06/13/2026
The Army has been on an as-of-yet unending quest for a true light tank or mobile gun capable of landing behind enemy lines alongside airborne troops. Just last year, the service canceled the M10 Booker — a light tank that never was. And that’s hardly the first of its weight class to end up in the Army’s boneyard — there’s the M56 Scorpion and the M50 Ontos, to name two. It hasn’t been since the M551 Sheridan that the service got what it needed out of a light tank, and even then, only kind of.
In 1959, the Army decided to move on from the Scorpion, which it began fielding in 1953, and began designing a new light tank. Leaders wanted something that was air-droppable and amphibious, so it had to be under 17 tons, but also capable of going up against and surviving Soviet T-62 main battle tanks, so it needed armor and a big gun.
You don’t need an engineering degree to see the problem here. Heavy armor and a heavy gun are, well, heavy. So, keeping the tank light enough to survive a parachute drop meant compromises had to be made.
The hull was constructed out of 7039 aluminum alloy. Using aluminum alloys for armor isn’t uncommon. The M113, early Light Armored Vehicles (LAVs), and even modern-day MRAPs use it. The alloys of today are far more capable, though, and nobody expected M113s and LAVs to fight T-62s.
