The 10x Tank Platoon

By Ted Maciuba

Article published on: September 3, 2025 in the Fall 2025 issue of Armor

Read Time: < 21 mins

Your boss — whether a Tank Platoon Sergeant, a Combined Arms Battalion Commander, or a leader at the highest levels like the Chief of Staff, US Army (CSA) or the Secretary of Defense — challenges you to think about what it would take to field a tank platoon that is 10 times more lethal than the cur­rent Abrams platoon. Would you focus on improving the Abrams with a larger cannon, an autoloader, and better am­munition? Or would you design a tank platoon, equipped with armed robots and sufficient firepower, to defeat a foe with ten times the armor?

The Combat Developers at the Maneu­ver Capabilities Development Integra­tion Directorate (MCDID) at Fort Ben­ning, Georgia, took the latter approach with the dismounted infantry platoon.

Six years ago — before the Second Na­gorno-Karabakh War, before the latest Russo-Ukrainian War, and before the Gaza War — Robotics Requirements Di­vision (RRD) and the Maneuver Battle Lab (MBL), parts of Army Futures Com­mand’s MCDID, ran the most important and consequential simulation experiment (SIMEXp) in its history, but no one realized it at the time: the 10X Robotic and Artificial Intelligence Equipped Dismounted Infantry Platoon initiative, known familiarly as 10X.

The 10X SIMEXp brought in military role players from Task Force 1st Battal­ion 28th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infan­try Division — two Captains, a First Lieutenant, and a Staff Sergeant — who were the first to be able to pull back the curtain and see the future of Platoon-level warfare1. They faced a daunting mission: leading a dismount­ed infantry platoon in an attack against a light-armored motorized rifle compa­ny (MRC) defending in strength. They were significantly outnumbered, facing a 1-to-3+ disadvantage. This mission would have been more appropriately assigned to an infantry or combined arms battalion.

The situation was further complicated by the platoon’s role in a supporting mission. It wasn’t part of the main ef­fort at any level – company, battalion, or brigade combat team – and there­fore received no priority for external support like mortars, artillery, attack helicopters, or close air support.

The 10x SIMEXp began with baseline runs, providing the role players with a standard dismounted infantry platoon equipped with current gear.

As expected, the platoon performed poorly in these baseline scenarios, re­peatedly suffering catastrophic casual­ties and failing to achieve its mission against the MRC.

In stark contrast, the 10X advanced case gave our role players a 10X Infan­try Platoon equipped and enabled with a system-of-systems of near-term armed air and ground robots and arti­ficial intelligence technologies. The 10x platoon’s three key lethality sys­tems were: the Apache helicopter’s lightweight 30mm cannon mounted on a small multipurpose equipment trans­port (SMET); and swarms of armed drones and loitering munitions (LM), both launched from a SMET.

Instead of engaging the enemy with ri­fles at close range (under 500m), they could now engage and kill the enemy out to 5,000m, a clear tenfold increase in lethality. A corollary of this range extension is that the 10X platoon, through the magic of geometry, could increase lethality (and situational awareness) dominance from 1 square kilometer (KM) to a 75-square-KM cir­cle and the oblate hemisphere above it.

Our 10X advanced case platoon suc­cessfully defeated the MRC in every it­eration, killing many of the enemy Sol­diers and most of the light armored ve­hicles. The 10X platoon’s losses were limited to robots, and Soldiers never even needed to fire their personal weapons.

An Army student group attending the Naval Postgraduate School analyzed2 the unclassified data from the 10X SI-MEXp and confirmed a 10X increase in effectiveness. Their study included a regression analysis, which calculated that increased 10X Platoon effective­ness was a function of the number of armed drones and LMs but, interest­ingly, that the 30mm cannon did not increase the effectiveness of the 10X Infantry Platoon. This insight support­ed the idea that the atmospheric litto­ral3 (later renamed the air–ground lit­toral) above the ground maneuver force (another oblate hemisphere) is key terrain that must be dominated to ensure future mission success.

To restate the obvious, the 10X SIMEXp demonstrated that a dismounted in­fantry platoon, enabled by appropriate robotics and AI and dominating the air–ground littoral, could operate ef­fectively over the same time and space as a current Infantry Battalion.

Let’s turn to the current tank platoon that is made up of four exquisite and expensive Abrams Tanks costing on the order of $100 million and weighing about 300 tons — we can use that as the 10X Tank Platoon constraints.

Our extended hypothesis is: Can a 10X Tank Platoon, equipped with robotics and enabled by AI, operate over the same time and space as a current Abrams Tank, Armor–pure (since we want an apple-to-apples compari­son) Battalion?

Before we address our new hypothesis, I think it is valuable to discuss the back story of Army Robotics and 10X.

Over a quarter-century ago, the Army, based on missions that it could not ac­complish in the Balkans, decided that it needed to modernize ground maneu­ver and started development of an Ob­jective Force, which eventually morphed into updated Operational and Organizational (O&O) concepts as well as technologies pulled together into the system-of-systems that would be fielded as part of a Future Combat Systems (FCS) Brigade Combat Team (BCT) (FBCT).4

The FCS O&O concept posited situa­tional awareness approaching 100% from unmanned ground and robotic sensors (most combat developers laughed at that), significantly increased lethality, force protection from being able to maneuver out of contact, and improved logistics from commonality of components and hybrid electric drive. Of particular interest in this con­text were the unmanned aerial vehi­cles (UAV), with one UAV per unit at each echelon from platoon to BCT, armed robotic vehicles (ARV), Multi-functional Utility/Logistics and Equip­ment Vehicles (MULE), and, most im­portantly, the network that tied all FBCT systems together.

The replacement for the Abrams, the 20-ton FCS mounted combat system (MCS), had a 120mm cannon-launched mid-range munition (MRM) to engage moving armored targets up to 10X far­ther away — a 10X increase in lethality proposed 20 years ago. MRM was part of the suite of 120mm cannon ammu­nition, along with the advanced kinet­ic energy (AKE) and advance multipur­pose (AMP) rounds. All were initially cancelled as part of the FCS termina­tion decision, a prime example of throwing the baby out with the bath­water. Through exemplary staff work, Mounted Requirements Division (MRD) was able to resuscitate the AKE and AMP rounds, which is why Abrams tankers now have the M829A4 and M1147 rounds available, as well as an ammunition data link capable of sup­porting a 120mm-cannon-launched, beyond-line-of-sight capability to kill armored targets at ranges 10X beyond current ammunition.

FCS is commonly considered a failed concept and program, but many of the ideas and technologies proposed in the FCS O&Os have and will continue to enter the Armored Force as the tech­nologies mature.

A decade ago, the Deputy Secretary of Defense proposed the idea of offset strategies5, increases in effectiveness (let’s say 10X) of US Forces based on overmatching technologies. We took that strategic concept and brought it down to the tactical ground maneuver level, simplifying the offsets in terms of Soldiers, bullets, and kills to make it understandable by all tankers and in­fantry Soldiers, and especially four-star generals.

Starting with a base line of US Army Ar­mor and Infantry lethality capabilities in World War II, there was barely par­ity with our enemies. It took dozens of tank cannon rounds and some luck to kill an enemy tank, and tens of thou­sands of small arms bullets to kill a dis­mounted Soldier.

Nuclear weapons in the First Offset at the end of World War II provided over­whelming overmatch, but that advan­tage was short-lived. During the Cold War, our adversaries caught up quickly and started to field their own nuclear arsenals. They also fielded many more conventional forces and much more equipment than the Army, so the Army had to “fight outnumbered and win.”

The Second Offset of precision weap­ons and sensors gave Abrams gunners and Infantry Antitank Guided Missile gunners high-probability-of-hit and -kill capabilities at extended ranges, which was proven by the success of Army tactical ground maneuver in Op­eration Desert Storm. Even with im­proved night-vision devices, it still took tens of thousands of rounds of small arms ammunition to kill a dismounted Soldier. Again, our adversaries caught up with improved tanks, weapons, and sensors, so a Third Offset of robots, autonomy, and AI technologies is now being developed and fielded, but not fast enough.

Eight years ago, the CSA challenged the Army and industry to develop weapons that would make Infantry Soldiers 10X more lethal, so the Army developed and is now fielding a new rifle, which even if twice as good does not meet the 10X goal.

Concurrently, in recognition of the changing operational environment and seeing the importance of robotics in small unit operations, MCDID stood up Robotics Requirements Division (RRD) and decided to address the CSA’s chal­lenge with the 10X initiative.

Dismounted Infantry capabilities are basically unchanged since World War II and the Infantry Platoon is close to parity with enemy dismounted Infan­try Platoons. 10X started with a hy­pothesis that there were near-term ro­botic technologies and AI tools that, if fielded as a system-of-systems, could make a dismounted Infantry Platoon 10 times more effective and able to make better Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) Loop decisions 10 times faster. Note that the only re­quirements specified in this hypothesis are 10 times better or 10 times faster. It was up to Industry, Academia, and DoD Labs to propose specific technol­ogies and justify how they met the 10X metric.

Concurrently to 10X, there were multiple advanced robotic and AI ini­tiatives in the works such as:

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA):

• Squad X to give Army and Marine Corps robotic and AI technologies to infantry squads and make them more effective — 10X is a logical extension of Squad X.
• System of system enhanced small unit (SESU) to make battalion-size units at echelons above brigade significantly more effective especially to defeat an enemy’s anti-access/area-denial capa­bilities — 10X scales the SESU concept to Platoon level.
• Offensive swarm-enabled tactics (Off­set) to demonstrate swarms of air and ground robots, working together to ac­complish autonomous missions — 10X requires swarms of armed air and ground robots to be 10X more lethal.

DoD Close Combat Lethality Task Force (CCLTF) and the organization formerly known as the Joint AI Center were working on AI for Small Unit Maneuver (AISUM) to pull AI down to the small unit level — 10X requires AISUM capa­bilities as middleware to command the constellation of air and ground robots.

MCDID is collocated with the Maneu­ver Center of Excellence (MCoE), and now CCLTF, at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Commanding General, MCoE, was named Army proponent for Robotics in 2023, filling out a quiver of Maneuver, Infantry, and Armor (and static line parachute) proponencies, adding over­matching ammunition to the ground truth that Fort Benning IS the Center of the Universe.

In the course of the 10X initiative, we realized that the critical enabling ro­botic technologies were assured com­munications, autonomy, AI, and ener­gy, all of which we will soon discuss in greater depth.

But we must take another side trip and talk about money, specifically the aph­orism that an idea without money is a pipe dream. For a variety of reasons, the Army wellspring that had always watered good ideas dried up over the last few years. Discretionary research funding that used to be available for revolutionary ideas and technologies, especially within the Army Science and Technology enterprise, is now orders of magnitude lower.

Conversely, it is easier to fund industry to develop innovative technologies through a Government Industry Enter­prise Partnership using Other Transac­tional Agreements (OTA). Simply put, the Government can ask an Industry Consortium to propose solutions for a specific problem, make a funding deci­sion based on that member’s proposal, transfer OTA funding through the Con­sortium to industry, and then receive the product from the Consortium for rapid prototype assessment or rapid fielding. The OTA process is faster and more responsive than normal Govern­ment contracting, and Consortium members cannot protest if their pro­posal is not funded.

For 10X, we used the Defense Mobility Enterprise partnership between the Army Combat Capabilities Develop­ment Command’s Ground Vehicle Sys­tems Center (formerly known Tank Au­tomotive Research, Development, and Engineering Center) and the National Advanced Mobility Consortium (NAMC)6. NAMC was originally named the Robotics Technology Consortium7 when first founded but had to expand into ground mobility because the ini­tial $1 billion Defense funding for ro­botics technologies quickly withered away to almost nothing per year.

10X funding was sparse, but through a Robotic Program Manager’s seed fund­ing and internal MCDID resourcing, we got through the 10X Table Top Exercise (TTX) and the SIMEXp, and then COVID stopped everything. As 10X restarted, the two 10X Technology Demonstra­tions in 2022 and 2024 were predomi­nantly funded by Congressional Adds that the Columbus Chamber of Com­merce proposed to Georgia Senators and were added to Defense Appropria­tion Acts rather than an Army budget, so the physical manifestation of the 10X SIMEXp was funded by the equiv­alent of a bake sale.

A half-century ago, Soldiers were taught the combat doctrine of “Shoot, Move, and Communicate.” A decade ago, Mounted Requirements realized that there were key capabilities that did not fit into those three bins and ex­panded this doctrine to “Shoot, Move, Communicate, Survive, Sustain, and Adapt.” The Joint working group as­sembled for the 10X TTX used this ex­panded doctrine to assess the technol­ogies proposed for the 10X Infantry Platoon and select them for the 10X SI-MEXp which exercised those robotic and AI technologies in a relevant, clas­sified operational environment.

We can now look at our 10X Tank Pla­toon through this expanded lens:

Shoot - The mission of the Army at its most basic is to kill our enemies and break their things, so lethality is the most important combat capability. The Abrams tank was built to fire 10 Mega-joule (MJ) Kinetic Energy (KE) rounds at enemy tanks on the move and with a high probability of hit and probabil­ity of kill. An Abrams tank needs inter-visibility to detect, recognize, identify, shoot, and kill. Historically, a tank main gun round was designed to kill an enemy tank at its strongest point. However, a 10X Tank Platoon won’t need 100 MJ KE rounds. It will need distributed situational awareness and lethality beyond line of sight, out to perhaps 20KM, with weapons that have enough energy to defeat an ene­my tank, or any target, at its weakest point. The more types of smaller, light­er, cheaper sensors in that 10X Tank Platoon, the more likely it is to detect, recognize and identify the enemy tank and target its weakest point. The more armed robots you have linked to those sensors, the more likely you are to be able to focus just enough energy and momentum at that weakest point to kill the enemy tank. A current Abrams Platoon carries about 160 stowed kills, both KE and Chemical Energy (CE), so a 10X Tank Platoon needs 1,600 stowed kills spread over 10X Tanks as well as armed air and ground robots arrayed to dominate an air-ground littoral of 1,200 square KM. A 10X Tank still needs a direct-fire weapon, perhaps as a last resort, and FCS demonstrated a recoilless cannon requiring less mass to manage recoil impulse, allowing for a much smaller, lighter, cheaper 10X Tank.

Move -Armor units need to deploy strategically from where they are to the Theater they are needed in, opera­tionally deploy within that Theater to the combat area, and then maneuver in that combat area to allow them to close with and destroy the enemy by shock, firepower, and maneuver. The first two segments penalize 75-ton tanks, and a tank you cannot deploy quickly to anywhere in the world may get there too late to make a difference. A 10X Tank Platoon needs to be strate­gically and operationally deployable, which means, at least until we can de­velop antigravity, we need multiple 10X Tanks on C-17s and the 10X Tank needs to be able to come out of a C-130 under a parachute, which drives us to a combat weight of less than 15 tons. Current Abrams tanks are capa­ble of reaching 100 kilometers per hour (KPH) but are governed back to 70KPH. A 10X Tank does not need to travel at 1,000KPH or even 700KPH. It needs to array its constellation of air and ground robots — with appropriate multimodal sensors, weapons, and protectors — to have lethal effects on the enemy anywhere within our 1,200-square-KM area within one min­ute, an effective 1,200KPH speed at the edge of the 20KM-radius bubble around the center of the 10X Tank Pla­toon.

Communicate - There is an inverse re­lationship between communications and robotic autonomy. The more au­tonomy you have, the less communica­tions bandwidth you need. Much of the computation for detection, recog­nition, and identification has to take place on the robot, further reducing spectrum load. Our 10X Tank Platoon will leverage wireless mesh, 5G/6G/Fu­tureG cellular, and low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite networks as part of an extended Army Network. For those of you who are naysayers about LEO sat­ellite networks, this is the time to fol­low the money — the US Space Force is spending billions to field military LEO constellations. Latency, the time it takes for data to move from transmit­ter to receiver, will be in the tens of milliseconds, faster than a human can react. This will enable not only robotic teleoperation but also allow Soldiers who are a terrain feature or an ocean away to teleoperate crewed 10X Tanks, including weapons, 24/7 during ex­tended campaigns, perhaps even al­lowing scheduled 10X Tank Platoon crew rest periods during combat — it really is a new world.

Survive - Almost three decades ago, Army Research Lab developed the con­cept of the Integrated Survivability On­ion, which I just found out is now a meme. Its layers are, starting from theinside: Don’t be Killed, Penetrated, Hit, Acquired, and/or Seen. A decade and a half ago, even before Robotic Re­quirements was born, we realized that the Survivability Onion assumed inter-visibility between you and the enemy and that if that intervisibility could be severed with robots making first con­tact with the enemy, then you were most survivable, so we added another layer: “Don’t be There.” The 10X Tank Platoon will “(Not) Be There” and will be able to maneuver out of contact, just like FCS promised. The constella­tion of armed air and ground robots will provide more protection than me­ters of Rolled Homogenous Armor Equivalent (RHAe). To address the un­derbelly threat resulting in fatal accel­eration, autonomous active blast de­feat technologies can increase the Mass Equivalency (Me) of the 10X Tank for underbelly blasts. Assuming no hull rupture, a lightweight 10X Tank can have an Me of 100 tons or more, mak­ing the crew more protected from fatal acceleration than in an Abrams.

Sustain - The 10X Tank Platoon, oper­ating over the same time and space as an Armor Battalion, will have a logistics footprint that is also orders of magnitude smaller. Having said that, energy-dense long-chain hydrocarbons (JP8) are the lifeblood of the current Abrams and the Army at every eche­lon; they are also the Achilles’ heel of Army logistics and a soft target of en­emy interdiction. Smaller, lighter tanks need less energy, and there is interest­ing research going on that may allow the 10X Tank Platoon to forage for any type of liquid fuel or even biomass that can be converted to usable energy. In the mid- to long-term, the 10X Tank will get a 10 megawatt (MW) compact fusion engine (10X the Abrams tur­bine) installed during production with fuel to last for a decade or perhaps its useful life. 10MW allows for a power budget for directed-energy weapons, electromagnetic guns, electric armor, water generation, food generation, and exportable power.

Adapt - The Abrams is the antithesis of the Army movement towards adapt­ability. The 10X Tank must be designed with Modular Open Systems Architec­ture (MOSA) allowing plug-and-play for new and better sensors, weapons, communications, etc. The 10X Tank Platoon, with distributed situational awareness, lethality, and protection will also be plug-and-play for air and ground robots and their modular mis­sion payloads (MMP).

Coming back to cost and weight con­straints, you can fit a lot of smaller, lighter, cheaper, more adaptable 10X Tanks and robots into a $100 million, 300 ton, and four C-17 envelope.

There are some key technologies that need to be fielded, matured, or devel­oped to realize the vision of our 10X Tank Platoon.

Drone Launch and Recovery - To be able to dominate a 1,200-square-KM battlespace, air and ground robots need to be distributed in a way that provides sufficient situational aware­ness and lethality to dominate the air-ground littoral. The 10X SIMEXp as­sumed away the technology needed for swarms of armed drones and LMs to be autonomously launched and re­covered. That technology has now been developed and will be demon­strated by the end of this year. Arsenal MMPs on ground robots will carry mis­sion-ready armed drone and/or LM cartridges allowing 24/7 combat air pa­trols throughout the 10X Tank Platoon’s 20KM-bubble, pushing to­wards the FCS goal of 100% situational awareness and enabling low-latency le­thality. As drones or LMs are expend­ed, replacements fly forward to fill the empty cartridges and are recharged while waiting for launch. The technol­ogy to autonomously rearm drones is a relatively simple engineering prob­lem, but autonomously repairing drones will require more effort.

10X Tank Platoon Weapons - The armed drones in the 10X TTX and SIM-EXp had high-energy recoilless weap­ons — both the Remote Operated Sin­gle Shot (ROSS) gun or the Davis gun fill the bill — with high probability of hit and high probability of kill. The 10X Tank Platoon will need smaller, lighter, cheaper anti-armor weapons in the constellation of air and ground robots, but the 10X Tank may need to have a large-caliber weapon. The 15-ton or ­less weight budget will not support current cannon technology. During FCS days, there were demonstrations of the RArefaction waVE guN (RAVEN) that decreased recoil impulse and weight and may be a large-caliber cannon technology that needs to be re­visited. I am sensitive to the fact that when your 10X tank turns a corner and finds an enemy tank traversing its main gun towards you, that is not the time to wish you had a bigger, tank-killing gun. This is the kind of trade-off analy­sis that will be performed by Combat Developers in the 10X Tank require­ments generation process.

Teleoperation - Until last year, I was absolutely certain that teleoperation of ground robots cross-country at tac­tical speeds and extended distances in support of a current Abrams Platoon was impossible due to latency and bandwidth, and that the path forward was to fund autonomy technology, which is what the Army is doing. How­ever, I was convinced by a startup that my worldview was wrong, and I now believe that teleoperation is the bridg­ing technology toward autonomous ro­botic and crewed ground vehicles. This capability was demonstrated a few months ago to the Army by safely tele­operating a vehicle physically in Cali­fornia from Michigan and Maryland, al­most 3,000 miles away, on city streets in normal traffic and up to highway speeds. The combination of LEO satel­lites, 5G/6G/FutureG cellular net­works, millimeter-wave radar, and cur­rent Army radios required for teleop­eration will also provide the graceful degradation of Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency commu­nications for the 10X Tank Platoon.

Quantum Communications - While it is currently considered impossible to communicate faster than the speed of light, the reality of Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” cracked open the door for instantaneous, distance-inde­pendent, large (perhaps effectively in­finite) bandwidth, no-probability-of­-detection, and no-probability-of-inter­cept quantum communications. And if we can transmit information, perhaps we can teleport people and equipment in the same way.

Compact Fusion -A decade ago, I vis­ited a nuclear scientist at a company working on compact fusion with a re­actor the size of a medium conference table producing 100MW. The chemis­try was deuterium and tritium,requiring and producing huge amounts of heat (at tens of millions of degrees Kelvin) and ending up with a helium atom and a high-energy neutron. Those pesky neutrons required dense shielding that dwarfed the compact fu­sion engine. I asked for a trash-can­size 10MW engine that would fit in an Abrams without shielding. A few months later, the nuclear scientist pro­posed proton-Boron 11 (pB11) chem­istry that required an order of magni­tude greater heat but ended up with four helium atoms and alpha radiation that could be shielded with a piece of paper. I called the Department of En­ergy expert on fusion power who told me that he had been working on fusion for 40 years and was sure it was impos­sible. However, the science works: We have a working fusion engine in the middle of our solar system; what we need are better materials and better ideas. So let’s follow the money.8 The private money going into fusion re­search is now close to $10 billion, and pB11 is one of the chemistries in the mix. Boron 11 is the most common iso­tope of Boron and the US is the second-largest producer in the world. A gram of Boron 11 is at least two orders of magnitude cheaper than tritium, and a gram of hydrogen is even cheap­er, but the mind-blowing value of pB11 is in its energy density.

This compact fusion slide in Figure 3 shows the 65 Gigajoules (GJ) of chemical energy in an Abrams fuel tank and compares it to state-of-the-art Tes­la batteries, hydrogen, and pB11 fusion on a logarithmic scale. pB11 is six or­ders of magnitude lighter than JP8. The smaller, lighter, cheaper 10X Tank needs a fusion engine.9

Antigravity - There is a chance of lever­aging our newfound knowledge about the Higgs boson to be able to counter­act gravity without beating the air into submission. Two decades ago, at the Armor Conference at Fort Knox, FCS ve­hicles were shown in an animation just floating over the ground, without wheels or tracks. Antigravity and anti-inertia would be very interesting on a 10X Tank, for both mobility and protec­tion.

AISUM -Finally, a 10X Tank Platoon cannot work without AI on the robots, on the network, on the 10X Tank, and on the Armor Soldier. AISUM will be the middleware between 10X Tank Pla­toon Soldiers and all of their equip­ment as it integrates air and ground ro­bots into a system of systems at the small unit level, allows Soldiers to com­mand robots rather than having to con­trol them continuously, reduces net­work load enabling assured communi­cations, and builds battlefield visualiza­tion that allows Soldiers to make bet­ter decisions faster.

Let’s revisit our hypothesis: Can a 10X Tank Platoon, equipped with robotics and AI as described above, operate over the same time and space as a cur­rent Armor–pure Battalion?

It’s time to find out. Let’s build a 10X Tank Platoon in simulation and fight it against a relevant current adversary. If it’s successful, then the Army should equip and crew a 10X Tank Platoon and test it in the real world.

Notes