[ SIG M18 Contract Overrun ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at the SIG M18.
This is half of the US Modular Handgun Program,
the other half being the M17, the full-size pistol.
The M18 is the compact.
And while it was only adopted by the US Army
specifically for use by Military Police and Criminal Investigation Division guys,
the compact M18 was actually adopted by all of the other service branches.
So the US Navy, the US Air Force and the US Marine Corps notably,
will all be using the M18 as their standard service pistol.
This is going to give it a lot more actual use
between the civilian and the military versions of the M17 pistol.
I think it's worth taking a moment today to talk a little bit more about
the procurement process that led to 17 and the M18 being adopted in the first place.
Because by historical standards, this testing and adoption regimen went really pretty fast.
So the actual RFP, the Request For Proposals, for pistol designs went out in late 2015.
By 2017 a winner had been chosen.
That's really fast. If you compare that to for example, the 1911 trials
... the main trials took place in 1907.
It would be 4 years of further development before the 1911
pistol was actually finalised and adopted.
And then time to actually get them into production.
Well, for the M17 by November of 2017
the first pistols are actually being delivered to the 101st Airborne (like that one).
Like the same year that it gets adopted they're already getting delivered,
which is astonishingly fast in historical terms.
So some of the requirements for the M17 and the M18
placed a pretty significant priority on modularity.
So they wanted to be able to have a threaded barrel
for those rather limited applications where a suppressor was called for.
They also in particular wanted the pistol to be able to fit
the hands of everybody in the military, all services,
from the 5th percentile up to the 95th percentile.
So it's basically impossible to get a pistol design that will fit everybody,
because as your bell curve gets out towards the ends you get some
really ... very, very small and very, very large hands.
But they said 5th to 95th percentile, so it's going to be ... the centre 90% of all the troops.
And so what SIG did was they designed
three separate grip modules for these pistols, a small, a medium and a large.
The medium is what the guns mostly come with,
and that is just a little bit smaller than the M9 pistol, the Beretta M9.
The large is a little bit bigger than an M9 grip.
And the small is well, quite a lot smaller than an M9 grip.
And between those three, these essentially fit everybody.
Now on the commercial side, the way SIG designed this pistol as the SIG P320
was around an internal fire control module that is ... legally considered the firearm,
and the plastic grip module is an unregulated uncontrolled part.
That's relevant on the civilian side because of
the background check process and the purchasing process.
But it's also relevant for basically the same reason on the military side.
If the military wanted to try and find someone with really tiny hands a suitable pistol,
they couldn't really modify an M9, because
the part they would modify, the ... frame, was the gun itself.
Well, with one of the SIGs they can keep the same ... serial number on the books,
and just replace a very simple, inexpensive and uncontrolled part.
So the army was pretty serious about that.
A couple of the initial competitors in this competition, Smith & Wesson and Sphinx,
both I believe submitted designs that didn't have this sort of modular feature.
And both of those companies ended up pulling out of the contest voluntarily.
Pretty much everyone else in the pistol world who was of substance,
a substantially large company that could afford to fulfil this order,
pretty much everyone else competed. FN was in it, Beretta was in it, CZ was in it.
SIG of course ended up winning.
The other requirements for the pistol involved
it had to be able to hit a 4 inch target at 35 yards 90% of the time.
So I'll let you figure out what that means in MOA.
It had to have an external safety mechanism,
it had to have an integrated rail for mounting a light or other accessories.
It had to have a 35,000 round service life, which is pretty substantial.
And it had to be able to penetrate 14 inches of calibrated ballistics gel at 50 metres.
So it needed a relatively powerful cartridge.
SIG ended up partnering with Winchester to develop a specific army loading.
This is designed for the M1152 and M1153 cartridges.
1152 is 115 grain FMJ (Full Metal Jacket)
with a pretty high muzzle velocity of 1,320 feet per second.
So it's in the +P or +P+ range,
it's more potent than just standard SAAMI spec 9mm.
The M1153 is a 147 grain hollow point
that is considered the special purpose round for those applications where
they want to reduce over penetration, and they don't have to worry
about Hague Convention stuff about expanding bullets.
So that's the ammunition that these pistols, both of them, were designed for.
I ... had a brain fart on the M17 video and said it was 9mm NATO,
which is 124 grain, essentially +P.
These will certainly run it very happily,
but that's not the specific ammunition that they are being issued with.
So let's go ahead and now (finally) take a closer look at the M18,
and I'll show you how it compares to the M17, and well, the details.
Generally speaking, the military M18 shares the same specific features as the military M17s.
... The differences between the civilian and military guns are pretty much parallel.
Now the M18s all have black controls.
Very few of these were delivered early, the first military deliveries were M17s.
By the time they started doing M18s I believe the controls had already changed to black.
So you won't see any [tan] ones.
However, ... if we look at our serial number here, this has a "TC" prefix.
That very specifically is a military contract prefix, so that's one way to tell a military M18.
On the slide you will have SIG Sauer M18, with no P320 reference.
And of course we have the manufacturer and the product number here on the side of the slide.
Note that if we compare the 17 back here and the 18,
the manufacturer is the same because they are both made by SIG Sauer.
The product numbers are different because one's an M17 and one's an M18.
The barrel length on this is 3.9 inches compared to 4.7 inches on the full size M17.
And ... specifically for the Marine Corps, this is going to replace
four different pistols that are all currently in Marine Corps service.
So it's going to replace the M9, the M9A1, the M45A1,
(which is their 1911 variant that's currently in service)
and also the M007, which is the Glock 19M as adopted for
Marine Corps concealed carry purposes. I think that's mostly Special Operations guys.
The M18 here will be replacing all of those,
so the compact size makes a little more sense.
I'm not sure how great of a concealed carry pistol this would be,
it ... seems like that's still a bit large, but that's their plan.
A couple of the other military features that are carried over
are the military-style optics plate and rear sight.
And of course the tool requiring ... Torx driver takedown pin.
So on the commercial guns you can just push this in to disassemble,
the military ones require a tool.
So let's go ahead and actually take this all the way apart, ... which we didn't do on the M17.
The magazine comes out to begin with. These use the exact same mags as the M17,
17 round flush fit, and 21 round extended.
We're then going to lock the slide open, drop our disassembly lever.
It was very important to the army that ... their new pistol,
which of course ended up being the SIG, be able to be disassembled without pulling the trigger.
That's a training thing.
A lot of people will say, "What kind of idiot
is going to leave the gun loaded and then pull the trigger when they go to disassemble it?"
Well it happens, honestly it's been happening for 100 years.
Between the wars the Germans actually had to modify the Luger
with a "police safety", specifically to stop police officers
who were accidentally shooting themselves while they were disassembling their guns.
So that was an important part. Frankly takedown is very simple and easy.
Looking inside the slide here, we of course have a captive recoil spring.
... All of the versions of the compact 320 have a two-part spring like this.
However, the military M18s have a two-part ... wound spring in the back section.
So this is a little bit stronger of a spring than ... you get in the ... commercial compact P320 pistols.
And that is because of the ammunition that they're expected to be running
for their 35,000 round service life, which is all basically +P or +P+ high pressure stuff.
So the spring's a little different than the commercial one.
And the spring is also a bit different than the M17, because it has to be a smaller spring,
because well, it has to be a shorter spring, because the barrel is shorter.
Take out the barrel.
Now to take ... apart the striker assembly, we have to rotate this.
We want that to pop out just a bit.
Having popped that out, I can now push it down and pull out the cover plate here.
Then I can pull out the striker assembly.
I can pull out this which is the takedown and also the extractor ... spring.
There's our extractor, pull that out.
As with the army M17s, there is a single Torx head screw holding the optics plate in place.
Alright, this one was pretty tight.
So there's our screw.
And then we have the same ... optics plate as on the military M17s.
On this one the actual sight component came off very easily,
on the M17 it's pressed together like it's almost one piece. ...
Once you take the optics plate off
to put an optic on the pistol, you of course lose your rear sight.
So we have our loaded chamber indicator and its little tiny spring there.
And that is the slide assembly.
Now on the ... commercial M17s there's an open milled-out slot here.
The commercial M18s don't really have that because the M18 slide
even ... for civilian ammo it needs to weigh more because it is shorter, it's got less mass than an M17.
So they didn't do the same sort of big extra cutout on the M17 commercial slides.
Now we can go ahead and dig into the frame as well.
So we can take our disassembly lever out.
There we go. So that comes out.
And with that out I can then lift the whole fire control unit out.
Just lift up at the front and lift it forward.
So this is legally speaking the firearm, both in the civilian world and on army records.
There is its serial number, there is its little QR code and manufacturer information.
This piece of just plain plastic with a magazine catch in it, is an unregulated part.
So SIG for the army makes three different sizes of these.
On the civilian market there's a whole bunch of after-market options
for different ones if you want to change up the grip profile a bit.
But that is how the army was able to reach one of their main goals
of accommodating 90% of the service force with a single model of pistol.
I'm not going to pull this apart. If you really want to see how the whole FCU goes together,
I actually have a video where we tear down ... a P320, but the mechanism's identical.
We tear it all the way down to every component part, so if you want to see that,
check out my other video. It's actually my SIG USW video.
There you go, there is an army contract overrun SIG M18 completely,
well not completely completely, but pretty much all the way stripped apart.
Both the M17 and the M18 have been produced in a variety of
civilian commemorative versions that differ from these army pistols.
Now ... as I said, there haven't been any M18s released
actually back from the military and sold on the commercial market.
However, SIG does have contract overruns and that's what we have here.
And they share all the features of the military pistols,
they just never actually went to the military. Made for them, never got there.
As opposed to the surplus returned and resold M17s,
I think we'll be seeing a lot of the M17 ... really for decades to come.
... Well, the Marine Corps are going to be using them in combat,
and a bunch of other services are going to be carrying them around offices probably.
Thanks for watching.