Finally, the U.S. Army will not have a light battle tank developed on the basis of the Spanish Ascod design. The M10 Booker program, as the new platform was baptized, has been canceled by the U.S. Department of Defense in the review process being carried out by the Pentagon. The plan is outlined in the document by the head of this department, Pete Hegseth, under the name of Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform.
In the words of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, “the Booker is a classic example of the sunk cost fallacy and that the Army is doing something wrong.” For the U.S. Army’s chief technology officer, Alex Miller, “this is not an acquisition story gone wrong,” but rather that the mistake is due to a requirements process in which “so much inertia has been created that the Army could not get out of its own way, and it kept rolling, rolling, rolling.” according to the US media One Defense.
The M10 Booker is a development of General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS), which in mid-2022 was the winner of the Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) program. In total, the purchase of 504 vehicles had been planned for an estimated cost of 6,000 million dollars. If the cost of the entire life cycle (at least 30 years) is included, with the costs of maintenance, personnel, etc., the figure that was being considered to invest in the program was around 17,000 million dollars.
The planned schedule had its sights set on 2035 as the date by which the deliveries of the more than half a thousand new cars should have been completed. The purpose of this armor was to improve the mobility, protection, and direct fire capabilities of U.S. infantry brigade combat teams.