Which handguns are used by US "Special Forces"?

[ACBMWM3]

I was not In SOCOM, I was in the MC but, most SOCOM units do get a budget to purchase what they want.
Even my unit got a budget to purchase new rifles we wanted.
(We chose the HK416, then they stopped making them so we chose LWRC's) Anyway. They can pretty much choose what they want.
Sig's were popular, as well as USP's, not MK23's though. I don't think I ever saw a Glock, I did see a few Beretta 96's however.

 

[Dan Crocker]

The sergeant major in "The Unit" carries what appears to be a 1911. And we all know that show is true!

It's the most truest show I've ever seen. After 24, that is. ;-)

 

[rtn]

Kimber

My brother was in the 82nd Airborne, stationed at Ft. Bragg before deploying to Iraq in 2003.

A couple of his friends at Bragg were Delta operators. Both carried Kimber Series 70 1911s.

 

[XUSMICO]

M9 slide fx & ammo

The ammo was Winchester Silvertip. One M9 did fx when TZZ ammo was used. More than one gun fx before a DON (CNWS) message had all silvertip and TZZ use stopped. "You are not a SEAL until you have eaten Italian steel" If the NATO spec. ammo was NOT the main problem, the "frame & slide mods" would not have been made. I have shot 1000's of +p+ 9mm from my 1990 SIG 226 and a G17 with no problems.

 

[philip964]

yeah but what was in the briefcase of pistols that went missing at the airport from the guards of the Prime Minister of Israel earlier this week?

 

[killchain]

My unit was issued M9's, Colt M4's, and M249's and M240B's.

The SF guys we were attached to were issued the same stuff... except they got a GAU19 in the back of an unarmored humvee, and got to wear baseball caps.

And one more than one occasion the good old ground pounders (like me) had to come and extract them because they bungled something.

Don't get me wrong, love the guys. But they pissed everyone off wherever they did an op. Hahaha.

 

[jaysouth]

Errornet = BS at the speed of light.

 

[Nine Lives]

I'm in Afghanistan right now and most of the guys walking around in civilians carrying M9's are MI, CI or whatever other military MOS's. There are a lot of federal agents around carrying glocks/sigs but I've seen a few contractors and SF carrying sigs/hk's/glocks/M9's. A lot of AK's on those guy's shoulders as well.

Being a lowly specialist all I've got is my M9 and M16A2 :/

 

[Pizzagunner]

The ammo was Winchester Silvertip. One M9 did fx when TZZ ammo was used. More than one gun fx before a DON (CNWS) message had all silvertip and TZZ use stopped. "You are not a SEAL until you have eaten Italian steel" If the NATO spec. ammo was NOT the main problem, the "frame & slide mods" would not have been made. I have shot 1000's of +p+ 9mm from my 1990 SIG 226 and a G17 with no problems.

It is so irritating when something so simple to look up and get right is not gotten right by the lazy or by those with an agenda for Brand X.

Between the SEALS and the army, there were a total of 14 slide cracks found in early production run Beretta M9 pistols that were at that time "92F" models, 11 in lab testing and three in the field with the SEALS. Before the pistols were being produced entirely in Accokeek Maryland, Beretta S.p.A. was producing the frames in the USA and using a mix of Italian steel produced slides and contract overrun slides made for France from French produced steel, where the 92G had recently won the national police contract and soon were to begin to be licensed built by MAS at St. Etienne. The French had included the rare earth element tellurium as a hardener and sulphate control in their steel mix. It turned out to be a bad choice.

Initially Beretta blamed the slide failures on the use of "overpressure" ammunition. It turns out that later metallurgical analysis of the fractured slides revealed that the slides were all overruns produced from the French steel. The tellurium had made the steel unpredictably brittle to the point that Picatinny fired a suspect M9 to 6k rounds, magnafluxed it and found no fractures, and then the slide catastrophically failed at round 6007. So the problem was rapidly identified and corrected.

However, the events had unintentionally revealed that the design could be improved in the case of a catastrophic slide failure. The end result was a slide cut on the underside of the left side of the slide that slots into an oversized disc on the hammer pivot pin. This modification retains the rear of the slide in the event of catastrophic separation, a modification that has since not been tested by any subsequent slide failures in the field, only during design with the suspect slides. The civilian Beretta model went from the 92F designation to the 92FS as a result of the modification. The French refit their pistols in 2002 after suffering slide cracks in their domestic version.

http://www.cybershooters.org/dgca/beretta_92fs.htm

http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA420011

 

[Owen]

there have been some subsequent slide failures, but these are generally on guns that are well past their service life....50k rounds and up.

 

[otcconan]

Let's clarify that. The Army may have more total aircraft than the Air Force, (not sure about that though) but the only reason is their large number of Rotorcraft. The Air Force has far more fixed wing aircraft than the Army. Most of the Army's fixed wing aircraft are for FAC or running generals around, not air to air or air to ground combat. That is Air Force, Navy or Marine.

Yep, there was a big fight in the '60's about this very issue. The Air Force felt that the Army was making their mission redundant. I'm pretty sure that most of the fixed-wing aircraft in the Army's inventory was transferred either to the Air Force or to the Marines.

This is why, when the Air Force considered phasing the A-10 out, they offered their inventory to the Marines and not the Army.

 

[otcconan]

Actually, if you only consider BOATS you may be correct. They still should keep to the ground. If their normal operations mirror what I saw, they won't have those boats for long. I guess that's one way of getting new toys, sink the ones that you have.

Truthfully, I believe that Homeland Secutiry has enough boats to make the Army look like they are just playing in the bath tub. Neither of them has as many SHIPS as the Navy. Besides, with the acceleration of Small Boat Squadrons, and auxillary craft used for security and life/rescue purposes, I think that the Army still comes up short. Consider that every SHIP has enough life boats for it's crew to evacuate. That's a lot of them for a carrier, or other large SHIP.

I'm pretty sure if you're talking BOATS, the Coast Guard has more than both of them.

 

[Owen]

Coast Guard is part of Homeland Security now...

 

[Pizzagunner]

there have been some subsequent slide failures, but these are generally on guns that are well past their service life....50k rounds and up.

The point I was making is that the "flying slide" retainer has no documented real world saves that one can point to. It seems that M9 slides no longer catastrophically fail, and instead give warning signs like progressive cracking, just like every other auto pistol slide out there does at the end of its service life.

The original problem was entirely metallurgical.

 

[Owen]

The point I was making is that the "flying slide" retainer has no documented real world saves that one can point to. It seems that M9 slides no longer catastrophically fail, and instead give warning signs like progressive cracking, just like every other auto pistol slide out there does at the end of its service life.

The original problem was entirely metallurgical.

Roger that.