Pistol Shootout at the Cost-Overrun Corral

Well, prepare yourself for cost overruns, out-of-the-box failures, book-cooking, and test trial fakery! The United States Army is looking for a new weapon! This time, they’re looking for a new pistol to replace the M-9 that replaced the perfectly good M1911A1. I think we can all see how this one will turn out. Whoever shows the army brass the best time at five-star restaurants and cathouses and provides the best season tickets for ball games will win the bid. Who knows, we could end up with a .25ACP as the new service pistol if the manufacturers of that stopping power “gems” can cough up enough dark money ducats to “convince” the whiz-kids out at Aberdeen Disproving Grounds.

See, the army just can’t do what most people do when looking for a heater. Most folks read a few magazines and ask friends what they keep stashed in a moccasin under the bed. The United States Army cannot do that. They can’t just go ask the experts or consult the hundreds of books written on the subject! This is the army! There’s a right way, a wrong way, and the billions of dollars over the budget way and the army get two out of three there every time. The right way eludes them because there is not a single technical manual or field manual in army inventory that even admits to the existence of a right way.

The army will need to gather a few expensive pistols that are finicky and prone to slide-crack failures because of ammo issues. Then they’ll drag them through the mud, throw them against walls in the Pentagon, and the pistol responsible for the best free ball game tickets will win the bid. The whole test-trials process is to up the ante for the manufacturers to convince the army that the pistol can and will deliver some spectacular meals at restaurants it usually takes a Congress member to get reservations at.

And why after all this time need we a new pistol? Why not just do what other countries are doing? They confiscate illicit arms shipments and then keep the weapons. Oh, wait, the United States government is the one shipping those illicit arms to terrorists, oops, Syrian moderates. Ok, so why not just skim some of those weapons off the top then and issue those? Because we need something better for our own guys. Well, heck, then hand them all .44 Magnums. No one will dispute the merits of stopping power then.

I don’t get it. We seem to go through this thing where we need more ICBMS for the air force and then the army decides it needs a new pistol. Hey, you guys actually better get cracking on a new anti-tank missile. Those TOWs you gave ISIS, I mean, those Syrian moderates failed to penetrate the new Russian T-90 tank. They’ve got that on video. Somehow, I doubt a new pistol will penetrate T-90 armor, too. Leave it to the army that when their great anti-tank weapon has just taken a massive dump on the battlefield to worry about handguns.

The USAF was just whining a couple months ago that they needed to upgrade their ICBMs with new ones. To nuke who?! You guys got $90 billion dollars worth of brand-new MX missiles back in the 1980s and where are those now? You took them to the junkyard and kept the “old” Minuteman 3s! So, given that history, let me predict what the army will do. They’ll get a new pistol that’ll cost us a fortune then, ten years later, they’ll scrap it and pull the “old” M-9s out of mothballs and re-issue those. Am I right so far, Pentagon?

Gosh, who knew that ISIS had us outgunned as far as pistols went? What, are we fighting the Shootout at al-OK Corral with them? What have we got here, a counterinsurgency operation or Gunsmoke? “Marshall Dillon, Marshall Dillon! Come quick! Curly Bill Baghdadi and Quick-Draw Khalil rustled a herd of camels and are holed up in the saloon and they’re making Miss Kitty wear a burka! They issued a fatwa saying you’ve got one hour to get out of town! And the whole town is under sharia law!” Come on, man, is this what the U.S. Army thinks? Since when have pistols won or made a difference in modern war the way the United States government fights it? A handgun can’t incinerate thousands of people en masse at once, so I fail to see how a pistol even holds the attention of the government. Except the insinuated one they hold to our heads to force us into signing up for Obamacare and paying taxes.

Of course, whatever the army ends up buying, many Americans will then copy them and buy it and fool themselves into thinking what the army did: That they have a decent handgun. Like the army, they’ll also pay three times what the weapon is worth, too. Generally speaking, when you’re looking for reliable weapons, look and see what the United States Army has and buy something other than that. My word, people, if the United States military collectively jumped off of a cliff, would you follow them? I know, I know, they’re the best military on the planet. Is that so? How, then, do we explain these cease-fires? Were those wars toss-ups? Gee, someone should flip a quarter and decided a winner then. I understand they flipped a quarter to decide on the M-9.

The army has been looking for a new pistol for a couple years now and still hasn’t settled on one. They sound like a young, liberal, Democrat couple that bought into gentrification and moved into a neighborhood closely resembling Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. So they’re sitting there mulling over buying a “gun” because the “Coexist” sticker on the car didn’t prevent it being ripped off. Not to mention the automatic weapons fire a block over. “Gosh, I thought machine guns were illegal!?” Yeah, well Scooter, crime is illegal, too, but that hasn’t stopped it in the neighborhood. So the army is like this couple, wringing their hands over what to buy. Anyone else who had a functional brain would already know. But, again, we’re talking about the United States Army here. That the United States Air Force basically was birthed by the U.S. Army explains the fact that their latest fighter aircraft have killed more American pilots than recent enemy action. “That was just a small design flaw…” Indeed. Evidently a fatal one.

Ah, well, they’re keeping us safe so we can sleep at night. Really? I thought it was the hand cannon in the moccasin under the bed doing that. Except most people know what to buy and it takes, what, less than an hour to walk out the door with it? Not the Pentagon. It’ll be 2025 before the army makes up its mind. Not that they won’t spend $250 billion dollars on the new pistol project each year in the meantime. Boy, if this was the Roman Army of Caesar, they’d be discussing the gladius right up into the Renaissance.

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