Wasting our money

English: M1 Abrams tank with 105mm cannon at Grafenwöhr, 1986. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Surprisingly, the Pentagon wants to save money ($3 billion) by freezing refurbishment of the M1 tank from 2014 to 2017, so it can redesign the tank.  Unsurprisingly, Congressmen from the districts where this refurbishment would be done don't think much of the Pentagon's idea as it will cost jobs in their districts.

It's not as though the M1 is a sine qua non of our defense strategy.  We have 2,300+ of them being used today, but there are 3,000 more getting the sun's rays as they sit at a base in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  The tank may have seen its day as we wage counterinsurgency war in that they are quite vulnerable to IEDs.

Maybe we could use that money to start fixing our infrastructure.