The flipside is that it's impractical to pay companies to maintain the capacity to build everything they've ever built for all time. The defense contractors ha

The flipside is that it's impractical to pay companies to maintain the capacity to build everything they've ever built for all time. The defense contractors handle that problem by putting those people on other projects. Sometimes it is productive work, sometimes it is just any project with a budget surplus. Their intent is to maintain institutional memory even if the project itself has been mothballed. That's what I saw happen to people numerous times while working as a consultant to a couple of DoD contractors. I billed a crazy-high rate and they even shuffled me off onto a peripheral program in order to keep me around as a sort of security blanket for the original program that was (slowly) spinning down.