Saco Defense was a weapons company at the time (they made the M60 machine gun) and they worked with Sig to enter the 226 into the competition. This is before Sig had a US presence.

You'll notice that most of the fails in the table above were from the 1981 tests. The criteria were reworked and relaxed a bit for the 1984 tests.

One of the things I've heard over and over again is that the 459 did better than the Beretta and the Sig but was disqualified for reason X (usually something far from the truth), but the Beretta did edge out the 459 in almost every test, often by quite a bit. The firing pin disqualifier is, of course, BS (is that why the hammer spring is so stiff on the third gen?). The frame failure at ~4500 rounds for one pistol is really just very unfortunate.

One of the interesting things they mentioned in that report is that using Beretta was expected to benefit the US economy *more* than using S&W because S&W would have manufactured the guns using existing capacity (sounds unlikely), while Beretta had to build new factories, supply new equipment, hire new workers, etc.