M10 Booker Boondoggle: The Army Built an Armored Vehicle No One Needs

The M10 Booker is a 40-ton tracked armored vehicle built to give light infantry formations a direct fire capability against fortified positions and light armored threats.

It’s equipped with a 105mm cannon, protected by composite armor, and powered by a diesel engine that was supposed to make it light and mobile enough to deploy quickly.

M10 Booker Light Tank. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

In short, it’s not a tank, not a scout vehicle, and not particularly well suited to either role. The M10 was meant to fill a supposed gap in the Army’s Infantry Brigade Combat Teams (IBCTs) – formations that, unlike their armored or Stryker counterparts, lack organic direct firepower.

But like so many “capability gap” programs born in the Pentagon’s contractor-driven acquisition culture, the Booker is a platform in search of a war, a concept in search of a doctrine, and a solution in search of a problem.

The M10 Booker Might Be a Failure

Now that the vehicle is entering production, it turns out the Army has no idea what to do with it. This isn’t hyperbole – it’s the official position. Now Army leaders are trying to figure out what to do with  the system now that fielding has begun. That is not just a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. That is the entire body suffering from institutional nerve damage. The United States Army has built a $1.5 billion armored vehicle that doesn’t fit into its force structure, doesn’t align with current operational concepts, and can’t be deployed at the speed or scale the strategic environment demands.

And yet, none of this is remotely surprising. Because the M10 Booker is not a failure of engineering or even tactical theory – it is the inevitable consequence of a procurement system that is strategically adrift, politically compromised, and structurally incapable of saying “no” to bad ideas. The M10 joins a long lineage of orphaned weapons systems: the Future Combat Systems catastrophe, the Zumwalt-class destroyers with no coherent mission, the Comanche stealth helicopter that never flew in combat. Each was the product of bureaucratic inertia, Congressional pork-barreling, and a defense industry that survives and thrives by building things the services don’t necessarily need but can’t seem to stop buying.

Boomer M10. Image Credit: U.S. Army.

Let’s start with the operational concept behind the Booker. In the early 2000s, as the U.S. military was bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was growing concern that IBCTs lacked punch. They had no tanks, no Strykers with 30mm cannons, and no organic means of engaging enemy positions with direct fire other than dismounted infantry or attached support. The Army wanted a vehicle that could be rapidly deployed by air and provide protected firepower in low- to mid-intensity fights. So far, so good.

But that world no longer exists. The security environment of 2025 is not about chasing insurgents through cities with lightly armored vehicles. It’s about deterring or defeating peer competitors like China and Russia – states that field precision-guided munitions, loitering drones, long-range artillery, and vast tank fleets. In this world, the M10 Booker is a square peg in a battlefield full of round holes. It’s too light to survive high-intensity combat. It’s too heavy to airlift in meaningful numbers. It’s not networked into the multi-domain kill webs the Pentagon claims are central to its future warfighting doctrine. And it doesn’t fit comfortably into any existing brigade structure without creating major logistical and doctrinal headaches.

That’s not just a mismatch. That’s a failure of strategic imagination. And worse, it reveals the degree to which the procurement tail now wags the doctrinal dog. Instead of strategy guiding weapons acquisition, acquisition decisions now drive force planning. A politically protected program like the M10 makes it through development and into production, and only then does the Army scramble to invent a mission for it. It’s like designing a battleship in peacetime and then waiting for a war to break out that justifies its existence.

How Did This Happen? 

And let’s not pretend the defense industrial base didn’t know exactly what it was doing. General Dynamics was awarded the contract in 2022, and once production began, it became politically untouchable. Jobs, contracts, and district-level pork insulated the program from oversight. Members of Congress could show up to ribbon cuttings, the Army could point to “progress” in modernization, and defense contractors could bank the checks. Never mind that no combatant commander asked for it. Never mind that the Army’s own internal war games didn’t call for it. The machine rolled on.

The consequences are bigger than wasted money. The more dangerous effect is institutional rot. Because the U.S. military isn’t just building useless systems – it’s building the illusion of capability. The Booker will show up in PowerPoint slides, on parade grounds, and in glossy brochures about “enhancing IBCT lethality.”

But in a real war – against a peer adversary – it will be sidelined, bypassed, or worse, destroyed in detail because it was never meant to fight in that kind of environment in the first place.

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)

Meanwhile, the threats that actually matter keep evolving. China is developing autonomous drone swarms, hypersonic missiles, and AI-enabled targeting networks. Russia, even battered and exposed in Ukraine, continues to build up an artillery-centric doctrine that emphasizes mass, deception, and mobility. And the U.S. response? More bureaucracy, more inter-service turf wars, and more Franken-systems like the Booker.

The tragedy here isn’t just the waste. It’s the opportunity cost. For the $1.5 billion poured into the M10, the Army could have invested in the things it actually needs: integrated counter-drone systems, resilient command-and-control networks, or the long-promised but still-theoretical next-generation fighting vehicle. It could have doubled down on electronic warfare or hardened logistics nodes. Instead, it bought a tank that isn’t really a tank, for units that don’t need it, in a world where it won’t survive.

The M10 Booker Is Part of a Bigger Problem 

So what happens now?

Most likely, the Army will quietly reduce the total buy, shuffle the vehicles into National Guard units, or repurpose them for partner training missions far from the front lines of real competition. But the systemic dysfunction that produced the Booker will remain untouched.

Because until someone takes a blowtorch to the procurement culture that allowed this to happen, we’ll keep building more Bookers. More platforms that check boxes but don’t solve problems. More hardware that photographs well but performs poorly. More myths of capability at the exact moment we need real warfighting readiness.

There is a better way. It starts with reasserting the primacy of strategy. If a new weapons system doesn’t fit into a coherent theory of victory—across domains, theaters, and timeframes—it shouldn’t get built. Period. It means empowering combatant commanders, not contractors, to shape requirements. It means Congress exercising oversight instead of protectionism. And it means military leaders having the moral courage to say: we don’t need this.

The M10 Booker is not just a mistake. It is a mirror held up to a broken system. And until we reckon with what it reflects, America’s military edge will continue to dull – not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic whimper.

About the Author: Andrew Latham 

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Andrew is now a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive.