by Jerm_G » Thu Nov 21, 2013 12:20 pm
There was an attempt in the past decade to change from the M9 but it ran into a little problem. Not a single service could decide on the action they wanted let alone what caliber. Marines wanted .45s, the army, wanted 40s and the Air Force and Navy wanted 9mm. Some wanted SA/DA, some wanted DA only, others wanted striker fired, and of course Marines wanted single action in the mix as well. Basically it turned into a huge debacle. The problem the military faces is that not only does the gun have to be combat capable but it has to fit a huge range of people and has to be agreed on across the services. Not an easy task to accomplish.
Then you still have to deal with the corruption in the procurement process. Often the best performing product is not the winner. It's the one that comes from an existing contract holder. In many of the contracts of the past there is a line that only allows for the winner to be from a major small arms contract holder (Colt, FN, HK). Not a big three? Tough shit. That was how the IAR contract was won by HK. Out of the big three, they had the winning design. But they did not meet the requirements for the contract. The primary part of the contract, which was well publicized, was that the rifle had to operate from both the closed bolt on SA and from the open bolt on full auto. One company made that happen and even out preformed all the competitors during testing. The rest failed to meet standards and just submitted a heavy barreled version of their current guns. The Marine IAR is just a longer barreled HK-416 with optics and a bipod. "Fixing" the procurement process is common in the DOD.
With the M-4, the first several tests never allowed testing beyond the capabilities of the M-4 platform. So parts had to be changed out based on M-4 specs and tests were never designed to go past the M-4's capability. Also see the above clause. So naturally, because the testing wasn't allowed to test further the result was "no significant improvement" over the M-4 design. Then small businesses were not allowed to compete. Violation of Federal law... Then in the latest round, they were but had to hand over production rights to Colt and FN. Despite abysmal performance of the M4 in testing as it came in last place (every time) and the second worse performer had less than 1/3rd of the amount of stoppages, The M-4 was still declared the victor. The Army gets the patent rights soon for the M-4. They don't want to change and the industry knows it.
As with energy transfer, those numbers only work if the round stops and dumps that energy into it's target. With full metal jacket rounds you almost always have over penetration.9mm for some reason has significantly more over penetration than others. So the name of the game is generally a bigger hole or more bullets. Modern bullets generally produce similar energy transfer when they stop. There really is not much of a difference between pistol rounds. The whole argument is moot. DoD does need a handgun that is reliable and does not have a 12 pound trigger pull.
"Sometimes it is entirely appropriate to kill a fly with a sledge hammer." -Major I.L. Holdridge USMC