The prospect of piles of money drew out Textron, a defense contractor best known for their acquisition of Bell-Sikorsky (helicopters) and Cadillac-Gage (tanks, ships), as well as their own smattering of military application technologies. In short, exactly the sort of company the contest was looking to attract. Textron's engineers began development of the "Stingray" light tank in 1983, and by 1984 had a prototype ready for some early testing.
The Stingray was designed to be air-mobile, powerful, and cost-effective. It utilized as many standardized and existing components as possible to assure that no matter where the Stingray might be sent to fight, virtually any field repair shop could patch them up- from Iceland to Australia, and anywhere in between that a standard C-130 Hercules cargo plane could go. The tank traded significant armor (which wouldn't have been air-portable anyway) for a powerful 105 millimeter main cannon intended to crack heavy Soviet vehicles like the T-60 and T-70 series tanks.
In 1987, the competition closed, with BAE Systems machine chosen as the winner, gaining the classification M8 Armored Gun System. Though the Stingray was defeated for the US contract, it remained in interest from the export market due to it's high reliability, and low cost. Textron received a windfall when a deal was reached with Thailand, who purchased 106 vehicles in 1988.
Today, the Thai army operates roughly 100 of these vehicles- though the exact operational number is unknown. In a strange twist of fate, Textron would in a sense be vindicated when the M8-AGS program was cancelled in 1997, stemming from cost overruns, and that without a Soviet Union to fight, there wasn't much need for the vehicles in the first place.
Had the Textron Stingray been adopted by the United States, there is no telling how many would have been mass produced for airborne warfare. Though they lack the armor of more traditional US tanks, it seems that they would have done alright in the Gulf war, and perhaps even later in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in some modified form. But, we may never know what could have been.
