The Austrian fantastic plastic handgun Glock has won a contract to supply pistols to the Philippine Department of National Defense, which will supply the new handguns to the Philippine armed forces. The contract award is for the supply of 74,861 Glock 17 Gen 4 handguns, which will be used by all branches of the Philippine military.

The contract was awarded to the American subsidiary of Glock GmbH, Glock, Inc., and the company’s press release suggests that the pistols will be made at Glock, Inc’s plant in Smyrna, Georgia, in the United States. The company’s press release proudly proclaims that the export of nearly 75,000 pistols to the Philippines makes Glock, Inc. “the biggest exporter of pistols from the United States” and states that the included buy of a similar quantity of holsters is the biggest holster contract in Glock’s history. That the Philippine government would buy from Glock, Inc. rather than the German company Glock GmbH makes sense, given that country’s history of close relations with the United States.

Interestingly, the winning pistol was not the new Generation 5 Glock, but the previous Gen 4. It seems likely that the competition to select the new Philippine Army pistol predated the development and/or release of the Gen 5, or that the Gen 5’s features were not desired by the Philippine government.