As we continue with our series of Cold War Era guns, let’s consider the US Army Service Pistol that closed out the Cold War era and moved us into the post-Cold War or Desert War era. Of course, I’m talking about the Beretta M9 or simply the M9.

There have been controversies regarding equipment selection by the US Army, but rarely have any lasted as long as 9mm vs .45 ACP and the M1911A1 vs M9 argument. To younger readers, this might seem a bit strange or even tedious, but I can assure you that to the American gun culture, the switch from the M1911A1 in .45 ACP to the Beretta M9 in 9mm was akin to sacrilege. It was egregious.

NATO and STANAG
Before we dive into the discussion of the Beretta M9 service pistol, we need to consider again the United States’ involvement in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Standardization Agreement (STANAG). Based on the lessons learned by the Allies during WWII, one of the major advancements of the NATO alliance was the STANAG. NATO countries agreed to all use the same field gear, training, communications equipment and small arms ammunition.

NATO members agreed that the standard pistol caliber would be the 9x19mm NATO, AKA the 9mm Parabellum, 9mm Luger, 9x19mm or 9mm NATO. Whatever you called it, the cartridge designed by Georg Luger and introduced in 1902 was settled on as the STANAG-approved handgun round.

The 1951 STANAG focused on small arms and ammunition. In 1955, NATO finally settled on 9mm Luger, renaming it 9x19mm NATO. To this day, barrel markings can be found with the verbiage “9mm”, “9×19” and “9mm Luger” inscribed on them. The US Army M9 simply says “9mm” on the frame and the barrel. GLOCK puts “9×19” on their barrels and I have a Browning Hi-Power with “9mm Luger” on the barrel…but I digress.

STANAG became — and has remained — more of a polite suggestion for NATO members than a hard and fast rule. In 1955, the United States Department of Defense had literally millions of M1911A1 pistols and tens of millions of rounds of .45ACP in ammo bunkers from coast to coast. The US wasn’t about to scrap the 1911 and the .45 ACP round at that time.

It should also be remembered that the priority during the Cold War, particularly the early stages, was nuclear proliferation and building more intercontinental ballistic missiles and long range bombers, aircraft carriers, and submarines than the Soviet Union. These big ticket items were the budgetary priorities. No one in the Defense Department really cared much about the Army’s pistol. “Does the 1911 still work?” “Sure.” “Good, keep using it.”

Out with the Old, In with the New
As we previously discussed during our review of the M1911A1, the Department of Defense bought so many M1911A1 pistols during WWII that they saw no need to order new models, at least not in bulk. By the mid-1980s, the M1911A1 pistols in the armories of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps averaged between 40 and 60 years old (remember, the M1911 became the M1911A1 in 1924). While special units might have had the privilege of purchasing new guns, the vast majority of M1911A1 pistols were WWII hand-me-downs and they were in rough shape.

The Joint Service Small Arms Program finally started looking for a permanent replacement for the aging M1911A1 in the late 1970s. The specifications for the new pistol called for it to have . . .

• 9mm NATO caliber
• A detachable magazine with capacity of at least 13 rounds
• A magazine catch that ejects the magazine without the use of the second hand
• A first-round trigger pull be double action with single action followups
• A slide stop that locks the slide open when the magazine is empty
• Durability of 5000 rounds with no more than 8 malfunctions

As for the safety system . . .

• Thumb-safety system is ambidextrous
• De-cocking device to safely lower a cocked hammer
• Firing pin block when the hammer is lowered

The Beretta 92 pistol was submitted and tested as the “XM9.” Again, we see the use of “X” for experimental model. Heckler & Koch, Steyr, SIG SAUER, Colt, Smith & Wesson, and Walther all submitted pistols to the JSSAP for evaluation.

After three separate rounds of testing spread out over several years, only the Beretta and the SIG (P226) pistols made it to the final selection phase. The official story is that SIG failed or lost out on the final bidding phase and the Beretta pistol was chosen. Of course, this was not the last we would hear from SIG and the P226. The US Navy — specifically the SEAL teams — lobbied hard for that gun. However, that’s a different story.

Beretta’s M9
On January 14, 1985, the US Department of Defense announced that Beretta was the winner of the JSSAP contest and a five-year contract was awarded to the Italian arms maker. America’s gun press, veterans, and the gun culture went berserk. Active duty military members, the vast majority of which didn’t carry pistols, simply shrugged their shoulders and moved on with their lives.

Naturally, the massive undertaking to replace the M1911A1 with the new M9 took some time, years actually. The rollout was incremental with Tier 1 units getting their guns first with a gradual trickle-down effect to the rest of the US military.

As discussed in the review of the M1911A1, when I entered the US Marine Corps in 1987, the standard issue pistol was still the M1911A1. When I reached my first permanent assignment, a Marine detachment aboard the USS Forrestal, I carried the .45 ACP pistol on duty.

It wasn’t until some time in late 1988, maybe early ‘89 that our unit received its allotment of M9 pistols. We viewed them as modern and “cool,” especially compared to the ragged .45s that we’d been carrying.

A Change in Attitude
What many folks on the outside looking in failed to realize was that the adoption of this new DA/SA pistol forced the US military to rethink training and carrying service pistols.

The standard and antiquated view of service pistols had focused on marksmanship exclusively, not tactics. With the M1911A1, we performed a 50-round “Qualification Course” where the guns were staged on the range table. We never drew them from the holster. After the last shot, we set the guns down and the armorers collected them up. We never engaged in what could be called “training.” When we carried the M1911A1, even on duty, we carried with the chamber empty, hammer down, and five rounds in the magazine.

That all changed with the M9. The Marine Corps came up with an M9 pistol training course. Instead of paper bullseye targets, we engaged OD green human-sized silhouettes. We loaded our guns, holstered them in the new Bianchi OD green nylon holsters and all of our shooter drills began with drawing our pistols.

We actually had movement drills where we walked forward while shooting. To modern shooters with training experience that might seem mundane, but it was a BFD back then. We also practiced sweeping the safety off and then de-cocking when we returned to the holster. No armorers were standing over our shoulders watching us.

Also, just as important, we started carrying our M9 pistols with a round chambered from the 15-round magazine and the safety lever engaged. Our duty load-out for the M9 was now two 15-round magazines as opposed to three five-round mags with the 1911. We still performed the 50-round Qualification Course at least annually with the M9, but we were far more skilled and competent with the M9s than we ever were with the M1911A1s, particularly in regards to tactics.

Cold War to GWoT
What no one knew in 1985 was that by January of 1990 the Cold War would for all intents and purposes be over with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the USSR. By the time the United States engaged in Operation Just Cause in Panama, the Cold War was coming to a close.

However, the Beretta M9 was still in service and the United States troops had been training with it in time for the wars and conflicts to follow. These would include Operations Desert Shield and Storm, Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia, the Kosovo War, and, of course, the GWoT with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

GWoT and M9 Training
When I was active duty, I fired perhaps 200 to 250 rounds total through my M9 pistol. Again, small arms training was low on the priority list compared to ICBMs, nuclear submarines, and long-range bombers. However, that thought process all changed when the Global War on Terror began and we had to put fighting men on the ground.

By September of 2001, I had been in and out of the Marine Corps twice with two honorable discharges in hand. Still relatively young and with something to contribute, I became a military contractor. Taking a contract with the Expeditionary Combat School, my team and I were responsible for running active-duty students through a month-long, pre-deployment training program as a work-up for combat deployments.

The small arms we focused on were the M4A1 and the M9. Our cadre, being subject matter experts, had to have expert level skills with these arms and we kept sharp by firing thousands of rounds. The days of stingy ammo budgets were long gone.

On average I would fire around 500 rounds per month through the M9. We taught our students to master the long and heavy initial double-action trigger press as well as the more manageable single-action press. We ran our students through stoppage clearing (no armorers standing by to fix it for them), reloading, moving and shooting drills, barricade drills, etc.

Same Old Story
Looking at the calendar, you can see that by the time GWoT was going hot and heavy, it had been about 20 years since the adoption of the M9. True to form, the US Army ordered X thousands of M9 pistols and these guns were passed around from unit to unit. As is standard practice, units considered to be “top tier” by the US Army got brand new guns. From both my active duty time and my contracting time, I would learn that training schools in the military are not considered top tier or a high priority and the small arms they’re supplied with are always hand-me-downs from other units.

The Expeditionary Combat School was no different than any other school and the M4s and M9s that were supplied had been through the wringer, having innumerable rounds fired through them before they got to us. The only silver lining was having brand new magazines when we stood up the school.

For three years I worked full-time teaching thousands of students who fired thousands and thousands of rounds. The US Military M882 9x19mm round fires a 124 grain FMJ bullet at speed exceeding 1250 feet per second. While not quite a “+P” cartridge, it’s no wimp either.

As we discussed in the M1911A1 segment, the standard operating procedure for military armories is to fix things when they break. Armory personnel are a thousand times more concerned about small arms being turned in “clean” than they are with preventive maintenance. Every firearms maker, particularly pistol manufacturers, recommend that the recoil springs be changed after so many thousands of rounds. It’s nearly impossible to track round count for individual pistols and rifles outside of Tier One units.

For the Beretta M9, the most common failure was the locking block under the barrel. Normal preventive maintenance would have seen these replaced after so many thousand rounds along with the recoil springs, but that never occurred. The only time a locking block was replaced was after it had broken in a pistol that might have had 10 to 20 thousand rounds fired through it.

The other feature that broke most commonly was the right side of the ambidextrous safety/de-cock lever. The magazines generally held up very well and were easy enough to disassemble to clean out the grit/dust/sand that accumulated over time.

Over the three years and thousands of students, I only ever witnessed one catastrophic failure of an M9. This was the one of legend that the SEALs claimed happened all too frequently. The student in question was moving and shooting when the forward portion of the slide came apart completely and launched down range along with the recoil spring and spring guide. The rear half of the slide locked back hard (we couldn’t move it) on the frame and the barrel remained on the frame. We halted training and all of the training staff descended on the student to have a look. The shooter was uninjured in any way.

We were able to pick up all the pieces and put them in a plastic bag. The shooter, a 19-year-old kid, was given the bag and told to turn it into the armory when he returned to base. We veterans all had a chuckle as the poor kid thought for sure he’d be punished. Being the Assistant Team Leader, after a bit, I took the young trooper aside and assured him that it wasn’t his fault and he wouldn’t be punished. Naturally, we gave him one of the spare M9s to finish out the training day.

How many rounds had been fired through that particular M9 pistol? There was no way to know. It had thousands put through it in our school and it was a well-used gun when it got to us. Had the recoil spring or locking block ever been replaced? That’s highly unlikely.

When I carried the M9 as a member of the Marine Detachment on the Forrestal, the guns were brand new, never went into the field or had been subjected to the elements. However, when I was an anti-tank gunner with Charlie Co. 1st Battalion 6th Marines, I took my M9 to the field continuously and carried it every single day during Operations Desert Shield and Storm.

The pistol’s open slide design and the fine desert sand were an awful combination. Those of us who carried M9s had to disassemble and clean them every single day. The barrel on my pistol was essentially silver by the time I turned it in with all of the factory finish having worn off from cleaning and exposure. The gun fired during the ground war phase of Desert Storm when we retook Kuwait from Iraq. I suspect that other users’ experiences were similar to mine.

Parting Thoughts
Writing this gave me the opportunity to get reacquainted with an old friend. It has been well over 30 years since I was first issued and taught to run the M9. While I’ve put thousands upon thousands of rounds through the Beretta pistol, the vast majority have been standard M882 FMJ. I took the time to run some commercial ammunition from Black Hills and Double Tap in both FMJ and controlled expansion designs. It all cycled without fail. The pistol was as accurate as I remembered it being as well. Twenty-five yard hits on a “head plate” with the single-action press weren’t a problem.

Was the M9 Beretta a pistol perfect? No, but its adoption was responsible for a big advance in handgun training. If the military armorers had engaged in preventive maintenance and swapped recoil springs and locking blocks, the issues that we did have would have been considerably fewer. The M9 is the pistol that carried us over from the Cold War into the modern era.

Specifications: Beretta M9 Pistol
Caliber: 9x19mm
Action: DA/SA
Capacity: 15+1 rounds
Grips: Hardwood or polymer
Barrel Length: 4.9 inches
Overall Length: 8.5 inches
Width: 1.5 inches
Weight: (empty) 33.3 ounces
MSRP: $809 (about $625 retail)

— Paul Markel, Shooting News Weekly