>The wargaming/RPG club at the university, back when I was young and
>thin, included as the back cover of the program book for their annual
>gaming convention a full list of every piece of 20th Century military
>hardware that used the designation M1 in some fashion. I remember it
>being 15-20 items, including the M1 Garand and the M1 Abrams.

Before 1925, the U.S. Army used the year of adoption as the model number for any given piece of equipment—hence the M1903 ("Springfield") rifle, M1911 pistol, M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, and so on. (Indeed, in those days it was often spelled out, as in "Model of 1911".) This is a familiar system in many parts of the world. It's where the "47" in AK-47 comes from, for example, and the "38" in Walther's P-38.

In 1925, the Army switched to a system whereby the first item of a particular type (e.g., rifle, pistol, tank etc.) to be adopted after that point was the Model 1 of its type and so on. This is why there's an "M1" of virtually everything an army could want, because even if there was only ever one of those, it's the M1 of those things. (One exception to this policy was aircraft, which were still part of the Army until after World War II, but continued to be classified by mission, as in P-40, B-17 etc.) Hence, there's an M1 carbine, an M1 rifle, and so on and so on.

At some point, the people responsible for these matters abandoned this scheme for some types of equipment. For instance, the experimental tank intended to replace the M60 in the late 1960s was called "MBT-70" after the year (or at least the decade) in which it was intended to enter service, and it's unclear what it would have been designated if it had been adopted. Ultimately it never was, and the tank that evolved out of the failed MBT-70 and XM803(??) development projects was adopted as the M1. I guess they figured it had been long enough since the original M1 light tank of the 1920s that no one would confuse them. :)

Nowadays, of course, such systems of nomenclature are in tatters, because all is madness in modern American military designations. The M9 (astonishingly) was the first pistol adopted after the change to sequential model numbers, but is the M9 and not the M1 (because it's a nine, you see). The Navy is cheerfully giving ridiculously out-of-sequence hull numbers to new ships for "branding" purposes (USS Seawolf, SSN-21, because she was supposed to be "a submarine for the 21st century") and naming ships after people who are not dead (USS George H.W. Bush); meanwhile, the Air Force skipped straight from the (Y)F-23 fighter to the F-35 because the prototype was the X-35 (even though that's not what the X series was supposed to be for either). It's all just marketing now.

I'm not sure if the new M17 pistol is called that because someone decided it would be cute to go back to year numbering, or if it's just a coincidence (it seems the project that spawned it has been called the XM17 Modular Handgun System for some time now, but perhaps they always expected it to end this year).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.