HH & Biggus,
Info on the B-52 fatigue life:
The life-limiting structural component is the warplanes’ upper wing skins, currently rated for around 36,000 flight hours. “As of 1999 the average airframe had 14,700 flight hours,” Globalsecurity.org reported in 2011. “Boeing believes with high confidence that the average number of flight hours left is 17,800, at a minimum. The ‘oldest’ B-52H is at about 21,000 hours and only experiences about 380 flight hours per year.”
So the B-52H is actually just mid-way through its fatigue life. And in many ways, a B-52H is “younger” in 2015 than it was just a few years ago. The Air Force is spending more than a billion dollars to give all 76 of the bombers new communications systems and to make them compatible with a wider array of modern weaponry.
One B-52H was badly damaged a couple of years ago so another was brought out of the Arizona graveyard and refurbished to replace it.
I do think the USAF will get 1700 F-35s in the end. The Washington, DC Congressional folks will assure that happening. It is a political airplane where work and jobs were created in nearly every Congressional district. Any Congressman/woman that doesn't support it risks the tag of a job destroyer and probably will not get reelected, reelection happens to be their main focus year after year, everything else is secondary.