SIG Sauer has won a lucrative contract to build a new rifle for the U.S. military. About that, two thoughts — one about the rifle, and one about the company.
On the rifle: The new squad rifle will be chambered in a 6.8mm round (also manufactured by SIG Sauer) that is considerably more powerful than the current 5.56mm NATO round that most U.S. forces are issued. Anti-gun activists who talk about “high-powered” “military-style” rifles notwithstanding, U.S. troops have complained for years that the 5.56mm is underpowered for modern warfare. I do not know anything about that, but I do know that the 5.56mm (and its not-quite-identical twin, the .223 Remington) were for many years prohibited for use in deer hunting because these so-called high-power rounds were judged to be in fact not powerful enough to ensure a humane kill. Many hog-hunting outfitters here in Texas and elsewhere will not permit hunters to use a 5.56mm rifle on the local feral swine, which the round often fails to kill. Again, the only fights I get into are with two-dimensional paper enemies and the occasional pheasant, so I don’t have much of an opinion on the military application; but, as a matter of firearms regulation, it should be reiterated that the gun-grabbers who say they have no interest in ordinary hunting weapons but only want to go after the “dangerous” “military-style” weapons are talking through their hats. Grandad’s elk rifle is a lot more powerful than the typical AR-style rifle, and semiautomatic rifles have been pretty commonly used by U.S. hunters since the 1960s. Currently, AR-style rifles chambered in a variety of calibers are used to hunt everything from coyotes to big game. “Leave the hunters alone, take the scary black guns” is and always has been an incoherent position.
About the firm: I am a big SIG Sauer fan. But the choice of SIG Sauer raises an interesting question: Is the new U.S. military rifle American-made?
In one sense, it obviously is: These rifles will be manufactured in New Hampshire (whose senior senator, Jeanne Shaheen, sits on the Appropriations and Armed Services committees), with SIG adding some 1,000 new positions and 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space. They were designed in the United States, too.
And SIG Sauer Inc. is an American company . . . sort of.
The SIG in SIG Sauer stands for Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft, “Swiss Industrial Company,” which, as you might imagine, was founded in Switzerland. The Sauer part is J. P. Sauer & Sohn, with that sohn being a clue that this is a German concern. Thanks to a series of mergers and acquisitions, there are three companies bearing the SIG name: a Swiss one, a German one (which has ceased manufacturing activities thanks to a hostile political climate), and an American one. (The relationship between the three arms makers has been the subject of some controversy.) Behind them all is a German holding company, L&O Holding GmbH, which has what is to my mind a funny mix of businesses: firearms and industrial fabrics.
The firearms business is a great American manufacturing success story (about which I will have more to say in a future National Review report) but, like most modern manufacturing, it is complex and inescapably global. There are plenty of Toyotas and Mercedes on the roads that have a better claim to being American cars than many Ford and GM products do—and that is without even drilling down to the nitty-gritty issues of raw materials. SIG’s new “American-made but kinda-sorta German and a little bit Swiss if we’re following the money” rifle is globalization reified.
We often emphasize the costs of globalization, and we undercount the benefits. There are going to be 1,000 new manufacturing jobs in New Hampshire — and our soldiers are going to get some superior rifles — thanks to the process of globalization that brought Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft from Schaffhausen (where it was founded in the 19th century as a manufacturer of railway cars) to Virginia and on to New Hampshire. That German investment probably contributed to a U.S. trade deficit somewhere along the way, too, because trade deficits are the flipside of capital inflows.
Also: If you have eight grand burning a hole in your pocket, SIG will happily sell you a civilian version of that new rifle.