New Army XM-17 Handgun Arrives With Advanced Fire Control, Grip & Magazine

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

After years of testing, development, and collaborative work with the Air Force, the Army chose SIG SAUER’s large M17 and combat M18 (also known as the X-17 and X-18) to be its Army Modular Handgun System.

The MHS program, in development for many years, was an extensive effort to develop a future replacement for the Army’s M9 Beretta and SIG Sauer M11.

The new weapons were identified as “modular” by design, meaning they were built to be adjusted and upgraded as needed over time. For example, the guns were configured to receive suppressors as adaptations moving into future development.

Although heralded as an optimal path forward for the future of Army soldier weapons, the M17 did go through several Engineering Change Proposals to correct a few developmental problems the weapons encountered.

In a drop testing of the weapon, during which an empty prime cartridge was inserted, the “striker struck the primer causing a discharge,” a 2018 essay from the Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation. explained. Subsequently, during further weapons testing, both the M17 and M18 experienced “double ejections where an unspent ball round was ejected along with a spent round.

M17 and M18 Developmental Challenges

“Both the XM17 and XM18 pistols experienced double-ejections where an unspent ball round was ejected along with a spent round. Due to the increased frequency of occurrence during Product Verification Test (PVT), the Army stood up a root cause analysis team to identify the cause of the double ejections in parallel with continued PVT,” the paper explains.

Ultimately, as many as 500,000 M17s could be built for military use, depending upon the extent to which the Navy, Air Force, Marines, and U.S. Special Operations Forces acquire the weapon. A write-up on the weapon in Jane’s Defense quoted an Army statement on the weapon that the XM17 was designed with “interchangeable hand grips and is ambidextrous, allowing the user to tailor the ergonomics to best fit their hands and optimize their performance.”