CZ has just released their new P09 Nocturne pistols, an update to the previous P07/P09 pairing. These guns fundamentally go back to the classic CZ-75. While that was (and still is) a very popular design, military and police tenders more recently have required more modern elements. So in 2007 the P07 Duty was released; essentially CZ75 mechanics with a modern look and a polymer frame. This was only offered as a compact model, until in 2009 the design was overhauled. At that point, the compact remained the P07 and a full size companion piece was released as the P09.
Now, the design has been updated again, as the P09 Nocturne. The compact is the P09C and the full size is the P09F, and both come with optics cuts as standard. They are only compatible with the mini-red dot patterns however, as the internal firing pin safety in the slide limits the amount of material that can be removed for the optic. For individuals and agencies who want a modern DA/SA system (with either decocted or manual safety), the P09 Nocturne is now an option with all the modern features.
“(…)decocted(…)”
What is this?
Typographical error for decocked. Spellcheck gone wild.
Missed Opportunities:
Use the reliable, much more popular/available, affordable, and 9mm-proportioned 75 mags.
Use an ergonomic safety lever. A safety (which needs to be deactivated immediately under stress to save one’s life) that is lower-profile than their own decocker (operated at leisure prior to reholstering) is absurd.
“(…)Use the reliable, much more popular/available, affordable, and 9mm-proportioned 75 mags.(…)”
Observe that CZ 75 http://modernfirearms.net/en/handguns/handguns-en/czech-republic-semi-automatic-pistols/cz-75-eng/ in 9×19 mm has capacity 16, whilst P-09 http://modernfirearms.net/en/handguns/handguns-en/czech-republic-semi-automatic-pistols/cz-p-07-p-09-eng/ in 9×19 mm has capacity 19, so there is distinct advantage
Like the 1911, Beretta 92, and many older pistols, the 75 has available higher-cap mags updated with modern springs and followers. I own a 19-rounder, also a P07 and a P09 mag. The 75 mag and its associated grip are superior for CCW, as well as for police and military customers who have to accommodate smaller-handed recruits; the P09 magwell caters to the small and dwindling (almost nonexistent for militaries) market for .40S&W.
Still not a fan of the DA/SA systems.
Even for experts, the transition between different weights of trigger pull is problematic, which Ian demonstrates during the shooting phase of this video.
Factor in the “We’re gonna be handing this to people who don’t know anything about pistols…” deal that you run into inside most institutional settings, and you’re basically programming for failure.
There are a bunch of basic design principles that I think we should have worked out, by now. Among them? Don’t build weapons that can be put together improperly and still present a semblance of working. Don’t build weapons you can’t maintain in the field without a bunch of fuss and bother. Don’t build weapons that require specialized tools and extensive support. Don’t build weapons that have inconsistent interface features like DA/SA.
Things like that. I’d fail every one of the DA/SA pistols on this factor alone; as a trainer, they made my life a misery. It’s really bad when you couple bad design with people making decisions about staffing and training support funding that preclude training your way out of the inherent issues. You’re gonna give me 40-50 rounds a year, plus or minus an additional year for training ammo? Yeah; give me a pistol that doesn’t have the inconsistent and overly complicated fire control system, please…
That’s why there are hybrid LEM/DAK triggers.
I’m curious about the DA/SA pistols you handled. It’s not that difficult to become sufficient with DA/SA triggers with enough training.
Rob said:
“It’s not that difficult to become sufficient with DA/SA triggers with enough training.”
It’s that “enough training” that’s the problem I ran into with every single DA/SA system I’ve tried teaching someone to shoot well. In the military, it was the M9, and I’ve also done it with a S&W 559, a Tanfoglio copy of a CZ-75, an actual CZ-85, and a couple of others.
If you’ve got the time and money to lavish on them, with a sufficiently “available” (in terms of interest and lack of fear…) student, you can eventually teach them to shoot DA/SA reasonably well. Even so, as you observe with Ian’s string there in the video, you’re going to have momentary bobbles that you just won’t have with a consistent action like SA-only and most striker-fired designs.
If you’ve got the time and the ammo? DA/SA can be made to work. I will hold, however, that in a resource-constrained situation like we usually had in the Army, it was a horrible idea poorly executed in the M9. The Glock, for all of its faults, is a better design for that sort of environment. If all you’re going to have is maybe a box of ammo every couple of years to maintain proficiency with, then something like the Glock is the way to go. The M9 was a lousy choice, considering what they planned on doing with it for training/proficiency support.
I’m still not a fan of the DA/SA idea, TBH. It’s like designing in uncertainty where you have no business putting it, even for an experienced shooter. Interfaces ought to be consistent, simple, and intuitive. DA/SA simply isn’t either; especially when you include something like the M9 safety, which isn’t just a simple decocker. Way too many modes, there…
And, to reinforce my earlier point about “design principles we should already know and religiously enforce…”, the “consistent interface” thing is a problem everywhere.
Once you’ve established that something works to a standard pattern, you should only change that for a good and persuasive reason, like “new technology”. Automotive designers are horrible for this, and I’d wager that there’s a not-inconsiderable fraction of automobile “accidents” that only occur because the driver is distracted trying to figure out some control or feature in their car while driving. At this point, there’s really no excuse for this crap, and they really ought to be doing designed-in onboard tutorials for critical features like “headlights” on modern cars… Or, at least, have extensive video-aided tutorials to work through before driving the designer-bedamned things.
Weapons aren’t any different, and in fact, ought to be designed to succeed in terms of it all. DA/SA is a design concept that really should have never been considered in the first damn place, because of that inherent inconsistency of trigger pull, along with the whole “Is this thing safe, ready to fire, or some unGodly combination of the two…?” deal with most of the safeties they design for these things. Walther’s P-38 was a horrendous early example, and I can see why the Luger was preferred by most German soldiers.
The Glock system, and its imitators, are almost the Platonic ideal of pistol interface: Minimum of controls, designed-in safety features, and as little as possible between the shooter and actually shooting the pistol at a malefactor. DA/SA is just… Incredibly stupid, as a design to hand off to someone who isn’t going to have or even be interested in extensive training time.
Most of the DA/SA systems I’ve seen are literally “Designed to fail” the whole paradigm of issuing a pistol as a last-ditch PDW system. You’re talking about a non-expert in a highly stressful situation needing to take immediate action against a threat, and without them having had a sufficient amount of training/trigger time to overcome the confusions inherent to the design of a pistol like the M9. The situation there is about like having a three-step variable process to get your fire extinguisher into operation, which makes no damn sense at all…
Exactly – as you noted, “OK with enough training” means “objectively much worse for the vast majority of servicemembers, cops, and home defenders alike who don’t get enough training (and occasionally, very experienced shooters like Ian)”. Every non-5 by every good shooter I ever saw with the M9 was a DA, and it got much worse for the others.
It’s interesting that you chose automotive design as your illustrative example; I always use it as my “good example” when thinking of the real offenders – computer programmers, i.e. if I took my car in for routine service and found they’d switched the brake and gas or put my gearshift in the trunk I’d brain them with a tire iron, but software companies think they have the right to do that with your paid-for product all the time.
Acid test for automotive design: Get in the car, after dark, and try driving it.
If you’ve got to stop and look at the dash controls for simple things like headlights and windshield wipers, then the designer failed.
Frankly, if you’ve got to stop and dig out the damn manual to figure out how/why the headlight dimmer switch ain’t working the way you expect it to, the designer failed in their job. Same with the various heater/climate controls: If you’ve got to stop the car, get out the manual, and spend ten minutes trying to figure out how the hell the defrost works, then the designer failed.
If you have anything like those sorts of things implemented in your design, then there ought to be built-in tutorial functions you can access from the driver’s seat without, again, digging into the manuals.
And, if you absolutely have to have the damn manual to figure out how the car’s basic functions work? You’ve failed as a designer.
Car interfaces used to be relatively simple and issue-free. They’ve changed that crap so badly in the last few decades that it ain’t even funny; my brother’s new GMC truck has some bullshit with the tailgate that’s not even laid out in the manual, which is fundamentally criminal…
Fair point about the peripherals. I was more focused on the fact that the main controls, the ones you have to nail immediately and intuitively in an emergency, are (and have to be) in the same place everywhere, with zero leeway for the Good Idea Fairy to be “creative”. Motorcycles are completely standardized.
@Mike,
The number of accidents that are attributed to poor human interface design are innumerable. The Navy, for example, is now doing away with touchscreens and all the rest of that modernistic Star Trek BS in favor of actual switches and so forth. Why? Because they’ve had too many accidents where the touchscreen interfaces were identified as proximate causes for the accident… Or, heavy contributors.
There are times and places for certain elements of design. There are others where you absolutely have got to have simplicity and consistency, like in firearms. The whole “Oh, gee, let’s have seven different options and three different modes of fire…” thing on a handgun is patently insane.
There are clear meta-aspects that have to be addressed, as well: If you’re going to use the pistol as a primary arm for say, cavalry? OK, fine… The Colt M1911 was a great design, and I can see the logic inherent to making it the type-standard for the entire force. However, huge ‘effing comma, the whole “Yeah, this thing is too damn big and intimidating to effectively train 90% of the user base on now that the Cav is dead and gone…” should have been a consideration starting about 1939. There is nothing particularly unique or revolutionary about the basics of the Glock interface; George C. Nonte was describing the “ideal combat handgun” back in the 1960s; I’ve still got that seminal work of his buried somewhere in storage. It’s frightening how he presciently described the Glock before the Glock was even a thing, and I believe he had a lot of influence on the people who advised Gaston Glock on design paradigm when he set out to create his pistol.
Part of the problem is that “they”, the powers-that-be in small arms procurement and design never seem to look at things holistically or with any realism. The M9 was procured on the predicate that we’d have plenty of time and ammo on hand to get everyone proficient on that relatively complex system, and they “validated” that by doing testing with people who were (as far as I’ve been able to ascertain…) already fairly pistol-savvy. At no time did they go out and gather up the average Suzy Chapstick types who make up the Nurse Corps or many of the other staff elements, and then try to see how well they’d be able to adapt to the M9 with the paltry amount of ammo and training that they should have known would wind up being the standard… Because, of course, those were the same assholes who wrote the STRAC training standards in the first ‘effing place. Which were entirely unrealistic and bizarrely out-of-touch with the realities of things. It’s like they projected “Every man a COL Jeff Cooper” as their baseline norm, and planned ammo expenditures accordingly… Never mind that COL Cooper himself was on record for having shot thousands of rounds a month just to maintain proficiency.
I mean, yeah… Gimme a few thousand rounds, nearly unlimited range time, and I’m confident that I could make nearly anyone a lethal threat to someone attacking them. The problem, however, is that “they” had to have known that they’d never be able to provide the trainer with that sort of support, and that they would never be able to get the average person they meant for that pistol to serve as a defense for to any real level of proficiency with it. The most they committed, in terms of resources? A lick and a promise, no more.
That being the case, the entire design should have been different, and much more attention should have been paid to the whole “Draw and fire” paradigm, rather than the “Draw, fumble with safety and trigger, maybe hit something…” that the M9 represented in actual practice.
I’m a “gun guy” from childhood forward, but I’ve got utmost respect for people who aren’t. You have to work to the necessities of the people you actually have to work with, and I’m afraid that the average use-case for the M9 was way more “Suzy Chapstick” than “Annie Oakley”, male and female personnel alike. Nice people who needed to be able to defend themselves with something that required minimal training time and ammunition… The M9 was a suitable sidearm for Military Police, who were lavished with the training ammo for it (in my experience, at least…) and nobody else. The rest of the Army outside of Delta Force got by on maybe fifty rounds every two years, on average…?
I’d have to go back and look, but I think basic qual numbers ran to like 35 rounds per course of fire, and you’d be lucky to see those, in a lot of units.
And as if the heavy “you can get used to it after 1000 rounds” DA and the abrupt SA transition weren’t enough, they took the “who cares that it’s in the wrong place or is ergonomically backwards because you’re meant to disregard it like a DA revolver” safety and made everyone cycle it manually.
@Mike,
One of the things I feel they need to do when evaluating military pistol designs (actually, damn near everything they issue…) is take a bunch of brand-new shooters and then observe with minute detail what they do during the training/familiarization process.
I’m telling you, if you’d watched half the crap my lane safeties had to deal with, and that with relatively senior soldiers who just didn’t have a background with handguns… Dear sweet babbling baby Jeebus. You would not believe half the crap… You’d run through the proscribed training syllabus, add to it, and they’d still be futzing it up by the numbers out there with that damn safety “system”. And, the trigger…
DA/SA isn’t a hugely difficult thing to pick up, but it’s virtually ‘effing impossible to train everyone to proficiency with the limited time and ammunition we were given for that weapon.
I think that had they gone to something as simplified as the Glock system, with no external safety and a single trigger pull to deal with? It would have been exponentially easier to train to some level of proficiency for all concerned, given the amount of time and resources they allocated.
Way, way too much of what they plan and procure for is based on a predicate of outrageously optimistic conditions and resourcing that they have to know just ain’t happening. And, what’s worse is that the idiots doing a lot of the procurement never seem to actually examine the realities of things out in the field and compare the resource allocations afforded by the training budget for all units to really assess what they’re buying. With the M9, you rather got the impression that they’d just “assumed” that all units would get the same lavish ammunition accounts that they gave to MP and Ranger/SF units for training, and they never stopped to say “Uh… Yeah, so what if they don’t get that kind of ammo supply and range time…?”
You run into stupidities like that all through the system, where they have crap lined up in the manuals and regulations that are simply totally unsupportable out in the real world that they’ve created with the budgeting and training facilities. Not to mention the minor idiocies like I ran into with the M249, wherein the night fire with night vision standards were totally unachievable unless you had the sight collimation kit that your unit wasn’t authorized unless it was Infantry, and even the Infantry outfits didn’t have enough of them to ever take the risk of lending them out. There’s a lot of issues like that which often had me railing against the gods of military stupidity…
Kirk,
I’d believe it because I’ve seen so much of it. One of my guys on my first ship missed the 3m silhouette entirely, so I took him to the range with my dream-trigger 1911; did the same again on his first shot.
The funny thing is, they never put two and two together. People who are so inexperienced, irresponsible, nervous, shaky, etc. that they can’t be trusted with anything less than a 12lb trigger and manual safety certainly exist. So do people who have practiced enough that they can achieve stopping hits with a 12lb trigger – but there is zero overlap whatsoever between those two sets of people.
@Mike,
The root of the problem is that they design for your second category of shooter, and never acknowledge that the first exists, or that that is the default state of the people they’re going to be issuing these things to.
The really funny thing is, the meat-eating segment of the population can do just fine with a tool like the Glock which is designed for the herbivores, but the procurement folks persist in this unrealistic fantasy that “Yeah, everybody can be Sergeant York!! We just need to get them the right gun…”, and then they procure something like the MK23. Which would kinda-sorta be their “ideal weapon”, if only the taxpayer would/could cough up the money…
I think there’s a vice going on in procurement, one that has overly-invested “enthusiasts” warping the overall direction of all the programs, not clear-eyed pragmatists that really don’t give a rat’s ass about anything other than killing the enemy in job lots.
I have had a love for firearms all my life, but at the same damn time, I don’t worship the ‘effing things the way some delusional idjits fall in love with something like a katana and then allow that love to utterly take over all their decisions and opinions on swords. The way I look at it, you left me alone to work out an arsenal and training program for the era when the katana was the go-to weapon for the “enthusiast”, and I’d have stepped back, taken a long, hard look at things… And, then procured a butt-ton of naginata to hand out to the actual troops, leaving the swords for the dandies in the officer class.
Same with modern small arms: What does most of the killing, if you’re “doing it right”? Machine guns and mortars, baby… Get those “right”, and you’ve got nine-tenths of your combat equation solved, right there. The pistols and rifles are just there to keep the specialists like the RTO and officers alive when they screw up and let the enemy get in close…
NGSW is representation of the fundamental inability of these idjits to actually “get” what is going on in modern combat. And, they’re repeating and reinforcing their failures with small arms with regards to the ongoing insertion of RPV/drone technology.
We used to joke about the “bullet with your name on it”, but the sickly disturbing feature of the drone war going on in Ukraine right now is that there actually are weapons “with your name on” out there, and the ‘effing things have warheads that body armor won’t do a damn thing to defend against. Do note the number of hors de combat soldiers we see who’re wearing body armor in all these video clips coming out of there, but they’ve been so badly wounded in the extremities that they can’t do any more than lay there beneath the drone coming in for the killshot…
Y’all have no idea at all how glad I am to be done with the stupidity. I’m not even sure how the hell we’d be able to counter most of the things I’ve been seeing whenever I go out to look at the raw reports… Scary crap: Imagine someone sneaking a bunch of those FPV drones into a harbor, and having to deal with them shipboard, flying down all the passageways… While most of your crew was on shore leave. It’d make what happened to the Stark look tame, by comparison.
Kirk,
The problem is that they design for nobody. Just as the first category of shooter (the noob who needs a staplegun trigger to not ND) isn’t going to hit anything with a staplegun trigger, the expert who’s practiced enough to be accurate with a staplegun trigger has no need for its “safety factor”. They took two diametrically opposed and incompatible sets of conditions and designed for the impossible situation where both happened at the same time.
It’s just like NGSW, designed for a war where we have to fight a fully armored peer competitor, but under ridiculously restrictive peacetime ROE where we aren’t allowed to shwack them with inorganic fires.
@Mike,
The lack of critical thought you find in this realm is maddening: “OK, we’re gonna design this whole new suite of small arms, just in case we’re ever in a situation where we’re fighting heavily armored enemy infantry instead of guerrillas wearing dashikis…”, and then ignoring the reality that those dudes wearing the dashikis were giving us grief without wearing body armor…
The whole “overmatch” thing in Afghanistan wasn’t a result of the enemy having access to or even wearing armor; if they’d have had it, they’d have left it behind. The problem that they failed to identify was that they were screwing up the small-arms centric fights they were getting us into because of piss-poor doctrine and even worse equipment. You cannot effectively answer MG fire coming at you from beyond 6-800m with another MG firing off the bipod and PFC Schmedlap’s shoulder. That doesn’t work; you need to put a real platform and fire controls under that gun, and be able to do it within seconds of receiving fire. Then, you have to have the ability to locate where the fires are coming from, and direct fire back on those locations effectively, while controlling that fire. You cannot do this off an M122/192 tripod, because those are optimized for fixed defensive positions, and if you never issue the MG team leaders the observation/rangefinding tools they need…? No wonder you can’t effectively deal with the enemy firing at you with PKs that are likely not even being run all that well.
NGSW is/was a non-solution to a non-existent problem, one that was fundamentally misidentified in the first damn place. The people behind this, I must speculate, saw an opportunity to leverage in a whole new family of small arms, and make a bunch of money doing it. While also, coincidentally, guaranteeing good post-military careers for a bunch of field grade officers.
When they started the whole thing, the goals were reasonable: New, much lighter cartridges and better ballistics. What they actually procured was a second iteration of the M14/7.62 NATO fiasco, and a cartridge that is either effectively emasculated or too damn high a velocity to actually issue because “barrel erosion”, the very same feature that’s plagued every one of these over-powered uber cartridges since before WWI. Look back at the history of what they were going to replace the .303 British with, then the .276 Pedersen, and that original cartridge for the Ross: Every one of them wore out barrels like a mofo’, and none of them were at all successful.
Meanwhile, what they should have done, which would be to have gone back to something like the .280 British for the individual weapon, and something like the 8X63 Swedish for the support weapon? That’s too damn hard to figure out, apparently…
Cost/benefit wise? I see no reason to leave the current suite of rounds behind for this insanely misconceived NGSW abortion. I predict failure for it, and I lay you long odds that the first time they take it to combat, the day afterwards will see the Infantry commanders raping the supporting arms for every M4 they can get.
Do remember… The M4 was supposed to be the carbine for the support guys to have, and the M16A2 was supposed to be the ultimate uber-rifle for the highly-trained Infantry outfits: How’d that all work out, again, in practice?
The desire path for combat runs through a dual-caliber solution, with the individual weapon being something a hell of a lot closer to the M4 than that overpowered POS NGSW that they have to issue two different kinds of ammo for. I don’t see that working at all well…
The lack of critical thought is all that much more maddening because they weren’t crafting a misguided tool for Afghanistan; they were building it for the absurd hypothetical where we somehow had to fight CHY-nah with our hands tied by Afghan ROE. I completely agree with the rest of your conclusions.
On the issue of interface design, there’s this utterly fascinating thread over on X/Twitter discussing the Navy’s issues:
https://x.com/d_feldman/status/1825591213040320909
I think you can easily work out how the design choices with that helm console led almost directly to the collisions under discussion. They always talk great bullshit about “man/machine interface”, but in the end? They just do whatever the idjit engineer in charge thinks will work. I’d lay you long odds that somewhere back along the design process, there was probably some superannuated mid-level Chief Petty Officer who had a lot to say about all of it, but that he was roundly ignored. His bosses, both enlisted and commissioned, were probably more concerned with stroking the contractors for potential post-service employment and getting good ratings from their bosses than actually getting a workable helm console out of the deal…
I ain’t even a Navy guy or a helmsman, and I can see a bunch of potential issues with that console design.
Should have highlighted this link/post in that thread, as it is one of the better explanations of all the fundamental issues behind those accidents:
https://adrian3.com/blog/2019/2019-09-28-The-US-Navys-100-million-dollar-checkbox.php
Read the whole thing, and be afraid: Very, very afraid. Mostly, for the taxpayers, because the McCain was a newly-refurbished ship, these consoles were state of the art… And, they’re all going bye-bye because they heavily contributed to the “accident”. Lots and lots of money involved, that your tax dollars are going towards.
Bad design kills, everywhere.
Jeez… Missed something else: The author of that piece, Adrian Hanft has a book that’s already out, and which looks to be very interesting in the “Oh, f*ck…” sense.
User Zero: Inside the Tool that is Reshaping Dystopia by Adrian Hanft
https://www.amazon.com/User-Zero-Inside-Reshaping-Dystopia-ebook/dp/B08MDM6LRT/
It’s practically inevitable. The Navy not only has separate administrative (man/train/equip) and operational chains of command, but also a Research, Development, and Acquisition bureaucracy that isn’t subordinate, accountable, or even in formal direct comms with either. They have active servicemembers, but they’re entirely out of the sea rotation, and (as you implied) do NOT include NCOs.
@Mike,
I suspect that one of the major problems we have before us is the way we go about acquiring and disseminating knowledge.
I know from observation that there’s this huge void in between what we might term “academic” and “tacit” knowledge. The academic stuff is what we’ve reduced to textbooks, and have taught to others by “experts in the field”, while the tacit knowledge is that which is picked up more-or-less informally, in the field, by practitioners. So long as there’s not too much difference between the two, there’s really no problem, but when the academics start wandering off into self-imagined lala land, and the guys with the skills acquired through practical experience are not even acknowledged as existing, let alone even being just ignored?
Yeah, we’ve got a problem. I was just talking to a guy, a Navy vet, who had a surface warfare badge, and who described to me the problems that they’d had with all the new gear. It was like the people designing it thought of the crew like they were lab rats, and got all pissed off when the rats didn’t run the maze the way they’d planned for them to be doing it.
He mentioned that there was a bunch of stuff that the designers had done that was just ‘effing nuts, compared to civilian bridge design (which he knew from working as a tug operator), in that the Navy had just hand-waved away the necessity for having a head near the bridge for bridge crew to use on duty. They had to take Gatorade bottles up on the bridge, in order to be able to take a piss, and if they had to use the head, it was two decks and a couple of bulkheads away…
Nuts. On the civilian tug he worked on, there was a head right abaft of the bridge, and he said that the Coast Guard inspected for that as a “thing”, in that if that head wasn’t fully functional, they’d get dinged on safety operations…
Which was why I was reading that article about the McCain and going “Waitaminute… Piss-bottles on the bridge… Wha…?
Gatorade bottles? We could be so lucky! That wouldn’t have worked for me anywhere since my last “all-ball” ship, which I left in 1999. And yes, there are too many “plant eaters” forcing their academic “knowledge” into everyday practice.
Glock had no thumb safety so the military was apoplectic. The SEALS tested the Glock underwater and it worked fine. They tried to train us on the SIG SAUER DA/SA in 1987 and I found the same problem. They sheared off the hammer spur in later models so one could not thumb cock it for a SA first shot. A smooth light DA only would work, like a S&W Revolver. We can hope.
The Glock was never considered because of the way they set out the procurement criteria. They wanted second-strike capability for the weapon, which meant “DA”, and they wanted a manual safety. They never stepped back and thought to consider things the way Nonte and Glock’s advisers did, which was to essentially pare everything back to “put nothing between the shooter and the target but the holster”.
You can’t solve a problem when you set out to do so with wrongly stated and preconceived ideas. The root purpose of a pistol in the military setting? Last-ditch defense for specialist personnel; start with the mission, evaluate the people you’re going to have to issue it to, and then move on. They should have looked at the pistol as something they were going to issue a nurse or a medic, who’d get minimal training and would likely not be a “gun-exposed person”. Instead, they assumed a user that’d be a lot closer to a military policeman or an infantry machinegunner, that needed an auxiliary weapon they’d be better capable of wrapping their heads around and using. Such a group could have used something designed for our first example, but… They chose to procure for the second group alone, and here we are.
To my way of thinking, the M9 program (and, about every other military pistol program…) ought to be taking the Forest Service fire shelter as its design paradigm: Something stupid-simple that stays securely stored until you absolutely need it, and then once you do need it, all you do is pull it out and put it into action with minimal fuss and bother. Hell, I’d go so far as to issue the goddamn things in sealed packaging for one-time use… “Oh, someone needs to be shot, pull it out, shoot them…”, throw it away and draw another sealed package. No maintenance other than wiping the packaging down, and that’s about all you need to worry about. Think of it as “Bear spray for people”, and there ya go.
You have something like that on one end of the spectrum, and something like the MK23 on the other… Guess which I’d be issuing the majority?
Kirk:
I am starting to think the DA only Enfield revolver was a smart piece of design. Even the 12 round training allocation does not sound too bad given what you are saying.
I’ve never fired or even handled that specific Enfield, but I think the argument could be made that that is a “fit-for-purpose” solution to the whole problem of giving someone who has limited familiarity with weapons something to defend themselves with.
The root problem here is that the “powers-that-be” don’t step back from things and really examine things from a “first principles” position. You have to wipe the slate of all pre-conceived notions, and then examine what is really going on in the world before you can come to a truly effective solution.
First, with regards to the handgun-as-actually-issued: What is the actual use-case, and who are the users?
I’ll piss a lot of people off with this, but Sergeant York ain’t what you’re aiming at for the vast majority of people you’ll be handing one to. You basically issue pistols (in the majority, again…) to people who’re highly-trained or high-ranking, in order to afford them something to enable them to preserve their high-value lives when the situation goes well and truly pear-shaped. All too often, these sorts are not going to be highly-trained and experienced meat-eating types, and you really shouldn’t worry about those guys, anyway: They’ll likely equip themselves with anything they can get their hands on, anyway. You should worry more about a.) what they’re going to do with their illicit acquisitions, and b.) how to separate yourself from the legal implications of what are very likely to be war crimes…
Father Jerzy, I’m thinking specifically of you, here. That was one chaplain that I had zero concern about protecting, and who I would have been more worried about protecting any potential Russian/Communist types from… But, I digress.
The whole paradigm of “military pistol” thus becomes, in the absence of cavalry, “something to give the inept at personal combat” to preserve them for future use. Thus, you basically want the Forest Service fire shelter approach, as close as you can get to that sort of “sealed whoop-ass in a can” ideal.
In that paradigm, anything beyond “Pull trigger, make bad man stop” is not only wasteful, but positively damaging to the mission you’re procuring one of these weapons for, which is the close-in protection and preservation of highly-trained specialist personnel.
Yeah, you’re likely going to need to issue something a little more complicated to other specialists, like the Military Police you have running traffic patrol on your bases in peacetime, but… The basic mission for the majority of use-cases is “draw, fire, eliminate threat to specialist personnel”.
This being the case, it’s my belief that you’re way better off issuing something like a Glock, and a good, solid holster. Familiarize the user just enough to make sure they understand that “pistol is dangerous out of holster”, and make it policy that pistols stay in holsters until and unless absolutely needed.
Like I said, I’d go so far as to develop a sealed package that was akin to a fire shelter; carry it at all times, and once you’ve pulled it out under exigency, toss it.
Like all too many things in procurement, people’s egos get involved, and they develop these really unrealistic images of what they’re actually doing, or what the weapon is supposed to be doing. That’s why they want to give everyone a high-powered DMR in the NGSW individual weapon, and fail to comprehend that the mission is absolutely not playing “one shot; one kill” in some play-space somewhere. The role of the individual weapon in today’s conflicts is close-in defense and assault; that tool has to be light, easily wielded in lots of unusual conditions, and be capable of offering the user an “excessively” high ammo loadout. That’s not NGSW; I predict that about the first time they get those NGSW individual weapons into actual combat, people are going to learn the hard way that that’s a damn DMR, not a general-issue weapon. I further predict that the M4 carbine has a much healthier future ahead of it than anyone wants to admit to…
Kirk:
The Enfield revolver wasn’t too bad for its time. The sights were excellent, and the double action trigger pull was quite manageable. The .38 ammunition was only about as powerful as .380 ACP, so it was no powerhouse, but I think it did its job as a personal defence weapon. Given a nonsensical training allowance of 12 rounds, anything more powerful would have been a waste of time.
It was clearly inappropriate to issue it to an infantry officer as his main weapon, but when the Sten came into service that problem was solved. Obviously, the officer could not carry a rifle like the men, that would never have done.
So I think Britain may have stumbled into having a pistol which did just as much as any pistol could be expected to do. They are not a main weapon, they are a back up. Any experienced shooter would take a 1911 over an Enfield, but 99.9% of conscripts are not experienced pistol shooters, and never will be.
Which is precisely why you need to procure to meet the needs of the 99.9%, not the fractional number that are going to be able to wring the most out of the weapon class.
I would almost advocate for going to a system wherein you could have the cognoscenti acquire and deploy with their own personally-owned handguns, and issue the “Forest Service fire shelter” paradigm for everyone else. We do it with anti-tank weapons, why not extend the concept…?
I kinda suspect that this sort of thing is going to come in, no matter what, once they manage to field some sort of “Iron Man” powered body armor to the first-line combatants; you’re going to have to mass-issue something in the way of a last-ditch weapon against those guys, and I suspect it will likely take the form of something a lot more like a Panzerfaust or an M72 LAW than anything else.
Either that, or they’ll be giving folks the equivalent of a magnetic/adhesive limpet mine, again… It’ll be another one of those new/old paradigm situations that most people familiar with military history are gonna be having a distinct sense of deja vu, observing it all.