Does NASA save money reusing SRB's?

Does NASA really save money by reusing SRB's rather than using
expendables?

This is something a lot of people I know in the industry have wondered.
By the time you recover them, tear them down, ship them to Utah, clean
them out, and inspect them, does it really cost less than it would to
just build new hardware at higher production rates? I know solids
engineers who think NASA can't possibly save money on them.

The other red flag is that solid strap-ons have been used for decades by
many other countries (particularly Ariane) and other domestic expendable
launch systems, yet nobody else reuses their solids. I can understand
why other launch organizations wouldn't have use for other aspects of the
reusable Shuttle because their missions are different (commercial
launches only, no manned or down-payload needs), but it seems to me that
solid strap-ons are solid strap-ons... they all do pretty much the same
thing regardless of mission or what vehicle they're attached to. Being
solids they have robust empty strength and they have relatively short
burn times and stage at relatively low altitudes so they are well suited
for recovery compared to any other type of stage.

Either you save money by recovering/reusing solid strap-ons or you don't,
and the fact nobody else flies reusable solids suggests that nobody else
thinks it's a money saver, or at the very least the recurring savings
aren't enough to justify the up-front investment required. Long after
Shuttle SRB's were flying, Ariane V and Atlas V in particular chose to
invest in clean-*** large expendable solid strap-ons. The only things
I can think of in Shuttle's defense are that the SRB's are extremely
large (perhaps this changes the economics) and they're also more
sophisticated than other solid strap-ons, so the hardware cost may be a
bigger percentage of the stage cost than most solids, so there's more to
be saved by reuse.

Assuming NASA doesn't actually save money by reusing SRB's, do you think
it is due to:

1) The early Shuttle paper studies suggested they would save money and
it just didn't ultimately pan out, and they either can't or don't want to
change now.

2) NASA wanted to sell the Shuttle as reusable and dictated the SRB's
be reusable for political/marketing reasons, and they either can't or
don't want to change now.

3) NASA's accounting is so screwed up that they have don't have usable
data to accurately calculate the cost difference between reusable and
expendable SRB's, so they have no idea if they should change.

4) NASA's management has no incentive to expend the effort required to
find out if reuse actually saves money because discovering expendables
are cheaper only makes them look bad, so even if the data is out there
managment wouldn't want to gather and analyze it.
.

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