Cold War Sidearms in Arma Reforger: M9 vs. Makarov PM

Arma Reforger issues one pistol per side, and neither is the one most players name when asked. There is no M1911 on the American belt and no suppressed Makarov PB on the Soviet one. The game ships exactly two handguns — the 9×19 mm M9 and the 9×18 mm PM — and the second of those is carried by two of the game's three factions.

That overlap is what makes the matchup worth settling. Measured against each other on the game's own configuration data, the two pistols are not close: the M9 holds nearly twice the ammunition, pushes it 70 m/s faster, and groups it into a cone roughly 1.4 times tighter. Yet the PM is the pistol that matters more, because since Update 1.7 it is the only weapon an FIA partisan is guaranteed to be holding when they spawn. For a US or Soviet regular, a sidearm is a five-or-six Supply decision with one honest use case. For the guerrillas, it is where the entire faction starts.

Arma Reforger Has Exactly Two Pistols, and Neither Is an M1911

Run the roster test yourself, the way you would check any other claim about this game, and it fails to turn up a third pistol three separate times.

Start with Reforger's per-faction weapon tables. The United States column has a single line under Handguns: M9 9 mm. The Soviet column has a single line: PM 9 mm. The FIA column has one too, and it is the same line — PM 9 mm. Then widen out from the factions to the weapon class itself, where Reforger's pistol category holds exactly two members, the M9 and the PM, with nothing else filed under it. Then leave the Arma wikis entirely and check an independent firearms-identification database, which catalogues every gun in the game by category and has no stake in Arma's internal taxonomy. Its complete Sidearms section for Arma Reforger reads: Beretta M9, Makarov PM. Then it moves on to assault rifles. Three listings — two on the Arma wikis, one compiled entirely outside them — and not one of them has a third entry to find.

The American entry is the M9 — displayed in-game as "M9 9 mm", described in its own item text as a 9×19 mm semi-automatic pistol, and marked in its configuration as used exclusively by US military forces. It is the standard-issue service pistol of the US Armed Forces here, and it is the only handgun a US player can draw: no variants, no alternate issue, nothing else on the shelf. It is also not a prop the developers dropped in at launch and forgot about. The M9's model was replaced after Update 1.1, the Resistance Ops patch of 13 March 2024, which corrected the magazine model in the same pass and gave it a proper catch window. Screenshots of the older model still circulate in source galleries, which is worth knowing if you ever try to identify the weapon from pictures rather than from the game's own files.

The Soviet entry is the Makarov PM — "PM 9 mm" in game, a 9×18 mm semi-automatic pistol, and the one genuinely structural oddity in a two-item roster. It is not filed under a single faction. Its entry carries two: REDFOR, the Soviet Union, and INDFOR, the FIA. The wording leaves no ambiguity, calling it a 9 mm handgun used by both Soviet military forces and FIA guerillas, and the standard-issue service pistol of the Soviet Armed Forces and FIA guerilla fighters alike. This is not two similar pistols wearing different labels on either side of a partisan war. It is one weapon entry attached to two factions. Reforger sets its Cold War in 1989, US against Soviet forces, with Conflict currently fought across Everon, Arland and Kolguyev, and in any of those matches two of the three factions on the field are reaching for the same handgun.

What is missing from the list is easier to state than to accept. There is no M1911 in it — not in the US tables, not in the pistol category, not in the independent catalogue. There is no PB, the integrally suppressed Makarov derivative that a lot of Soviet loadout fantasies are quietly built on. There is no Stechkin APS. If you have been picturing a .45 on an American hip in this game, you are picturing something the base game does not contain, and you are in very large company, because that mental image did come from somewhere real. It just did not come from Bohemia's files, and it deserves its own explanation later.

Nor is this a roster caught mid-change. Update 1.7 rewrote a great deal about how Reforger plays, and its changelog touches a pistol exactly once — to fix a left hand that sat in the wrong place while jumping. The 1.8.0.5 Experimental build published on 29 July 2026 adds no handgun either. Checked on 1 August 2026, the stable branch stands at 1.7.0.54 from 24 June 2026, and the newest publicly available build on any branch still ships the same two pistols the game has always had.

Two entries is a thin roster, but thin is not the same as careless. Reforger models a manual safety on the PM that you can engage and disengage yourself, and animates the reload through the heel-mounted magazine release before the slide release, the way that pistol actually works. The M9's reload has the shooter's support hand retaining the magazine while the correct thumb-operated side button is pressed. Whoever built these two weapons knew the difference between them at the mechanism level. The scarcity is a content decision, not an oversight.

So the practical version is short: stop hunting for a third pistol, because there is not one, and stop looking for the M1911 in your faction's Arsenal, because it is not there to find. What is worth carrying into everything that follows is the asymmetry hiding in that two-line list. The Americans have a pistol nobody else touches. The PM is issued twice over, to a superpower and to a guerrilla movement that fights it. Before a single performance figure enters the argument, the two weapons already differ enormously in how much of the game they are responsible for — which makes the obvious next question the one you came here for. Two pistols, two calibres, one of them doing double duty: how far apart are they when you actually shoot them?

M9 vs. PM: The Numbers That Actually Separate Them

Far apart, and consistently in the same direction. Lay the M9 and the Makarov PM side by side on Reforger's own weapon data and the M9 wins almost every axis that decides a firefight: nearly twice the ammunition, seventy more metres per second behind it, and a visibly tighter cone at the far end. What the PM wins is everything you feel in your pack rather than at the target — lighter in the hand, lighter loaded, and smaller to stow. One axis is a dead heat. And two figures the table below does not carry look like they settle the argument, but do not — which is where most of the confidently wrong pistol takes in this game come from.

Start with the row a player feels first. A US soldier who draws their M9 with a full magazine and one up the spout is holding sixteen rounds. A Soviet or FIA soldier doing the same with a PM is holding nine. To match what the American brought to the fight, you need both of your magazines — two full PM mags come to exactly sixteen rounds, the same number, arriving in two instalments instead of one. That is two magazine slots against one, and one more reload in the middle of a firefight that will already be decided in seconds. The arithmetic is worse than it looks, too, because those two PM magazines weigh 0.236 kg loaded and the single M9 magazine weighs 0.23 kg. Per round of ammunition actually carried, the PM's famous lightness essentially evaporates. What stays light is the gun.

The velocity gap is the one that changes where the pistols work rather than how long they last. The M9's M882 leaves the muzzle at 380 m/s with a ±15 m/s spread; the PM's P round leaves at 310 m/s with a tighter ±9. Seventy metres per second is about twenty-three percent, and in a game that models flight time and drop, a slower bullet spends longer getting there and falls further on the way. Neither figure is remotely in rifle territory. The M16A2 pushes M855 at 930 m/s and the AK-74 pushes 7N6 at 890 m/s — about two and a half times what the M9 manages, and roughly three times the PM's. Whatever hold you have learned for your rifle is not the hold that lands a pistol round at distance, and the M9's version of that problem is simply less severe than the PM's.

Dispersion is the number people misread most often, so it is worth stopping on the metric before the values. Reforger states weapon dispersion as the range at which the weapon's cone has widened to 0.4 m across. That means a larger number is a better weapon. The M9 reaches that 0.4 m cone at 140 m; the PM reaches it at 100 m. Same cone, more distance — the M9's is 1.4 times tighter.

Turn that into distances you can actually picture. At 100 metres, the PM is throwing rounds into a cone 0.4 m across — a torso's width, before you have accounted for a single thing the player is doing wrong. The M9 at the same range is at roughly 0.29 m. The AK-74 is at 0.125 m and the M16A2 at 0.10 m, which is to say a rifle is holding a group two to four times tighter than a pistol, depending on which pair you put side by side, at a range every rifleman on the server considers unremarkable. Read the table backwards and it gets sharper: a PM only shoots as tightly as an AK-74 does at 100 m once you have closed to about 31 m, and an M9 gets there at about 44 m. That is the honest band. Inside forty-odd metres, a Beretta is doing real work; inside thirty, so is a Makarov; past that you are relying on a weapon whose cone is opening faster than your target is getting closer.

Two caveats keep that from being a promise. Dispersion describes the weapon's own cone and nothing else — sway, recoil, stance and your own hands are separate systems that this figure does not include, and all of them make the real group worse rather than better. And there is no tuning available to improve it: each pistol accepts exactly one magazine type, loaded with exactly one cartridge, so the numbers in that table are the complete performance envelope of each weapon rather than a starting configuration.

Which brings the one genuine tie. Both pistols are semi-automatic and both are rated at 500 rounds per minute. Not "similar" — identical. The rate at which either one puts rounds downrange is your trigger finger, and it is the same ceiling on both sides of the war. Whatever separates a US shooter from a Soviet one in a pistol duel, it is not how fast the gun will cycle.

Now the two figures that mislead, neither of which appears anywhere in the table above. The first is base damage value, and it is the reason you will occasionally see someone claim a 9 mm pistol hits as hard as a rifle in this game. The M9's M882 lists a base damage value of 50. The PM's P round lists 50. The M16A2's M855 also lists 50, while the AK-74's 7N6 lists 76. Taken at face value that would mean a Makarov and an M16 do the same thing to a body, which is not a conclusion anyone who has played this game would endorse. How that value actually combines with velocity, projectile mass, mushrooming, tumbling and penetration at the moment of impact is not spelled out in any documentation you can go and check — so treat base damage value as one input into a wounding model rather than as the damage a shot does. It is not the number that separates these two pistols, and it is emphatically not the number that separates a pistol from a rifle.

The second is penetration, where the temptation is worse because the figures look directly comparable and are not. The PM's P round is quoted as penetrating 1.3 mm at a reference density of 7.860 g/cm³ — the same steel-like reference the rifle rounds are quoted against, where M855 manages 4 mm and 7N6 manages 3.6 mm. So there is one clean statement available: against that reference, a Makarov round gets roughly a third of the way a rifle round does. The M9's M882 is quoted at 20 mm — but against 0.650 g/cm³, a far lighter reference entirely. Those two numbers are not on the same scale, they are not on the same material, and putting them in the same sentence as a ranking produces nonsense. The M9 does not penetrate 20 mm of steel, it does not out-penetrate a rifle, and there is no honest way to place the two pistols on a single penetration axis from the data the game exposes. Where the M9's advantage is real — capacity, velocity, dispersion — it is measurable. Here it simply is not measured.

The same caution applies to the small print in the projectile rows. The PM's round is lighter (0.00610 kg against 0.00804 kg), slightly wider and appreciably shorter, and it carries a mushrooming multiplier of ×0.2 against the M9's ×0.05. On paper that is the PM's round leading on one of the deformation multipliers by a factor of four. What that converts into against a player wearing a vest is the same unanswered question as base damage value, so it belongs in the "interesting, unbanked" column rather than in the verdict.

Which leaves the PM with a short, honest list of wins. It is 0.21 kg lighter unloaded and about 0.32 kg lighter with a round chambered. It displaces 200 cm³ against the M9's 250 — though both occupy the same 2×1 slots, and both pistols' magazines occupy an identical 1×1 slot at 50 cm³, meaning a spare PM magazine costs you exactly as much room as a spare M9 magazine while holding a little over half the rounds. That is the whole case for the Makarov on the numbers: it is a slightly smaller, slightly lighter object to carry around. Everything that happens after you point it is worse.

So the head-to-head resolves cleanly, and then immediately reveals that it was the smaller question. Yes, the M9 is the better pistol — more rounds, faster rounds, a tighter cone, and no compensating advantage on the PM's side beyond mass and bulk. But the M9's cone at 100 m is still nearly three times wider than an M16A2's, and neither pistol clears half a rifle's muzzle velocity. The distance between an M9 and a PM is real; the distance between either of them and the rifle your enemy is carrying is much larger. Which is exactly the point where any sensible player asks the obvious next question: fine — what can I put on this thing to close that gap?

Neither Pistol Takes a Suppressor — or Any Attachment at All

Nothing. You can put nothing on it. In a game where the rifles argue about flash hiders, optics, bayonets and grenade launchers competing for the same mounting points, both pistols are sealed units, and the sealing is deliberate enough that it is worth walking through rather than asserting.

The PM says so outright. Its entry states that, just as in Arma 3, it is not possible to attach accessories of any kind onto Reforger's PM. Not a suppressor, not a light, not a sight — there is no slot to fill and no menu to open. The Makarov you pick up is the Makarov you keep.

The M9's version of the same emptiness is more interesting, because it is a subtraction rather than an absence. In earlier Arma titles the M9 could thread a suppressor onto its barrel and could be fed reduced-velocity ammunition to go with it. Reforger removed both. That is the missing history behind a detail the numbers already showed: the single magazine type each pistol accepts is not a design that never had options, it is what remains after the options were taken away. Reduced-velocity rounds exist in a shooter for one reason — to stay quiet behind a can — so once the can is gone, the ammunition that partnered it has no job left to do.

Follow the attempt through the way a US player naturally would, and it dead-ends at every step. Reforger ships exactly two suppressors. The American one is the Mark 3, whose own item text calls it a US-made 5.56 mm suppressor, and whose compatibility list contains two entries: the M16 Carbine — excluding the sub-variants that already carry an M203 — and the M16A2. The M9 is not on that list, and there is no third US suppressor to try instead. Cross the map and the Soviet answer is narrower still: the PBS-4 is described as designed exclusively for 5.45 mm-chambered assault rifles and carbines in the AK family, which excludes the PM by calibre before it excludes it by anything else. Neither suppressor names a handgun anywhere in its compatibility set.

Nor is that an oversight in a lookup table that a patch might quietly fix. Reforger models the mount physically: a weapon that lacks a threaded barrel cannot take a suppressor at all, an existing flash hider has to come off first, and anything else already occupying the muzzle — a bayonet, for instance — blocks it too. The suppressors in this game attach to specific barrels that were built to receive them, and neither pistol has one. There is no combination of items, no rank, no amount of Supply and no clever Arsenal trick that puts a can on a pistol in vanilla Reforger. The suppressed sidearm is not rare or expensive here. It does not exist.

It is worth knowing that the suppressors which do exist would disappoint you anyway. The game's own field manual is blunt about it: they modulate the sound of the report and partially mask muzzle flash, but they do not make the shooter invisible, nor do they make the weapon completely silent to the enemy. They also cannot mask the crack of a round travelling faster than sound, which is what every round you can actually obtain does, because magazines loaded with subsonic ammunition are not available from Arsenal Box crates. Even the rifleman who does get a tube on the end of their M16A2 is not sneaking anywhere; they are being marginally harder to locate.

Which produces one small, genuinely funny detail, offered as a curiosity and nothing more. The PM's round leaves the muzzle at 310 m/s. The speed of sound at sea level is usually taken as roughly 343 m/s — a standard figure, not one Reforger publishes — so the Makarov happens to be the one cartridge in this comparison that is already doing the thing subsonic ammunition is loaded to do. The game has exactly one weapon whose bullet arrives with the property a suppressor is built around, and it is a weapon that will never mount one. That is a coincidence to appreciate, not a tactic to build on.

The closure extends to the sights as well. Neither pistol's ironsights can have their zero manually adjusted. Reforger otherwise makes checking your zero a habit — it is the sort of thing that catches out a rifleman who respawned and forgot — and pistols simply remove the question. Whatever elevation a shot needs beyond the point of aim, you are supplying it out of your own head, on a weapon whose cone is already opening at the ranges where you would want the help.

None of this is decay, either. Both pistols are semi-automatic only, and both arrived in Reforger already configured the way you find them. The M9 is a deliberately pared-back version of its earlier Arma incarnations — a slower cyclic rate, a lower muzzle velocity, and the suppressor and its reduced-velocity ammunition removed. The PM went the other direction on the one axis where they now match, with a fire rate raised relative to its predecessor. Nobody lived through those as patch notes. They are how these two weapons were tuned for this game.

That leaves a short list of things to stop doing. Stop planning a quiet approach around a pistol; there is no quiet pistol here and no stealth role for one to fill. Stop looking for an accessory that improves either weapon, because the Arsenal has none to sell you. And read your faction's sidearm as a fixed quantity from the moment you pick it up: the capacity, the velocity, the cone and the sights you have are the ones you will have for the rest of the match, and every judgement about whether the thing is worth carrying has to be made against that permanent ceiling rather than against some upgraded version of it.

A weapon with no upgrade path in a game built on an enormous modding scene is, of course, an invitation. Players noticed the gap almost immediately — and what they filled it with, more than anything else, is the pistol you probably came to this article looking for.

The M1911 You Were Picturing Is a Workshop Mod

Two days. That is how long Arma Reforger existed before somebody put an M1911 into it.

The M1911 exists in Arma Reforger only as Workshop content. This is the mod's own title card, not gameplay.

The mod is M1911 - BLUFOR, published to the game's Workshop on 19 May 2022, two days after Reforger entered Early Access, and built against game version 0.9.5. Its pitch is a single sentence of pure week-one ambition: it adds a classic M1911 to Reforger, and it goes in the BLUFOR arsenal. Not a curiosity parked in a test scenario — straight into the American arsenal, where a US player would find it on the shelf beside the M9 as though it had been issued along with the rifles. Its listing showed 19,796 downloads when it was checked on 1 August 2026.

So if you came to this page certain that this game has a 1911 in it somewhere, the honest verdict on that memory is not that you invented a gun. You are remembering a real weapon that real players have really been carrying in this game for four years. You are only wrong about where it came from — and given how the Workshop works, that is an easy thing to be wrong about, because a mod-loaded Arsenal looks exactly like an Arsenal.

Four years on, the flagship is The 1911 Project, last modified on 15 December 2025 and targeting game version 1.6.0.95. On 1 August 2026 its listing showed 63,662 downloads. By its author's own description it ships classic M1911A1 service models alongside modernised variants — the Kimber TLE and the Springfield Prodigy — with tactical lights, lasers, red dot optics, compensators, suppressors and extended magazines. Hold that list up against the previous section for a moment. Every single category on it is something the vanilla M9 and the vanilla PM will never accept, on a weapon the vanilla game does not contain. Whatever else the mod is, it is a precise inventory of what Bohemia decided a pistol in Reforger would not do, answered item by item by somebody who disagreed.

That is a description, not a review. What any of these weapons actually do when you fire them — how they group, how they hit, whether they are balanced against an M9 at all — is not something this article has measured, and the feature lists above are the modders' claims about their own work rather than verified game behaviour. The download counts and target versions are point-in-time figures too, read on 1 August 2026 and drifting upward from the moment they were written down.

The line is unbroken across those four years, and by more than one author. A separate standalone mod, simply called M1911, adds a 1911 in .45 ACP feeding from a seven-round magazine; it targets 1.2.0.70 and had 22,153 downloads. Three different builds of the same gun, aimed at three different eras of the game — 0.9.5 in 2022, 1.2.0.70 in 2024, 1.6.0.95 in 2025 — which is why the M1911 has never really been absent from Reforger in the way the vanilla roster suggests. It has simply always arrived from the Workshop rather than from the base game.

The community did not stop at adding pistols, either. It went after the two the game does ship. Auto PM and Burst M9 exists to break the one rule both vanilla sidearms share: it turns the Makarov into a full-auto pistol and gives the M9 a three-round burst. The rates of fire quoted on its page, and the real-firearms history the author tells to justify them, are the modder's own account rather than anything Reforger publishes. But the mod's existence makes the point on its own. Semi-automatic-only was a deliberate constraint, and within days of launch somebody had already decided it was one worth removing.

That is a warning as much as a signpost. The Workshop can add any number of pistols to this game, server-side mods are common in Conflict, and what appears in a given Arsenal is a fact about that server rather than a fact about Arma Reforger. If you have seen a 1911 in a match, you were on a modded server. If you want one, you can go and get it — from the Workshop, knowing you are adding it rather than discovering it. And if a friend swears their Arsenal has one, they are probably right and it still does not change the base game's roster by a single entry. There are two pistols in vanilla Reforger. There are considerably more than two in circulation.

Set all of that aside now, because the mods are a different conversation from the one a Conflict player has at an Arsenal terminal. Back in vanilla, with the M9 and the PM as the only options on the shelf, the pistol stops being a question about what exists and becomes a question about what it takes out of the pool your whole team is drawing from.

What a Sidearm Costs Your Team in Conflict

The bill is short enough to read in one line. An M9 is 5 Supply off the Arsenal rack, or 6 if you take it pre-loaded with its fifteen-round magazine. The Soviet PM is priced identically — 5 bare, 6 loaded with its eight. Spare magazines run 1 Supply apiece on either side. That is the whole transaction: six units to put a pistol on a soldier, and one more for every reload you want to carry.

What makes those six units worth a paragraph is whose they are. The Conflict Arsenal is not a personal wallet you refill by playing well. Everything drawn from it comes out of your team's shared Supply — the same pool that pays for the structures your side is building and the vehicles it is fielding. That is the mechanism behind the advice every experienced Conflict player eventually gives a new one: kitting yourself out lavishly on every single respawn is not free enthusiasm, it is a withdrawal, and what it comes out of is your team's construction and its motor pool. Worth being precise about the scope here, too. Supply prices and rank checks are Conflict's rules, documented as applying inside that official mode; they are not a universal property of the weapon that follows it into every scenario on every server.

Set against a primary, though, the pistol is genuinely small change. A loaded M16A2 is 10 Supply — 8 for the rifle, 2 more for a thirty-round STANAG. A loaded AK-74 is 12. Against either of those, a loaded sidearm at 6 is a small line on the bill: roughly half the cost of the rifle a Soviet rifleman is holding, and a little over half of the American equivalent. If you are agonising over whether your team can afford your pistol, the honest answer is that your team can afford your pistol.

The more revealing comparison is against an upgrade rather than a weapon. Either suppressor in the game — the American Mark 3 or the Soviet PBS-4 — costs 10 Supply on its own, and requires Sergeant to draw, two promotions above the rank at which both pistols are already sitting on the shelf. The Mark 3's Olive and Camouflaged finishes push that to Lieutenant. So one rifle suppressor is priced at exactly two bare pistols, or at a loaded M9 plus four spare magazines, and it is gated behind a rank the pistol never asks about. And that same suppressor will not fit either pistol under any circumstances. There is a real sense in which the cheapest thing in that comparison is also the only one you are certain to be allowed to take.

Which is the other half of the answer, and the simpler half: there is no gate. Both pistols and both magazine types are available from the lowest normal rank — Private, on the US and Soviet ladders alike — and they stay available at every rank above it. Nothing unlocks them, because nothing was ever locking them. Whatever the Arsenal is refusing you at Private, it is not the sidearm.

Weight barely enters the argument either. An M9 with a full magazine is 1.128 kg and a PM 0.807 kg — the slightly higher figures in the table above add a round in the chamber — against 3.968 kg for a loaded M16A2 and 3.59 kg for a loaded AK-74. Add a spare magazine and you are at roughly 1.36 kg of Beretta or 0.93 kg of Makarov — a kilo and a half at the outside, on a soldier whose total load you are being advised to keep under 40 kg for the sake of stamina, sprint speed and agility. It is not nothing, because Reforger counts this stuff carefully: an update named Ground Support rewrote the weighting system so that every individual round inside a magazine is weighed, where magazines had previously carried a flat figure regardless of contents — 0.05 kg for the M9's, 0.03 kg for the PM's. That is why a loaded pistol and an empty one are different objects on your character sheet at all. But a kilo against forty is not the constraint that decides your loadout. The game even models an M12 holster.

So price the sidearm the way you would price anything else at the terminal, because that is all it is: a 6-Supply line item with no rank attached, competing for the same pool as the sandbags and the trucks. It is not a splurge, it is not a mistake, and it is not something you need permission or a promotion to buy. Whether it earns the slot is a separate question, and a genuinely open one — but the cost side of that question is closed. Six Supply and about a kilo.

That is the position a US or Soviet player is in: the pistol is an Arsenal item with a small price on it and no rank attached, drawn or left on the rack on the merits. It is worth appreciating how much of a privilege that is, because one of the three factions on the field never gets to make the decision at all. The game hands its guerrillas a pistol before it hands them anything else.

For the FIA, the Makarov Is the Faction's Starting Point

A US or Soviet rifleman walks to an Arsenal and pays Supply for a pistol. An FIA partisan opens their eyes already holding one, and the decision was never offered.

That inversion arrived with Update 1.7. On 28 May 2026, Bohemia's "Become a Partisan!" release made the FIA a playable third faction in Conflict scenarios rather than a set of AI bodies scattered around the map for the superpowers to shoot at. It was not a token addition. The same patch added Renegade as a faction with its own spawn points and configuration, seeded FIA weapon cache locations across the islands, wrote thirty-eight base callsigns for the guerrillas, and built FIA-camouflaged versions of the Soviet fortifications so the resistance had something of its own to dig in behind. Bohemia set expectations bluntly in the announcement: playing as FIA is not for the unprepared, and you will be outnumbered, outgunned, thrown into the world with minimal equipment and no clear task ahead.

"Minimal equipment" has a precise inventory. In Bohemia's own words, you spawn with just a pistol, a spare magazine, and a "shopping list" — a guide leading to hidden equipment caches at random locations, and a document worth protecting, because should it fall into enemy hands you might find an unwanted surprise waiting at your next cache visit. The official text never names the pistol. It does not need to. The FIA has exactly one handgun anywhere on its roster, and it is the Makarov PM — the same pistol the Soviet regulars carry, issued to the guerrillas fighting them. Players on the receiving end have reached the same conclusion less formally — one post-1.7 Steam thread's contribution to the discussion is the single line "YES A FARMER WITH A MAKAROV SO ANNOYING," which is about as direct a field confirmation as a roster inference is ever going to get.

Then there is the detail that makes the PM genuinely the FIA's weapon rather than a borrowed one — though it is narrower than it first appears, so it is worth being exact about which half of the kit is free. The pistol you spawn holding costs nothing, because you did not buy it. Walk up to an Arsenal for a replacement and the FIA's PM is 5 Supply, the same base price the Soviet Union pays for the identical weapon; the guerrillas get no discount on the gun itself. What they get is the ammunition. The FIA's 8-round magazines cost nothing at all from the Arsenal — not one Supply, not a discount, zero — which makes the FIA the only faction in the game whose sidearm ammunition is free. That is not a balance statement Bohemia ever wrote down so much as a fossil of an older economy: PM magazines were free from Arsenal Boxes and Resupply Packs from Early Access all the way through Update 1.2, and the Update 1.3 balance pass that put a price on them applied to Soviet forces only. The guerrillas' column was never re-priced. Whatever else the FIA is short of, it can feed this one weapon indefinitely.

It also cannot escape it cheaply. A hands-on guide written from 1.7 play reports that the FIA cannot save loadouts — every death returns you to the default kit, and both tent spawns and random spawns put you back in it as well, meaning any gear you assembled has to be assembled again at an armoury on the next respawn. Treat that as one experienced account rather than a published rule; Bohemia also shipped a mission-header toggle that lets a server disable random spawnpoints and caches entirely, so the shape of your opening minute is partly a property of where you are playing. But where it applies, it makes re-equipping a recurring tax rather than a one-off setup cost, and it is the mechanism that keeps the PM permanently relevant to a faction that would clearly rather be holding something else.

Play the first two minutes out and the loop is easy to see. You come to with a PM and one spare magazine — eight rounds in the gun, eight more on you, and nothing to pay for either. You have a shopping list pointing at a cache and no transport, so job one is finding a civilian car, because Everon does not shrink for you. Arriving at that cache empty-handed accomplishes less than you would hope: the guide's reading is that a cache carries only a default 50 Supply of its own, so you are expected to bring supplies to it rather than harvest them from it, and even a Deployable Tent to spawn from later runs 200 Supply while holding 100. Your realistic alternatives are the two every guerrilla in history has used — take a weapon off a body, or get yourself to a green control point where the faction can actually build. Get shot at any point in that sequence and the sequence restarts, from the same pistol.

Unless you have earned the one status that takes even that away. The Arsenal's FIA rank table marks both the PM and its magazines with a cross for Renegade — a Renegade cannot draw the pistol or its ammunition at all. The 1.7 changelog that added Renegade also added an "FIA Renegade punishment UI," and the same player guide describes the behaviour that earns it: kill friendly FIA AI to strip their equipment and you are flagged a traitor, locked out of joining a squad, your faction colour greyed out in chat. No single source spells out the entire chain from teamkill to disarmament, but the pieces all point one way, and the result is a neat piece of design either way. The one weapon this faction gives away is the one weapon it can take back. Climb rather than cheat and the ladder opens up instead — building an FIA Ammunition Supply Depot, for instance, requires Partisan rank.

Players have not been gentle about the starting kit. The 1.7 guide calls the default equipment "one weak handgun, practically a water gun" and the FIA opening "an extremely hard start," and a Steam thread titled "FIA is a mistake" frames the whole arrangement as an unfair asymmetry, with FIA players scavenging for a weapon while US and Soviet forces spawn fully loaded and call in armour. Both are opinions rather than mechanics, and both are pointing at something the game does not dispute — the pistol is the floor, not the ceiling. FIA players can pick up and use whatever a defeated US or Soviet soldier drops, and the faction's own arsenal, once reachable, is a distinctly Czechoslovak-flavoured collection: Sa 58P and Sa 58V rifles in 7.62×39, the UK-59L machine gun that took the PKM's place in FIA equipment tables back in Update 1.1, and a reusable RPG-7 variant. A well-supplied FIA squad ends up looking like whatever the match has given it. It just never starts that way.

That shapes what you do next, from either side of the fight. If you are playing FIA, your opening loop is fixed and worth rehearsing: pistol, car, cache or corpse or control point, and re-equip after every death because the game will keep undressing you. If you are playing US or Soviet, adjust your read of the player in the treeline holding nothing but a Makarov. They are not necessarily bad, and not necessarily out of options — they are in the default state of a third of the factions in your match, and the free magazine in their pocket means they have no particular reason to stop shooting. They may also be one dead body away from picking up the rifle you are currently holding.

One faction, then, has had the question answered for it. Everyone else still has to decide — including the partisan who has finally scavenged something better and now has to work out whether the Makarov is still worth the pocket it occupies.

When a Sidearm Actually Earns Its Slot

The best case anyone has made for carrying a pistol in this game was made by a player who mostly does not carry one.

It appears in a Steam Community weapons tier list posted on 24 March 2025, whose author ranks every weapon in order — including within tiers — and states up front that cost effectiveness is part of the ranking. Both pistols land in B, the third of that list's four tiers, and the reasoning is more generous than the placement suggests: they are, in the author's words, unironically good, you can kill people just fine with them, and with decent aim and a fast trigger finger you can delete someone who has crept up on you while you were busy sniping. Then comes the qualifier that does more work than the tier letter. That same author only carries a pistol when their primary is a DMR. Worth being exact about what that is and is not: one experienced player's ranking, published in March 2025, more than a year before the FIA became playable — so it is a verdict on the pistols as tools, not a comment on anything Update 1.7 did.

Take the qualifier seriously, because it is the whole argument. Run an M21 or an SVD as your primary and you have bought reach at the cost of everything inside it. Through the M21's scope at close range, the author's assessment is that you cannot see anything at all. The SVD at least lets you look under the scope while aiming, which they rate as workable and bad. Neither problem is about damage — a marksman rifle will kill anyone who walks into a village square. The problem is that the thing which actually reaches a marksman is the target they never saw closing, arriving at a distance where their optic has turned into a tube full of blurred grass. That is precisely the band where a pistol is still grouping tightly enough to hit a person, and where the sidearm's real advantage isn't ballistic at all: it is the only other weapon you are allowed to be holding.

Now the case where it collapses. A rifleman carrying an M16A2 or an AK-74 has no such hole. At the ranges where a pistol is doing its best work, the rifle is already doing better work — a tighter cone, more rounds before a reload, and a round travelling more than twice as fast to get there. Switching to a sidearm in that situation is not reaching for a specialist tool; it is trading down mid-fight. If your primary already covers close range, the pistol is not insurance. It is redundancy that you carried up the hill.

There is one more honest reason, and it is smaller: you are deliberately travelling light. A pistol is the least amount of gun you can be carrying and still be armed, and both the weight and the cost of that decision were settled earlier — neither is what should be stopping you. If you have chosen to move fast and unencumbered, this is the weapon that respects the choice.

If neither of those describes you, carry one anyway if you want to. It is not a mistake. It is a small, cheap indulgence in a mode where far more expensive indulgences go unremarked, and the tier list's core observation holds regardless of what else is on your back: these weapons kill people. What a sidearm is not, for a rifleman, is a plan. Nothing you will ever accomplish with an M9 or a PM is something the weapon already on your shoulder would not have accomplished more reliably — which is a very different criticism from "useless", and it is the one the evidence actually supports.

So assume you are carrying one. Expect it to be decided inside a few dozen metres, against someone who is closer to you than they should have been able to get. That is the engagement the pistol exists for, and it is why being shot by one stings so much on the receiving end — one post-1.7 Steam thread's exasperation at being killed by a partisan holding nothing but a Makarov is, read the right way, a testimonial.

And after the last round, there is the pistol whip. Both weapons swing for a base damage of 10 at a range of one metre, with a precision factor of 0.3 — exactly half what a rifle butt does, and it comes with the same requirement to be standing close enough to touch someone. It is a genuinely old feature, cut from the original Operation Flashpoint and restored for Reforger, which is a nice thing to know and a terrible thing to rely on. Treat it as the option that exists when your slide has locked back and the reload is longer than the distance between you. Nobody plans a match around it.

Which leaves you a rule you can apply in the two seconds you actually have at the Arsenal terminal. If you are FIA, there is no rule — the game already made the call and put the Makarov in your hand. If your primary has a hole at close range, or you are deliberately going out light, take the pistol. Otherwise take magazines for the rifle instead; they will decide more firefights than the sidearm would have. And either way, you are no longer guessing: you know which pistol your faction issues, you know what its numbers are, you know nothing you can buy will improve them, and you know exactly how far it will carry you before it becomes a very expensive club.