With a SIG it’s a simple barrel swap to go to the 22TCM9r which is a 5.56mm rifle round shortened to fit in a pistol mag. 5.56mm rifle rounds even fmj ball rounds already pierce soft armor out to 300+m in a pistol the 22TCM does it to 100m. With steel core bullets the 22TCM will pierce level III hard armor with ceramic plates out to 75m. The simple fact is a handgun is a back up weapon to fight back to the rifle you never should have been without in the first place. I say that with 11 years plus in the service on 5 of 7 continents.
That’s fine...
I’m not anti-sig, some 45 fetishist, or have any other bone to pick other than I believe in todays world with the proliferation of soft body armor even in third world nations and with asymmetric threats, it should be a “requirement” to field a weapon that can deal with that.
Iraq militias (2016): https://www.iraqinews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Iraq-Shia-Militia-2.jpg
Iraq militias (2015): https://cdn.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Iraqi-Shiite-fighters.jpg
Very few bad guys have advanced body armor with ceramic plates... But heck, in some cases you see the bad guys running around with our old PASGT body armor that somehow trickled back to them... When something is a 1% scenario, it’s rather an exception than a rule, but when 20% of the Iraqi troops in 2003 already had an aramid based soft body armor capable of stopping a 9mm, you’re no longer dealing with a rare exception and should factor that into what sort of weapon/caliber you use.
I get the need for NATO standardization, but this is a case where the US DoD needs to push NATO to revise it’s standard, or we go our own way not because we’re irreverent, but because we should not give our boys equipment that isn’t effective.
I suppose a “stop-gap” measure is to field as standard ammo a 9mm armor piercing round as the Russians do, but what we have today is unacceptable, IMHO- Ideally, if we’re going to a new handgun, we should be thinking about penetrating body armor (include that as a heavy weighted variable).
