Jared Keller
After a seeming eternity of waiting, the Army will officially field Sig Sauer’s P320 to soldiers downrange in November, the branch announced on July 21, a proclamation that signals the end of the turbulent six-year-long Modular Handgun System program.
As previously announced in May, soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, will receive the branch’s first 2,000 Sig Sauer P320 sidearms as the XM17, replacing the fraught Beretta M9 pistol adopted in the 1980s. It will take 10 months for the Army to distribute the handgun across all units, from November 2017 until September 2018.
According to Soldier Weapons Product Manager Lt. Col. Steven Power, trials of the new Sig resulted in “overwhelmingly positive feedback” regarding the XM17’s suitability as an M9 replacement. “That’s an uncommonly positive thing,” Power said in an Army release. “Typically even in our own households, when you’re buying a new car, there’s things that people like about the old car better than the new one.”
Although the Modular Handgun System program ran two year years shorter than the Joint Service Small Arms Program the Department of Defense initiated in 1977 to replace the Smith & Wesson Combat Masterpiece (M15) with the Beretta M9, the search for a new Army sidearm has seen its share of controversy in recent months stemming from Sig Sauer and Glock competition for the branch’s 10-year, $580 million contract.
Shortly after the Army announced its selection of the P320 for the service branch’s sidearm in February, Glock lodged a protest claiming not only that Army Material Command “improperly failed to complete reliability testing on Sig Sauer’s compact handgun” due to a truncated testing timeline, but that the branch’s “evaluations under the price, license rights, manual safety, and penetration factors and subfactors were flawed.”
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/heres-when-the-army-will-finally-field-its-new-modular-21685
