The entire U.S. military is in the process of replacing their now mostly decades old Beretta made M9 pistols (in service since 1985), with the SIGArms manufactured M17 and M18 (full size and compact variants of the civilian P320)... A process going on since the beginning of 2017, and expected to be finished by the end of 2022... though most likely there will be some spillover into 2023.
What's really fascinating to me though, isn't what they're buying...
...The M17/M18 is an excellent self defense firearm, for both duty and concealed carry, with a lot of advantages over the M9, and even the other P Series based pistols it will mostly be replacing (the SIG P226/228/229 based M11)...
...It's how many pistols they're actually buying...
...Or rather, how few...
Including all active duty, reserve, and national guard components, we have around 3 million people in uniform... A little less than one percent of our population.
However, the ENTIRE pistol replacement program, expected to replace every standard service issue pistol (excepting perhaps 20,000 other earlier M11 pistols still in use by some selected units across all branches, and a few thousand model 1911 pistols in use by some special operations components), will encompass appx. 422,000 pistols.
Meaning that somewhere between one in six, and one in eight servicemembers, are actually issued a sidearm.... Which is pretty similar overall to the ratio of officers to enlisted personnel, though it's certainly not a 100% overlap (many officers and enlisted never touch a pistol... or rifle for that matter... after or outside of qualification. Many enlisted carry them every day as part of their normal duties)
But it's a good reminder, that for the military, pistols are not "serious weapons" for the most part... Outside of certain special operations contexts, they're secondary or even tertiary weapons, used for self defense... Enabling someone to survive, and get to a rifle, or a radio.
Also, it's a good reminder of how TINY the actual military market is, compared to the civilian firearms market in the United States.
The DOD is acquiring approximately 85,000 pistols a rear, for 5 years.
In the last five years since the P320 the M17/M18 are based on has been on sale, SIG has sold more than 150,000 per year of them to the U.S. civilian market alone.
...That's more than 1.5 times the total number they will sell to the armed forces...
For one single model of pistol, from one manufacture.
There were more than 25 million sales of firearms through federally licensed dealers last year... About 5 million of those were new centerfire handguns.
Meaning, Americans buy more than 10 times as many handguns, as the entire U.S. military has in total, every single year.
...Oh and the same is true for rifles and shotguns by the way, except considerably more so...
EVERY... SINGLE... YEAR...
And yet gun banning geniuses still trot out that silly old mantra "You can't resist tyranny with rifles and handguns"... As if the last almost 20 years of continuous warfare wasn't clear proof otherwise...
