Key Points and Summary – The M10 Booker began as Mobile Protected Firepower: a compact, protected assault gun to give light infantry brigades organic shock and breaching.
Competitive prototyping led to low-rate production, early deliveries, and a plan to field the first unit.
But requirements creep drove the vehicle’s weight into the forty-plus-ton range, undercutting deployability and infrastructure assumptions and blurring roles with Abrams.
In 2025 the Army canceled procurement, redirecting funds to counter-drone, fires, and air defense.
The gap that birthed Booker remains. The next solution must be lighter, drone-resilient, and ruthlessly tied to IBCT logistics and terrain—or risk repeating the same mistake.
M10 Booker: A Needed Punch That Outgrew Its Mission
For two decades, infantry brigade combat teams (IBCTs) have fought without an organic, armored direct-fire punch. In urban fights, against bunkers, or when ambushed by enemy armored cars and IFVs, IBCT commanders borrowed tanks from armored brigades or called for air.
That answer is slow, conditional, and sometimes unavailable. The Mobile Protected Firepower idea—later designated the M10 Booker—promised a compact, protected assault gun that could maneuver with light infantry, blast hardened positions, and survive small-caliber cannon and RPG threats. In concept: fast to deploy, tough enough to lead, simple enough to sustain.
The gap was real; the requirement was sensible.
So why did the M10 Booker ‘light tank’, as many called it, fail so badly?
From MPF To M10 Booker: A Fast Start
The Army took an unusually pragmatic path. Instead of a decade of paper requirements, it ran a competitive prototyping sprint, put soldiers in the vehicles, and selected General Dynamics Land Systems for low-rate initial production in 2022.
In 2023, the Army named the production vehicle M10 Booker to honor two soldiers—Sgt. Stevon Booker (Iraq, 2003) and Pvt. Robert Booker (Tunisia, 1943). The M10 paired a stabilized 105 mm gun with modern thermal sights and digital fire control in a compact hull, aiming to give IBCTs organic shock and breaching without hauling a full M1 Abrams battalion everywhere. Early deliveries began in 2024, with the plan to field the first unit and build toward full-rate production later in the decade.
The Promise On Paper
Done right, Booker would have given infantry commanders three forms of leverage:
Tempo at contact. A gun you own beats a gun you borrow. Instead of waiting for CAS or an attached armor task force, an IBCT could push metal forward the moment a strongpoint or ambush appeared.
A live fire demonstration of the Army’s newest and most modernized combat vehicle, the M10 Booker, marks the conclusion of the M10 Booker Dedication Ceremony at Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Aberdeen, Md., April 18, 2024. (U.S. Army photo by Cpl. Jonathon Downs)
Training coherence. Crews and infantry would practice together—approach lanes, stand-off, communications—so the first time they shared a street wasn’t the first time under fire.
Logistical sanity. A lighter, less thirsty platform than M1 Abrams, with simpler support demands, could live inside an IBCT’s sustainment system without breaking it.
The theory was sound. The execution strayed.
Requirements Drift And The Weight Spiral of the M10 Booker
M10 Booker’s root sin was requirements creep. The original MPF concepts talked about a compact vehicle deployable to austere theaters and airfields, resilient to the most common battlefield threats, and sized for light forces’ roads, bridges, and ramps. As the program matured, the protection and survivability bar kept rising—against better cannons, nastier anti-armor threats, and the expectation of close-in urban brawls.
Every added plate, thicker glacis, and beefed-up suspension brought unintended consequences: more weight, more ground pressure, more stress on bridges and transport gear, and a larger logistical shadow. By the time low-rate production was in swing, the “light tank” was roughly forty-plus tons—no longer compatible with some of the very infrastructure and deployment schemes that justified it.
Deployability Collides With Physics
Weight wasn’t just a number; it bent the entire concept. A vehicle sized for rapid movement by roll-on/roll-off sealift and theater airfields now struggled with axle loads, expeditionary bridging, and tactical mobility on narrow, degraded roads.
A platform that was never meant to be airdropped was nonetheless supposed to be quickly deployable—but the real world of ramps, pallets, and runway strength doesn’t care about PowerPoint. Commanders looked at the emerging constraints and asked a fair question: if we must plan around heavy transport and limited routes anyway, why not bring Abrams—heavier, yes, but decisively more lethal and better protected—when the risk justifies armor?
PD1 – Delivery of First Production Vehicle M10 Booker Combat Vehicle. Image Credit: U.S. Army.
Overlap With M1 Abrams; Underlap Against Drones
Even before cancellation, field reports and wargames suggested an awkward truth: Booker risked being too heavy to be “light,” but not heavy enough to dominate against modern anti-armor teams in dense urban or drone-rich battlespaces.
The platform could kill and survive, but the threat envelope kept stretching: first-person-view (FPV) drones with tandem charges, proliferating top-attack munitions, and cheap loiterers that punish any vehicle lingering in the open.
You can add cages, APS candidates, and better soft-kill, but every ounce you bolt on drives the spiral farther from the original mission—a mobile, protected direct-fire asset that lives with light infantry day after day.
Industrial Reality Wasn’t The Culprit—But It Didn’t Help
The armored industrial base did what it was asked: weld hulls, machine turrets, integrate powerpacks, assemble, test, and deliver early vehicles while ramping a supply chain that hadn’t built a new U.S. armored combat vehicle family in years. But the broader ecosystem was under strain—workforce churn, long-lead parts, and competing demands across multiple vehicle lines. Early fielding dribbled in as planned, yet the Army’s thinking was already shifting. That meant the factories and depots were climbing a learning curve just as the customer’s appetite cooled.
The Strategic Pivot And The Cancellation
In spring–summer 2025, under a wider Army transformation initiative, senior leaders terminated the M10 Booker program during low-rate production.
The M10 Booker Combat Vehicle proudly displays its namesake on the gun tube during the Army Birthday Festival at the National Museum of the U.S. Army, June 10, 2023. The M10 Booker Combat Vehicle is named after two American service members: Pvt. Robert D. Booker, who posthumously received the Medal of Honor for actions in World War II, and Staff Sgt. Stevon A. Booker, who posthumously received the Distinguished Service Cross for actions during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Their stories and actions articulate the Army’s need for the M10 Booker Combat Vehicle, an infantry assault vehicle that will provide protection and lethality to destroy threats like the ones that took the lives of these two Soldiers. (U.S. Army photo by Bernardo Fuller)
The official logic combined relevance, cost, and opportunity cost: dollars tied up in a vehicle that had drifted from its niche would be redirected to higher-priority “war-winning capabilities”—notably counter-drone, long-range fires, air and missile defense, and formations restructured around unmanned systems.
The Army signaled that a handful of vehicles already on the line would still be accepted, but there would be no full-rate production. Years of work ended not with a grand operational debut, but with a budget realignment and a lesson.
What Happens To The Vehicles Already Built
The Army had funded dozens of LRIP vehicles and accepted more than two dozen by the time the axe fell. Their fate is still being decided. Several options are on the table:
Training and experimentation. Keep a small fleet at home stations and at the combat training centers to refine infantry-armor TTPs for assault-gun roles and to test counter-UAS kits, signature reduction, and decoys.
OPFOR and schoolhouse. Use them as “red” armor in controlled scenarios and as gunnery trainers—valuable even if the platform never fields widely.
Foreign military sales or transfers. Allies facing urban fights may be interested—but only if sustainment and spares pencil out and if the vehicle’s weight/road limits fit their terrain.
Storage and cannibalization. The least appealing, but historically common: preserve hulls as parts donors or contingency assets.
What The Army Still Needed—And Still Needs
Canceling Booker didn’t erase the original problem. IBCTs remain short of organic, protected direct fire. That gap can be addressed in several complementary ways:
Better infantry-carried and vehicle-mounted precision weapons for bunker and wall breaching, with low collateral and rapid re-attack.
M10 Booker. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Robotic breachers and assault UGVs that can push into the first blocks of a city without risking a manned crew.
Modular applique protection kits for existing light vehicles that can be mounted for a fight and stripped for movement.
Air-ground teaming with small drones, loitering munitions, and precision mortars so a platoon can create its own fires at the speed of contact.
A smaller, truly light direct-fire vehicle purpose-built for FPV-dense fights—less armor, more signature management, better soft-kill, and logistics that match an IBCT’s footprint.
In other words: solve the effect—rapid, repeatable, protected direct fire—without locking into a platform that drags the brigade into heavy-force logistics.
What The M10 Booker Program Got Right
It’s easy to bury a canceled program with snark. Booker also demonstrated several good behaviors worth keeping:
Competitive prototyping with soldiers. Getting hardware to troops early surfaced real feedback fast.
Naming the need clearly. “Mobile protected firepower” focused debate on effects at the breach, not on the romance of tank battles.
Industry responsiveness. After years of upgrades, the industrial base showed it can still design, weld, integrate, and deliver a new combat vehicle on a real timeline.
These wins shouldn’t vanish with the line shutdown.
Why It Failed—In One Sentence
Mission drift turned a needed “light fist” into a medium-weight vehicle that couldn’t deploy like a light system or dominate like a heavy one—just as the Army pivoted money and formations toward drones, air defense, and long-range kill chains.
Lessons To Bank For The Next Try
Freeze the “why.” If the effect you want is breach and shock for light brigades, write everything—weight, protection, comms—back from that effect and refuse the temptations that blow the weight budget.
Design for the drone fight first. Assume you will be seen, spoofed, and swarmed. Bake in soft-kill, hard-kill, decoys, and thermal discipline.
Respect infrastructure. Bridges, ramps, theater road nets, and port cranes are as real as enemy fire. Model them early; let them veto you.
Prototype in public. Field company-size test sets with line units for a year before production decisions. Let mud, dust, and training calendars crush PowerPoint optimism.
Buy the effect in pieces. A mix of loitering munitions, light breachers, precision rockets, and a truly light assault gun may beat one exquisite vehicle—especially if the enemy’s cheapest weapon is a $600 quadcopter with a shaped charge.
The M10 Booker Lesson
The M10 Booker wasn’t a fraud; it was an honest attempt to solve a real infantry problem. It died because weight and context changed faster than the program could adapt, and because the Army decided that dollars parked in a “medium” assault gun were better spent on counter-drone, fires, and air defense for the war it expects next. The sting is that the original need hasn’t gone away. The next answer must be lighter, more drone-resilient, and ruthlessly tied to the deployment realities of the formations it serves.
Done that way, the Army can still give its light brigades the close-in punch they’ve lacked—without buying another vehicle that outgrows its purpose before it reaches the line.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) is Editor-In-Chief and President of National Security Journal. He was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
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