[dublin]

Interestingly, in a first-ever move (AFAIK), the Pentagon ordered the tooling for the F-22 destroyed when they shut the program down. In every other case I'm aware of (and I participated in both shutting down and bringing back things when I worked in the aerospace industry), tooling and documentation/artifacts are carefully stored and preserved for possible future use. If there's one thing the DoD does know how to do, it's configuration management and archival/storage.

[nradov]

That's not completely correct. The Air Force didn't destroy the tooling and documentation. They made an effort to preserve it. But even so it appears some was lost or is no longer usable.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-big-problem-a...