The Army’s combat vehicle, the M10 Booker, fires three shots after a dedication ceremony in April 2024 at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. (Matthew Adams/Stars and Stripes)
The Army is canning the M10 Booker, a tank-like armored vehicle that the service chose less than two years ago as its first major new front-line combat weapon in decades, officials said Monday.
The decision made by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll comes amid a Pentagon-wide push to cut spending on underperforming programs, reduce the number of top-ranking officers and streamline the military’s procurement processes.
Driscoll and Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, announced last week that the service’s efforts under the new Army Transformation Initiative would include the elimination of unnecessary programs to instead “ruthlessly prioritize fighting formations to directly contribute to lethality.”
The Army said those would include eliminating the production of the AH-64D Apache attack helicopter in favor of the more modern AH-64E, ending the Gray Eagle drone program, and halting procurement of several tactical vehicles including the decades-old Humvee and the newer Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. The M10 Booker, too, will be discontinued, an Army spokesman confirmed Monday.
“The Army will cease investment and procurement of the M10 Booker so that we can optimize and reinvest those savings into war-winning capabilities,” said Lt. Col. Jeff Tolbert, a spokesman for Driscoll. “The Army is increasing lethality by ceasing procurement of obsolete or ineffective systems so that we can invest in capabilities that benefit the American soldier.”
The short-lived M10 never achieved operational capabilities at any combat units, though some of the Bookers did make it into formations, including at Fort Bragg, N.C. The vehicle was first announced in 2023 after years of development and pitched as an up-armored, direct-fire combat vehicle capable of supporting light infantry formations with heavy fire. It was technically not a tank, Army officials insisted, even though it looked like a tank and performed a role much like that of the M1 Abrams tanks, which have long been the American military’s mainstay battle tank.
But despite the Booker’s relatively light framework — the M10 weighs about 42 tons compared to the most modern Abrams, the M1A2 SEPv3’s 74 tons — it cannot be dropped to the ground from an airplane and thus does not have the capability soldiers need now, Driscoll determined.
“We got the Booker wrong,” the Army secretary told reporters, according to a Task & Purpose report. “We wanted to develop a small tank that was agile and could do [airdrops] to the places our regular tanks can’t.”
The Army had accepted about 80 M10 Bookers from General Dynamics before Driscoll decided to kill the program, officials said. It was not clear Monday what would become of the existing M10s or whether the Army would soon pursue a tank that could be airdropped.
Driscoll said it was important to cut the program before it went further.
“What’s historically happened is we would have kept buying this to build out some number of Bookers, and then in decades in the future we would have switched,” he said. “Instead, we went to the Pentagon leadership, and we said, ‘We made a mistake, this didn’t turn out right. We’re going to stop. We’re going to own it.’ ”
