Glock and Beretta dropped the ball on the XM17 project

Word (from The Firearm Blog) has it that Glocks cannot get over losing the XM17 Modular Handgun System contract to Sig Sauer.

More rumors are getting around stating that Sig Sauer was basically handed the contract.

The M9 tests were very in-depth,and the results were talked about for years by various gun publications.

From reading everything we can tell the 1980s about the M9 project, there seem to be several major fallacies with the M17 test. If we look at the fallacies, the chances of Glock winning diminish even more.

Randomly Selected Handguns
During the M9 test, inspectors were allowed to select handguns at random from the factory. As reported by various publications in the 1980s, inspectors were allowed to walk into the factory, and hand pick at random which handguns to test. These samples were then tested and compared with the submitted samples.

The goal was to see if companies had modified their submissions from guns that were actually being produced.

Glocks does not mass-produce the model submitted for the M17 test. It would have been pretty much impossible for inspectors to compare random handguns from the assembly line to the test sample Glock submitted; this alone is the opposite to what happened in the 1980s.

Dropped Balls
Time to spread the love.

Let’s look at the facts: Glock and Beretta dropped the ball. They had 30 years to develop a new handgun, and they didn’t.

Rather than developing a handgun that met the M9 specifications, Glock did nothing. Glock hypothetically could have produced a handgun off the M9 standard and called it the M17, M19 or M22. The M would stand for military specification.

The M model handguns could have included:

• Lanyard attachment
• Manual safety
• Fixed sights

Glock did nothing over the past three decades to prepare for the next round of military trials. Then when Glock lost, its fanboys threw a sissy fit.

Beretta
Beretta in similar boat as Glock, had more than 30 years to develop a polymer frame handgun, and they too did not initiate. Also, rather than developing a handgun that could utilize decades’-worth of surplus M9 magazines, Beretta’s new handgun design takes an entirely different magazine.

A selling point could have been, “We are going to save the military X amount of money by reusing decades of M9 magazines.” Beretta marketing team did not forecast the possibility with military market (GSA contracts).

Being a die hard Beretta fan, I am not going to whine and complain how Beretta got screwed out of the XM17 contract, when they partially did it to themselves.

The XM17 contract was awarded to Sig Sauer on January 8, 2017.

Was the APX even in mass production for random test samples to have been selected, as was done during the M9 test?

In contrast to the APX, the Beretta 92 was developed in the 1970s and evolved into the 92F and eventually the M9. When the M9 project came about, the 92 had years of experience and just needed some minor tweaking for the M9 test, they had a chance to claim the contract(again).

Final Thoughts on what they could have done
If Glock had been something more than a one trick pony and produced a handgun that met the M9 standard back in the 1980s, they may have won the XM17 contract. The handgun would have had decades of fine tuning to prepare it for the XM17 trials.

If Beretta had gotten off their hands and produced a polymer-frame handgun a decade ago and fine-tuned it over time as they did with the 92, they may have won the XM17 contract.

Instead, both companies lost the contract and left it to the fanboys to fight it out over the Internet.

Sources: Wikipedia, All Outdoors, Kevin Felts