The army sidearms seldom mark a unit as a rifle marks one, and the history of the small arms of the United States is full of fingerprints. As the service switches pistols, something has most likely altered, such as ammunition, training realities, logistics or the manner in which handguns are projected to match a considerably broader group of shooters.
These five handguns demonstrate how the Army continued to attempt to use various engineering solutions to the same problem: find a small, reliable solution that will continue to perform its job when all other things have gone awry.
1. M1911 / M1911A1 (.45 ACP)
M1911 attained the status of benchmark in the army, since it came with a definite mandate; greater power within a closer range than the predecessor pistols powered by the .38 caliber. The pistol which John Moses Browning had delivered was not merely a winner in ergonomics and shootability, it was a winner because it continued to run through agony that disintegrated rivals. During the last test, the Colt design was able to test an 6,000-round load with no stoppages, and a competitor made several gaffes.
The subsequent M1911A1 improvements, which included modifications to the mainspring housing, trigger length, grip safety and sights did not re-innovate the gun, but now narrowed the interface between a soldier and a heavy steel sidearm. The resultant product was a pistol that remained pertinent to various generations of ammunition, holsters and training doctrine, whose service footprint was more than seven decades long.
2. Beretta 92FS / M9 (9×19 mm)
The M9 period was not so romantic but rather standardized. The Department of Defense was driving towards a single handgun and standard ammunition and the capacity, controllability and durability of the Beretta gave it a viable base. During the testing of the ultimate XM9, the Beretta entry achieved 1,750 rounds per malfunction in dry conditions, passing a test that selected guns through temperature variations, contaminations and endurance fire.
Its image suffered because of factors which in most cases did not relate well with the design but rather with the realities of fleet maintenance. According to one technical observer, the biggest issue with any of the weapons we have in this country is logistics and maintenance. The updates M9A1 introduced, most noticeably the rail and photographing magazines in sandy environments, pointed to a trend that endured through the system until retirement: the Army and Marine Corps continued to refine the surrounding system in order to enable the pistol to keep up with the surrounding accruals as well as the corresponding mud.
3. SIG Sauer M11 (P228) (9×19 mm)
The importance of the M11 can be overlooked since it was not the overall issue sidearm of the Army. That is exactly what makes a difference. It was a realistic acknowledgment that a single standard pistol does not protect investigators, protective information and individuals who require a lesser package without sacrificing a belief in functionality.
In official testing, reliability made the M11 its calling card. At Aberdeen we have three pistols that were alleged to have discharged 15,000 rounds in one malfunction, and that is the sort of dull stuff procurement officers like. The M11 also underlined a doctrinal fact: the short pistols are not mere scaled-down versions of full-size firearms, they are self-contained implements that exist to be handled and be consistent.
4. Colt Single Action Army 45 Colt (Peacemaker)
Many years prior to the emergence of magazine-fed pistol, the Army had a requirement of a rugged, repeatable sidearm capable of enduring rough use and unreliable support. Colt Single Action Army was developed to fulfill that need and adopted in 1873, had a robust frame, a simple manual of arms and a cartridge that struck with impact. It won its Army life, however, at the end of the 19th century, and its posthumous fame is what made it legendary: it became an icon of the frontier, the institution that supported it, and the period that required it.
Its duration is also representative of a larger pattern in ordnance history of the U.S.: designs which are both deriving their usefulness and difficult to destruct their usefulness tend to survive their official issue years by decades, either carried along or stored in other applications long after newer designs are introduced.
5. Colt and Smith and Wesson M1917 Revolvers ( 1/2 moon clipper, using.45 ACP )
The M1917 revolvers proved to be a logistics measure that had become a technical lesson. Large frame revolvers were pressed into service and adapted to the same cartridge when U.S. intervention in World War I put the production of M1911 in jeopardy. What made the revolver useful was the loading system: half-moon clips caused rimless.45 ACP to be used in a revolver by limiting the speed of extraction and reloading.
The quantities of production indicate how rapidly the stopgap had been produced: over 150,000 were produced by Colt, and over 153,000 by Smith & Wesson. Mean to be a stop-gap measure, the M1917 demonstrated that provisional sidearms may be permanent in cases where they correct a genuine limiting factor, industrial capacity, without causing any additional training load.
The feeling is not nostalgia across flintlocks, revolvers, steel autoloaders, and alloy framed 9mm. It is engineering in terms of limitations: what is the ammunition at hand, what can the industrial base produce, what the average soldier can physically carry, keep in good condition, and fire effectively.
That is why these sidearms remained the talk of the town long after the date of their official issue-each of them had grabbed a point of inflection where the needs of Army and the available technology coincided with that of the era in a short-lived way.
