But I do believe that the 226 is the better gun.
That's fine. Several respected firearms experts would agree with you. Several would not.
My point is simply that arguing that selecting the P226 would have remedied any real problem is silly. We'd get the same stories of people complaining about their sorry, unreliable 30-year-old Sig M9 running a garbage Triple K/Checkmate mag and a recoil spring that should have been changed 10,000 rounds ago, and how the performance of that pistol means that the Sig M9 sucks in general. In fact, given an equivalent maintenance environment, there's no doubt that we would have seen widespread problems with roll-pin fatigue leading to cracked slides on the old stamped-slide Sigs, which of course had a separate breech block pinned to the slide rather than milled into the slide (and which has occurred on poorly-maintained M11s).
But FWIW In the 1984 reliability testing, the Sig P226 suffered 12 stoppages, only 1 that required an armorer. The Beretta had 20 stoppages, with 9 of them requiring an armorer.
Yes, and almost 30% of the P226 test pistols cracked their frames before reaching 7,000 rounds whereas none of the Beretta test pistols did. Also, two-thirds of all the malfunctions with the 92SB-F test pistols came from just two guns.
And just a couple of years later, Army-supervised testing of the M9 at the Beretta USA plant resulted in reliability figures that were a
1000% improvement over the results from the XM9 trial pistols. And so on and so forth.
This leads me to two points:
(1) We can throw specific data points back and forth, but it should be obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of statistics what a joke the testing was in the first place as a basis for trying to draw precise conclusions on reliability and durability. There's a very large degree of statistical uncertainty with a sample size as small as the one used in the XM9 trials. Further uncertainty results from drawing these small samples from single production lots, and also from the very nature of some of the tests themselves. Whether the specific data point is "pro-Beretta" or "pro-Sig," there's isn't a statistically sound basis for thinking it definitively says anything as between the two pistols. (It's a bit different, of course, when the differences are enormous, as with the P7M13, which was a full order of magnitude less reliable in the testing than either the 92SB-F or P226.) So it was a poorly-constructed "experiment" in the first place for the kind of granular data the Army wished to extract from it.
(2) Even if the data supported precise conclusions at that time, which it did not, that data would have no relevance for discussions of today's 92 and P226. The guns are very, very different from their predecessors -- mostly in ways that you can't see with the naked eye, thanks both to continuous small design improvements and to advances in mass-production manufacturing technology since that time (well, design improvements until 2004 in the case of Sig, which has since been headed in the opposite direction under Cohen's Kimber playbook). See the above-referenced instance of the Beretta's reliability figures jumping ten-fold in just a couple of years, for one example, and the fact that these aluminum-framed guns aren't cracking their frames at low round counts anymore for another. The most recent government-supervised testing of the M9 resulted in a figure of 22,500 mean rounds between stoppages for the current-production Beretta 92/M9; I've yet to see results from government testing, U.S. or otherwise, of any other gun that approaches this reliability figure.
The Sig was also cheaper until Beretta dropped their price by 20 percent at the end of the tests.
This statement does not by itself constitute an argument.
Of course Beretta lowered its bid -- Beretta's pistols were 25% more expensive than Sig's in the first round of bidding. They were willing to sell the pistols at cost as of the time of the final bidding (prior to the existence of a stateside plant). There's nothing damning or dispositive about any of that.
it was then as it is today money (and politics) that kept the 226 out of the Army's hands.
The difference between the final bid figures does not account entirely for the victory margin of the Beretta in the scoring.
Furthermore, when you make the wholly unsupported claim that the only reason the military doesn't today switch to another big, heavy, aluminum-framed 9mm DA/SA pistol is the Sig's cost, you assume that today's production costs are higher for Sig than Beretta. That's definitely not something you can conclude on the basis of retail prices. (Remember, the P290's original MSRP was a ludicrous $758. I don't remember the P250's initial MSRP, but it was something similarly absurd. After being judged relative flops, the P290 can be had for less than $300 retail, and the P250 for ~$375, with Sig still making a profit.)
In fact, given Beretta's use of more expensive 4340 carbon steel for the 92's slide and 8640 carbon steel for its barrel -- both grades being harder and tougher, and thus more difficult and expensive to machine, than either the 4140 carbon steel or the stainless steel alloys used by almost everyone else -- the opposite may very well be true.
The politics allegations are nothing but pure speculation and Sauer grapes. As TunnelRat has mentioned, the only reason that 92SB-F wasn't the
sole finalist was because the Army retroactively changed the testing rules and disregarded the P226's results in part of the mud testing. It's funny how that's never mentioned when people throw around silly conspiracy theories -- from diplomatic intrigue to leaked bids -- about how the Army and/or government conspired to have the Beretta declared the winner. If that were so, they could have uncontroversially (or, rather, much less controversially) annointed Beretta the winner then and there.
