[Aktungbby]

Well your right; but any pilot or any other front line trooper understands that the 'tip of the spear' is always expendable incl. my nephew, whom I urged to go the Air Force Academy, but to stay out of fighters mostly because he is huge-too large for the cockpit; naturally wound up a 'full bird' rolling in over Afghanistan in an F-16... The B-52 as with the Superfortress in Korea when they tried to resurrect my dad for duty is probably past it's prime, but is a very viable 'threat in being' compelling our potential enemies to divert way too many rubles, shekels, and Yuan towards air-defense that would otherwise be used elsewhere. One 'nuke is a great deterrent' is the name of this game here, not conventional bombs as in Nam. Stormin' Norman (Bovine Scatology) kept the marines off-shore in Desert storm completely wasting Saddam's war effort against a perceived threat/ Patton's ghost army for the Pas de Calais D-Day landing etc- Money is the sinews of war here and their respective economies cannot stand the strain of both sanctions AND misdirected military spending. Think WWI; when Germany blew a Gazillion marks on the Kiel Canal to expedite the dreadnoughts access to the North Sea...only to discover that the British HAD upped their class of ships, Elizabeth Class BB's, and Germany's new vessels to keep pace would have miseries fitting through...not to mention ships like post-WW I's Bismark, which did go in the canal, once, but in the age of air-recon would be a sitting duck. All warfare is based on deceit; and we can afford more deceit than our enemies can. With 'below radar avionics' thrown in, the individual B-52 also represents 'economy of forces' being an incredibly utilitarian payload 'arsenal aircraft' and we don't need to make new ones. For your reconsideration: http://warontherocks.com/2016/06/we-already-have-an-arsenal-plane-its-called-the-b-52/