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A comment on The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber. Parent comment

Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ... by dreamcompiler on Thursday March 04, 2021 @01:16AM (#26339233)
It's also possible the government did get all the technical data and then lost it. It has to be somebody's job to archive and catalog that stuff, and the cost of archiving comes out of somebody's budget. The pressure to just toss old dusty paper files to cut costs can be enormous. It might have happened because "Joe Smith was the archivist and he retired 10 years ago and we needed the space."

If the data was classified (very likely) it costs a lot more to store it and audit it, and the pressure to "just burn it" is that much greater.

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Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ... by angry_octet on Thursday March 04, 2021 @03:39AM (#26340122)
This is extremely implausible. Files (the non descript name for official records) are extremely hard to destroy even if you want to. Everything about the B2 is in a special TS compartment and will likely be retained until long after we are dust.
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Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ... by vertis on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:52AM (#26340911)
Slightly off-topic:

A few years ago I wanted to renovate an apartment. I dutifully applied for the plans from the local council. Only to be told they no longer existed.

I had this, "Well then, it was always like that" moment.

Didn't end up knocking out the wall, for other reasons, but if the plans no longer existed who was to argue that it wasn't always like that.

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Re:The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its ... by dublin on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:49PM (#26349612)
Configuration management, especially for black projects, is the one thing you can count on from the DoD and its contractors just as surely as taxes and waste.
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