Final assembly and mating to the vehicle hulls was performed at Anniston Army Depot in Alabama.

All M728A1s were converted and assembled at the Anniston Army Depot under contract with General Dynamics Land Systems[1] with a total of 312 of all variants produced.

[4][8] The M728 is a full-tracked combat engineer vehicle designed to provide maximum ballistic protection for the crew.

It is a heavily armed derivative of the M60 series tank modified to provide a mobile and maneuverable weapon for combat support of ground troops and vehicles.

[9] The vehicle is armed with a 165mm M135 short-barreled demolition gun with 30 rounds of HEP (high explosive, plastic) ammunition.

The M135 is a license-built copy of the 165 mm L9A1 gun that was used on the British Army's FV4003 Centurion Mk.5 AVRE (Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers) tank.

The gun's primary purpose is for clearing defensive fixtures and obstacles, such as walls, fences, roadblocks and bunkers, or for destroying buildings and is generally not meant to be for use in anti-personnel or anti-tank warfare.

The pushing and heaving effects caused by the HEP round's base detonating fuze and large amount of explosive can demolish barriers and knock down walls.

[9] They were also deployed at this time to West Germany during the Cold War to support combat engineer operations and participated in annual Reforger exercises until 1991.

During mine-clearing operations in the Gulf War, the M1 MCRS was found to be cumbersome, heavy and hard to transport.

[citation needed] After the cease-fire, CEV guns were used to break up coke piles that had formed around approximately 20% of the burning oil wells in Kuwait.

[12] Three M728CEVs were temporally acquired for use by the United States Department of Justice's FBI and ATF SWAT teams to conduct Operation Showtime during the 1993 Siege of the Branch Davidian Complex near Waco, Texas.

There was a Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) camera system attached to the front of the Panther so the remote-operator could see where the tank was going through a screen on the remote control unit.

The CEV was also useful for quickly recovering the Panther should it become stuck, and its crane allowed easy loading and unloading of the mine roller onto transport vehicles.

The M728 has been determined by the US Army to be inadequate to fully support the M1 Abrams and M2 Bradley, also cited were the rising costs to maintain and difficulty in acquiring parts for a low density piece of equipment and was retired from combat use with no clear replacement in 2000.

In the late 1990s, the Army decided it could not afford to continue developing complicated, maintenance-heavy vehicles for this purpose.

The M1 Grizzly Combat Mobility Vehicle (CMV) was canceled in 2001, and the prototype developed never went into full production.

An initial batch of 38 vehicles have been produced in close liaison with engineers at the Army Logistics Command.