Is this what it sounds like?

“The Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts Of Its Own Stealth Bomber”, or is it part of Air Force current production procedure?

From The Drive

“In a surprising turn of events, the United States government is calling upon its country’s industry to reverse engineer components for the Air Force’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. An official call for this highly unusual kind of assistance was put out today on the U.S. government’s contracting website beta.SAM.gov.”

(“Of Its Own” in the headline is a head-scratcher. Who else’s stealth bomber would the Air Force be asking for reverse engineering? “In a surprising turn of events.” Who said so? Unnecessary, bloated writing. Just state the facts and let people interviewed give opinions.)

“While it’s hard to say exactly why this approach is being taken now, it indicates that the original plans for these components are unavailable or the manufacturing processes and tooling used to produce them no longer exists. This could be the result of them having been so secretive that, at some point, they were inadvertently destroyed altogether. They could also have been simply misplaced, or the parts may have been produced by a smaller contractor that has long since disappeared, taking the bespoke tooling with it.”

(The story be somewhat better to have someone other than the writer giving an opinion on why the Air Force is asking for reverse engineering.)

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39537/the-air-force-needs-to-reverse-engineer-parts-of-its-own-stealth-bomber

The web site that had the link (gunfreezone.net) postulated that if original B2 plans were printed on paper and later digitized, it might be some plans were not transferred from paper before the papers were destroyed.

Or is it likely that someone in the Air Force’s filing system misfiled or lost the paper and/or digitized plans? 

The story would have been better had the writer actually contacted the Air Force and asked, “What’s the deal here?”