The Beretta M9A3: The Gun the Army Didn’t Want

By Kyle Mizokami,The National Interest

In 1985, the U.S. Army made an abrupt shift, aging fleet of World War II-era handguns for a foreign model. The Italian-made Beretta M92 was classified the M9 handgun and served with the U.S. Armed Forces for more than thirty years. The U.S. Army recently chose a new handgun, the M17 Modular Handgun System, and excluded a new, updated M9A3 from the competition. Although the proposed M9A3 [3] failed to gain traction, it is still available on the civilian market and its improvements, adopted by Beretta for the twenty-first century battlefield, are worth examining.

In the early 1980s, the U.S. Army began searching for a replacement for the Colt M1911A1 handgun. Introduced after World War I, the bulk of the Army’s guns were built during World War II. The Army’s huge wartime inventory, plus their relatively infrequent use by officers, medics, vehicle crews allowed the M1911A1s to soldier on for nearly four decades. The U.S. Army held a competition and to the surprise of nearly everyone the Italian Beretta company won, and M9 handgun entered service with the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. Over thirty years, the Pentagon purchased more than six hundred thousand Beretta pistols.

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In the mid-2010s the Army started up a competition for a new handgun. Although Beretta had a newly redesigned M9A3 waiting in the wings the Army declined to evaluate it, citing a history of reliability and design problems [7] with the original M9. Beretta officials protested that the new pistol solved many of the problems with the older handgun.

The M9A3 Beretta [8] looks like a futuristic, high tech version of its Reagan-era ancestor—which of course it is. The A3 is finished in a three-tone black, coyote, and flat dark earth scheme, unlike the flat black of the M9, a bit of marketing that reflects the type of environment U.S. forces have been fighting in for the last seventeen years. It has harder lines than the original Beretta, with a flattened mainspring housing eliminating the bulge along the backstrap, creating a more angular grip reminiscent of the M1911A1.