I appreciate your last two sentences because they made me pause, and realized I hadn't thought about this much living on the left coast.. (waiting for a decent earthquake).
I guess my point from the beginning is that these planes didn't need to exist in the first place, so the money spent could have been provisioned differently, like for programs to possibly help tax payers that just got given the finger.
edit: Your first sentence sounds like it's meant to dissuade criticism about military spending, because your opinion mandates it.
Since this amount of money lost isn't outrageous to the Air Force, what was keeping them from moving the planes we paid for, and spending the ~billion dollars on us and our pursuit of happiness, liberty, and life?