A good call. About 80 of the planned 504 were delivered.
The Army has officially killed further delivers of the M10 Booker, canceling . . . a billion-dollar program to build a heavily-armed vehicle for fast-moving infantry units. . . .
“We got the Booker wrong,” said Driscoll, adding that the Army already has taken delivery of roughly 80 of the tanks. “We wanted to develop a small tank that was agile and could do [airdrops] to the places our regular tanks can’t.”
But the Booker, at 38 tons, can’t be airdropped.
“We got a heavy tank,” said Driscoll. “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. 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.’”
From here. As the linked article explains, the Army has now that it is canceled, stopped trying to deny that it is a tank.
The heaviest vehicle in the Army that can be air dropped currently is the JTLV with a base model weight of about 7 tons, which is wheeled (and hence much faster and more fuel efficient), has a crew of four, can have armaments fairly comparable to that of the original Bradley M2 infantry fighting vehicle, and is armored, but is more lightly armored than the M1 Abrams, the M2 Bradley, or the M10 Booker.
It is also ironic that in this rare case where the Trump administration could have legitimately blamed Biden, it doesn't appear to be doing so.
2 comments:
At this point in time the Army should cancel just about everything in favor of training at least half of its soldiers as drone operators and support. My kin in the Army were remarking on how extreme the limits on the OpFor at Ft. Irwin are. The OpFor is expected to be tough, but with drones and local knowledge they were freaking Hollywood Ninjas.
Fair.
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