Glock Inc. is not slowing down its attacks on Sig Sauer, the gun manufacturer the Army has selected to provide the service’s sidearm.
The Army selected Sig Sauer to provide sidearms for all Army servicemen for the next decade in January, following a nearly 3-year search for a new handgun supplier.
Glock, which was one of the finalists for the contract, has protested the Army’s decision and now says the Pentagon has made a mistake that may put soldiers danger. (RELATED: Army Picks Sig Sauer To Replace Handgun After 3-Year Search)
“This is not about Glock. This is not about Sig. And it’s not about the U.S. Army,” Josh Dorsey, vice president of Glock Inc. and former Marine, told Military.com. “It’s about those that are on the ground, in harm’s way.”
Dorsey claims that the Army relied on inconsistent testing, and that the service made its decision based on price. Glock proposed two weapons for a total cost of $272.2 million and Sig Sauer offered the P320 for a total of $169.5 million
The Government Accountability Office, which adjudicates contract protests, denied Glock’s claims that the Army unequally evaluated the two companies’ proposals on one particular test in a June 5 decision.
Sig Sauer’s handgun performed more poorly on one specific test of mean rounds between stoppages, or MRBS, but the way the Army tested the requirements didn’t make sense, so the service scrapped the requirement.
The Army’s technical requirements mandated 2,000 rounds MRBS, with a 90 percent confidence, according to the GAO, but the test procedure only fired 1,500 rounds rather than 12,000 rounds for the complete service, so the Army chose to waive the requirement all together.
“Sig Sauer’s full-sized handgun had a higher stoppage rate than Glock’s handgun, and there may have been other problems with the weapon’s accuracy,” the GAO said of the Army’s test results.
The GAO continued to say that “because the Army ‘could not mathematically achieve statistically significant results [at the 90 percent confidence level] with the amount of rounds fired,’ it ‘determined the best solution was to non-rate the subfactor’ for both offerors.”
According to Dorsey, the issue comes down to “the importance of a pistol, which doesn’t sound like much unless you realize, if you pull a pistol in combat, you are in deep shit.”
The long procurement process for the Army’s new sidearm lasted several years and cost between $300 and $500 million, according to Army officials. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain claims that cost of looking for the new weapon alone cost closer to $1.2 billion once all costs of testing and complying with “byzantine” and “unnecessary requirements” were added up.
Sig Sauer did not not immediately return The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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