 9mm. Well, even though the testing is over, we still don’t know what caliber the military wants. The nation’s leading law enforcement agency, the FBI, recently went back to the 9mm after using the .40S&W for many years. The advances in bullet construction made the switch easy. The .40 S&W does tend to have some serious recoil, and smaller-statured officers were having a difficult time qualifying. If they couldn’t qualify on the range, their real-life shootings weren’t going to be much better. So, now there is a mad rush by law enforcement all over the country to dump their .40 S&W caliber handguns and switch back to the 9mm.

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