While centrally managed economies can just mandate that state-owned factories continue to exist, private markets won't do this. If you don't order tanks and missiles, the factories that make tanks and missiles will cease to exist, and the market will reallocate resources elsewhere.
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".
That sounds very implausible, bordering on conspiracy theory.
We of course run these procedures while writing and formally verifying them, before handing them to the customer, not running them would be folly.
Whatever this story is sounds like the worst kind: a small nugget of truth surrounded in a giant ball of shit.
Even more than that, a customer doesn’t just hand us a pile of money and say “talk to you again in 2 years” far from it. They literally “status the status” once or more weekly. If the answer to the question of “what is the plan this week” has the answer of “we’re out of work so we’re just charging you pad our profits” won’t play.
Also, building tanks is fucking hard, I sincerely doubt any company in the industry isn’t using every penny they have to solve problems and deliver a good product.
For those that scoff at the last bit: companies are in the business of making money, and if you deliver an inferior product, you won’t get another contract.
Every other agency and branch of the US government? Absolutely not.