The Army Made a Tank It Doesn’t Need and Can’t Use. Now It’s Figuring Out What to Do With It
USA, May 2, 2025 – Rarely does an author leave foreign materials without his own comments, this time such an exception was made. An article by reporter Meghann Myers, who works for the Defense One portal, has been published. The army in the title refers to the US Army ground forces, which also include airborne divisions. The tank in this case is the M10 Booker, which has only recently entered service.
And so, the article says: “The M10 Booker has been a design challenge from the start. It’s a case study in how Army procurement needs to change. As the 101st Airborne Division prepared to receive its first M10 Bookers last year—armored fighting vehicles designed specifically for infantry forces (meaning paratroopers)—staff planners realized something: eight of the 11 bridges at Fort Campbell would collapse under the weight of the “light tank.”
It turns out that while the vehicle was originally conceived as relatively light—capable of being dropped by a C-130 (a turboprop four-engine transport aircraft)—twists in the Army’s requirements process made the tank too heavy to traverse Kentucky’s infantry-oriented infrastructure, and no one thought about it until it was too late.
“This is not a story of a failed acquisition,” he told Defense One. Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer. “This is a story about a requirements process that creates such inertia that the Army can’t get out of its own way and just rolls and rolls and rolls.”
It’s a twist on the classic Pentagon procurement snafu (Alex Miller must have been really excited about the tank, SNAFU is not commonly used in the media, it means Situation normal: all fucked up)—a program that moves so slowly that it’s obsolete by the time it gets to the field.
In this case, the Army knew from the start that it wouldn’t be able to make the thing it set out to make, but it was committed and determined to make something. So it built something it didn’t really need.
Booker is a stark reminder of what can happen when a system checks the boxes but doesn’t do any critical thinking. With the service under pressure to streamline the way it develops new technology, the Army has vowed to change things.
How did that happen?
Shortly after 82nd Airborne Division leaders told the Army in 2013 that they wanted a new light tank, à la the retired M551 Sheridan, the team working on their requirements ran into a problem. The 82nd Division was asking to be able to drop the new vehicle from a C-130 or C-17 (a four-engine jet transport aircraft capable of carrying the Abrams tank), but nothing of the size and capabilities of the Sheridan could fit into a C-130.
“I can’t give you a reason why everything wasn’t pulled,” Miller said. “But when the request was first sent to the one-star in September 2013, and it didn’t look like the [operational requirements statement based on the needs of the airborne division] that came in July 2013, the Army should have said ‘Stop.'”
Instead, they decided to continue with the Mobile Protected Firepower program. The Army Requirements Oversight Board (AROC) looked at the 2015 requirements submission and said, never mind, there’s no need to load it into a C-130, and there’s really no need to even think about airdropping it. The Joint Requirements Oversight Board signed off on it.
“And that’s where you start to see things start to fall apart in the story,” Miller said. “As we all know, once you remove the airborne requirement, you’re not really helping the infantry (again, meaning the infantry division paratroopers – paratroopers/parachutists). At this point, you’re as maneuverable as a main battle tank, which means you’re less maneuverable/maneuverable.”
And it only came up again last year, as Fort Campbell prepared to take over the final product. Or if it had come up earlier, the amount of work that would have to go back and change the requirements would have been insurmountable.
“There’s a monster of inertia there,” Miller said. “Nobody wants to stop anything at this point or go back and look at it again just to be sure, because if you make any adjustments to the requirement, you have to restart the process.”
So the MPF got going, froze in 2016—and was filled with requirements from much earlier times. It needed to use the Single-Channel Ground-Air Radio System, or SINCGARS, which first went into service in 1990. The Pentagon tried to replace SINCGARS, and it’s been known to spend 15 years and $15 billion just to cancel the Joint Tactical Radio Program. system. The Army is still working on it. The requirements also committed the Army to purchasing 504 vehicles, because a 10 percent increase in the cost of the program would trigger a new review of the requirements.
Miller said that in 2022, the requirements were updated — mystifyingly — to say it doesn’t have to have an optional manned (manned) or autonomous capability (ground combat drone), despite the entire Department of Defense moving toward unmanned technology.
“So now you have a vehicle that is the best idea of 2013, that has the best technological limitations of 2013 — which are really technological limitations of 2000 because you’re trying to be backward compatible,” he said. “You’ve added boundary conditions that say you can’t expand. You can’t expand the capabilities because you can’t add autonomy. You can’t really add digital technology. And the process continues to move.”
In 2018, the Army decided to field the M10 at Fort Bragg, N.C., with the 82nd Airborne Division; at Fort Campbell, with the 101st Airborne Division; at Fort Carson, Colo., with the 4th Infantry Division; and Fort Johnson, La., with the Joint Readiness Training Center. But the doctrine, training, equipment and other factors needed to field the new system have not yet been finalized, Miller said. There have been no national environmental policy reviews, “which usually take forever,” and no mobility reviews.
Bases like Fort Riley, Kansas, or Fort Cavazos, Texas, home to armored brigades, are built to allow tanks to move around. But Fort Campbell is all about infantry (airborne) and special forces.
“So now you have divisions that can’t train on their systems. You have systems that don’t really meet any current needs because they can’t be airdropped and require a C-17,” Miller said.
The icing on the cake, he added, came when the Air Force changed its cargo restrictions so that the Army could only fit one M10 on a C-17, rather than the two the service had planned. The M10 weighs 42 tons—much lighter than the 70-ton M1 Abrams, but more than twice as much as the 16-ton Sheridan it was designed to replace.
So what now?
Three M10s are operating at Fort Bragg, but the Army is unsure whether to complete a low-rate production contract awarded to General Dynamics in 2022 for up to 96 tanks. The plan was to reach full production in 2025, then 2027.
“I know everyone was trying to do the right thing, and I want to emphasize that everyone was trying to do the right thing for their part of the process,” Miller told Defense One, paraphrasing what Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll (the commander in chief is President Trump, the Secretary of Defense is P. Hegseth, the Secretary of the Army/Ground Forces is D. Driscoll) said when he heard the story about the M10. “But what the Secretary, the Chief, said is, ‘OK, ready, take a step back. The process doesn’t exist to serve itself. The process is there for us.”
The Army is currently working on a new Abrams variant that will look very similar to the M10.
“So we’re going to have a lighter main battle tank that will have all the features that we want: things like the automatic loader, things like partial autonomy, active protection systems,” Miller said. “I think the secretary and the chief had in mind, can that really meet the need?”
(This less-than-clear passage in the article for the well-informed speaks of a plan to accelerate development of the M1E3 tank as much as possible and, if possible, do it in 24 to 30 months, instead of the originally planned 65 months. Also, significantly earlier than in parallel with the deployment of a new infantry fighting vehicle based on the XM30 program. The trick is, first of all, the ability to complete a new tank in such a short period of time. But also that the new BMP program has two finalists, and one of them, in addition to the KF41 Lynx, is the Griffin III, while the M10 Booker is something like the Griffin II – the American development of the ASCOD infantry fighting vehicle program).
If they can get the M1A3 (apparently a typo, meant M1E3) into production quickly, with all the new incentives the service has to procure more efficiently, they might be able to get the M10 up and running without buying a lot of them.
“I think what we’re ultimately going to do is review what this program looks like after the first three units that we’ve bought and see what the next steps are,” Miller said. “Instead of resting on our laurels and saying, ‘We’re stuck in this process, we’ve got to buy this for 20 or 30 years.’ Because that doesn’t make sense.”
The process in 2025 is quite different, he stressed, stressing that a mistake like Booker’s won’t happen again. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George used his authority over the Army Requirements Oversight Council (AROC) to outline what constitutes the next step in the process, but his goal is to validate these gold-plated (meaning sustainable without risk of further failure) requirements before they are fully closed.
“He said, ‘I’m approving this requirement for 120 days. You have to go back and make sure you can actually do all the things you said you could do, at a cost that provides the best value to the Army,'” Miller said.
If it doesn’t work, it’s toast (meaning in big trouble, broke, defeated). And the Army wants to get better at “no.”
“In terms of the overall acquisition and procurement process, this is a case study in ‘Wow, we really need to fix this,'” Miller said. “We’re willing to say, ‘Hey, we’re not doing this anymore.'”
