The Army made a tank it doesn’t need and can’t use. Now it’s figuring out what to do with it.

As the 101st Airborne Division prepared last year to receive their first M10 Bookers—armored combat vehicles designed specifically for infantry forces—staff planners realized something: eight of the 11 bridges on Fort Campbell would crack under the weight of the “light tank.”

It turns out that though the vehicle was initially conceptualized as relatively lightweight—airdroppable by C-130—the twists and turns of the Army requirements process had rendered the tank too heavy to roll across the infrastructure at the infantry-centric Kentucky post, and nobody had thought about that until it was too late.

“This is not a story of acquisition gone awry,” Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, told Defense One. “This is a story of the requirements process creating so much inertia that the Army couldn’t get out of its own way, and it just kept rolling and rolling and rolling.”

It’s a twist on the classic Pentagon procurement snafu—a program that moves so slowly that it’s outdated by the time it reaches the field.

In this case, the Army knew early on that it wasn’t going to be able to make the thing it had set out to make, but it was bound and determined to make something. So it made something it doesn’t actually need. 

The Booker is a stark reminder of what can happen when the system is checking the boxes but doing no critical thinking. With the service under pressure to streamline the way it develops new technology, the Army has vowed to turn things around.

How did this happen?

Pretty soon after 82nd Airborne Division leaders told the Army in 2013 they’d like a new light tank, à la the retired M551 Sheridan, the team working on its requirements hit a snag. The 82nd had asked to be able to airdrop the new vehicle from a C-130 or C-17, but nothing even roughly the size and capability of a Sheridan was going to fit inside a C-130. 

“I can’t give you a rationale why everything wasn’t backed off,” Miller said. “But the first time that the requirement was sent to the one-stars in September of ‘13, and it didn’t look like the [operational needs statement] that came up in July of 2013, the Army should have gone, ‘Stop.’ “

Instead, they resolved to push ahead with what was then the Mobile Protected Firepower program. 

The Army Requirements Oversight Council took a look at the 2015 requirements submission and said, never mind, it doesn’t need to be loaded onto a C-130, and actually, don’t worry about airdropping it either. The Joint Requirements Oversight Council signed off.

“And that’s where you start to see in the story, things starting to crumble,” Miller said. “As all of us know, as soon as you remove the requirement for airdropability, you’re no longer actually helping infantry. You are just as maneuverable as a main battle tank at that point, which means you are less maneuverable.”

And it didn’t come up again until last year, when Fort Campbell prepared to take possession of the final product. Or if it did, perhaps, the amount of work it would take to go back and change the requirements felt insurmountable.

“There is a monster of inertia,” Miller said. “No one wants to stop anything at that point, or certainly go back and re-look, because if you make any edits to the requirement, you have to restart the process.”

So the MPF rolled on, frozen in 2016—and saddled with requirements from far older eras. It was required to use the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, or SINCGARS, first fielded in 1990. The Pentagon has tried to replace SINCGARS, famously spending 15 years and $15 billion only to cancel the Joint Tactical Radio System program. The Army is still working on it.

The requirements also locked the Army into buying 504 vehicles, because a 10-percent increase in program cost would trigger a new review of the requirements. 

In 2022, Miller said, the requirements were updated—mystifyingly—to say that it doesn’t need to have optionally-manned or autonomous capability, despite the entire Defense Department’s march toward uncrewed technology.

“So now you have a vehicle that is the best idea of 2013, that has the best technology limitations of 2013—which are really technology limitations of 2000, because you’re trying to be backwards-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 actually add digital technologies. And the process continues to move.”

In 2018, the Army decided to station the M10s at Fort Bragg, N.C., with the 82nd; Fort Campbell with the 101st; Fort Carson, Colo., with the 4th Infantry Division; and Fort Johnson, La., at the Joint Readiness Training Center.

But the doctrine, training, facilities and other considerations required to onboard a new system hadn’t been finished yet, Miller said. Nor had the National Environmental Policy reviews, “which normally take forever,” and the mobility reviews hadn’t been done either.

Posts like Fort Riley, Kansas, or Fort Cavazos, Texas, home armored brigades, are built to enable tanks to move around. But Fort Campbell is all about infantry and Special Forces. 

“So now you’ve got divisions who can’t train on their systems. You’ve got systems that don’t actually meet any current needs, because they’re not airdroppable, and they require C-17s,” Miller said.

The sour cherry on top, he added, arrived when the Air Force changed its load restrictions so that the Army could only put one M10 on a C-17, rather than the two the service had counted on. 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 to replace. 

So now what?

There are three M10s operating at Bragg, but the Army isn’t sure it’s going to see through the low-rate production contract it awarded to General Dynamics in 2022, to make up to 96 tanks. The plan was to get to full production in 2025, then 2027.

“I know that everyone was trying to do the right thing, and I want to stress that everyone was trying to do the right thing for their piece of the process,” Miller told Defense One, paraphrasing what Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said when he heard the story of the M10. “But, what the secretary, the chief, have said is, ‘OK, ready, take a step back. The process does not exist to serve itself. The process exists for us.’ “

At the moment, the Army is working on a new Abrams variant that will look a lot like what the M10 probably should have been. 

“So we’ll have a lighter main battle tank that has all the features that we want: things like autoloader, things like partial autonomy, active protection systems,” Miller said. “What I think the secretary and the chief were holding in reserve is, can that actually satisfy the need?”

If they can get the M1A3 into production quickly, with all the new motivation the service has to procure more efficiently, they might be able to off-ramp the M10 without buying a bunch more of them.

“So what we will end up doing, I think, is reviewing what that program looks like after the first three units that we bought, and figuring out what the next steps are,” Miller said. “Rather than resting on our laurels and just saying, ‘We’re stuck in this process; we need to buy this for 20 or 30 years.’ Because that doesn’t make sense.”

The process in 2025 is different enough, he stressed, that a mistake like the Booker wouldn’t happen again. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George has used his authority over the AROC to introduce what amounts to another step in the process, but is meant to validate those gold-plated requirements before they get fully locked in.

“He goes, ‘I approve this requirement for 120 days. You need to come back and make sure that you can actually do all the things that you said you can do, and do it at the price point that provides the best value to the Army,’ “ Miller said.

If it can’t, it’s toast. And the Army wants to get better at “no.”

“On the kick of fixing the acquisition and procurement process in total, this is a case study on, ‘Wow, we really have got to fix this’,” Miller said. “We are just willing to go, ‘Hey, we’re not doing this anymore.”

Defense One