SIG Sauer M17

Origins

By the 2010s the Army's M9 — the Beretta 92 adopted in 1985 to replace the M1911 Pistol — was worn out and widely disliked for its size, its slide-mounted safety and its limited ability to fit different hands or mount modern accessories. In 2015 the Army opened the Modular Handgun System competition, asking industry for a commercial pistol that could be configured for different users, take lights and suppressors, and be supported for decades. SIG Sauer entered a militarized version of its P320, a striker-fired design introduced in 2014, and in January 2017 the Army announced it as the winner, with a contract that could exceed half a billion dollars. Glock protested; the Government Accountability Office denied the protest in June 2017, and the pistols were designated the M17 (full size) and M18 (compact).

Design & Construction

The heart of the P320 is its fire-control unit, a stainless steel chassis carrying the trigger group and slide rails. That unit, not the polymer frame, is the serialized firearm, so a soldier or armorer can move it into a smaller or larger grip module, or change slide and barrel lengths, without creating a new weapon on paper. The Army's versions add an ambidextrous manual thumb safety, a loaded-chamber indicator, night sights, a coyote-tan finish, a slide cut for a miniature red-dot optic, and 17-round standard and 21-round extended magazines. The M17 has a 4.7-inch barrel; the M18 has a 3.9-inch barrel and a shorter slide on the same full-length grip. Both fire 9x19mm, and the Army adopted a jacketed hollow-point load with them, a departure from the full-metal-jacket ammunition carried since the M1911.

Combat Use

The first M17s went to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell in November 2017, and fielding across the Army, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard followed over the next several years; the US Marine Corps chose the compact M18 as its general-issue pistol. The pistols entered service in the closing years of the Global War on Terror and went with deployed units to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, where, as with every service handgun, they were carried far more than they were fired. Special operations units, long users of the Sig Sauer P226 and the Navy's Mk25, also received M17s and M18s.

Legacy

The M17 made a SIG design the standard American service pistol for the first time and ended thirty years of the Beretta. The adoption was followed by controversy over the civilian P320, which SIG recalled for a voluntary drop-safety upgrade in 2017, and by later lawsuits alleging unintended discharges, which SIG disputes; the military pistols, with their manual safety, were tested separately. Commercial M17 and M18 pistols, surplus-marked examples and CO2 air-pistol and airsoft replicas made under SIG's license have made the service pistol one of the most familiar handguns in America.