pblanc wrote:
Anyone recall the 535 million taxpayer dollars that the Obama administration pissed away on the failed Solyndra "green energy" debacle?
I did, that was just the expanded team accessible to mere mortals. Sad to see it turn out like that. They still have a small team of sponsored Pros.You must not of got the memo that they shut down their shooting team last year.. Max might be the only member left... (?????? havent really kept up if he is still employed by sig or not)
I enlisted in the Army on 6 December 1974 and retired on 1 November 2003. I have just a tiny bit of experience to draw on here. I am quite familiar with what is going on in the Army now as my middle son enlisted in 2002 and is also a career Infantry NCO (just like I was) with multiple deployments under his belt. He is going back to Iraq this Spring. TTPs are changing back to preparing for a mid to high intensity conflict with a peer opponent.
We don't need a new pistol to change our mindset. It wasn't the fielding of the Abrams and Bradley in the 80s that broke the Army out of it's post Vietnam identity crisis. It was leadership. It was the young thinkers at the service schools who abandoned active defense and created Air Land Battle. The Army would have excelled had we kept the M60s and M113s. It wouldn't have been as capable, but it still would have excelled. It was leadership not equipment.
How is this going to reemphasize training? Units will send officers and NCOs to a short class on the new pistol. Those officers and NCOs will present a short block of instruction to the people in the unit who are issued pistols and then they will fire the same pistol qualification course they have with the M9. Some units, mostly in the special operations community will continue to conduct meaningful pistol training, because they are resourced for it and everyone else will put them in the arms room and break them out when they go to the field and conduct their bi-annual qualification. Little changed in training when we switched from 1911A1s to M9s. Changing from M9s and M11s to Sig 320s will require even less change.
Explain why this is a positive move from a broader perspective and holistic viewpoint. It's a 9mm semi auto pistol that doesn't do anything significantly different then the 9mm semi auto pistols we already have in service. What can we do with the new pistol that we can't do with the M9? This isn't a great leap in capability like mounting our mechanized units in M2 Bradleys instead of M113s. Adopting a new pistol is not going to require any change in doctrine. Our units aren't going to fight any differently with Sig 320s in their holsters then they do with M9s and M11s in their holsters.
Pistols ceased to be important battlefield weapons when we took the horses away from the Cavalry and eliminated the need for a trooper to be able to fire a weapon on horseback.
Of course we are. But I still love the Beretta, and the 1911 is still the first girl I ever kissed ...Sig fans are gettin' wood looking at those pictures...
M
Poppa Woody lolSig fans are gettin' wood looking at those pictures...
M
Don't forget the all important ambi slide stop. I think both of our points have been made.17M was a Gen 4 frame with a mag well and minus the finger grooves. And a slightly different taper on the slide near the barrel. Oh wow. Glock really thought out of the box for that one. The dimensions for the polymer cast without finger grooves are probably still on file because of the Gen 2 Glocks. So the only real change there was keeping the RTF texture and backstraps of the Gen 4 frame while adding a mag well. Once again, I am astounded at Glock's innovation. I am sure it would be more difficult for Glock to add a manual safety to a Gen 4 frame than the changes they did to make the laughable failure we call 17M.
I don't know which world some of you live in but in my world a half billion is real money and a hell-of-a-lot of it!!!
Huge waste of money IMO. Is this the most good $500M could do for the Army?
As if Glock has never made a pistol with a manual safety for a government contract before.
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/thumb-safety-glock/
All this hand-wringing about the pistol cost. It is for a new weapon system replacing a 30 year old gun with a crappy slide mounted safety/de-cocker that fit nobody's hand well. Long overdue, even if it could have been done more efficiently and sooner. To put it in perspective, the Army wasted about 4x as much on the ACU uniform fiasco. We had the "Multicam" -ish pattern back in '04 and could have just went BDU-OCP in 2005.
It doesn't have much to do with the topic, other than a reminder to those who are bemoaning the waste of this deal that our Federal government has done much, much worse in the past.Yes, I do. But what does that have to do with the topic at hand?
In remembering Solyndra, I also remember that even counting the losses from Solyndra, the renewable energy investment loan program that it was a part of has ended up being a money maker for the Treasury.