Look, I heard a lot of things from the guy at the street corner too, but that doesn't make it true. We'll start with the fact that M1s aren't built on a "base"

Look, I heard a lot of things from the guy at the street corner too, but that doesn't make it true. We'll start with the fact that M1s aren't built on a "base", they're built at the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima. Government owned, contractor (GDLS) run, not a base. What they do do is refurbish older tanks, which one I suppose could distort into "disassembling", if one wanted to make a rather distorted claim. The waste contention for that base comes from an Army proposal to temporarily shut down the factory in 2013, which was supposed to save ~$1B. GDLS explained that, sure, can do, but spinning up production again is going to cost ~$1.5B, and restarting production in 2017/18 was always planned. It's not as simple as "the politicians always allocate money to the military".