Nah, unfortunately it's just politics as usual. The military procurement process is desperately corrupt and broken, driven exclusively by politics instead of actual need. I used to fly the C-141 which was a fantastic airplane. We had 247 of them and they were constantly going all over the world.
The C-17 came onto the scene. Not by accident, the manufacturer spread component production across every single congressional district in the nation, so every congressman had a personal stake in this jobs program. When the C-17 program started running into problems and going over budget, there was talk of reducing the number to be purchased and shutting production down. The fix for this was to rapidly accelerate the retirement of the C-141. Almost overnight they were all flown to the boneyard, then to prevent this decision from being reversed, they were all quickly destroyed. This then created a desperate shortage of strategic airlift and the only solution was to buy many more C-17s at enormous cost.
History is repeating itself. We are flying C-5s to the boneyard and cutting them up even though they went through an expensive wing retrofit program to extend their service life until 2040.
Even more infuriating, the c-5 recently went through a massive retrofit program where the entire avionics suite was converted to modern 'glass cockpit' with GPS etc. this was a super-expensive program costing many millions of dollars each. In some cases airplanes went through the retrofit (a process that took 6-8 months or so) and their very first flight was to the boneyard where they were then scrapped!
With respect to c-130s, every year it seems, the Air Force requests to buy ZERO new models as they already have hundreds of them and can use that money better elsewhere. But every year congress sticks more new C-130s in the budget and forces the AF to take them. Needless to say perfectly good existing C-130s are being scrapped at the same time.
Even worse, congress first funded the purchase of the new c-27 and then changed their minds. The contract was funded, so some of the new airplanes were given to the afghan Air Force, but others were flown directly from the manufacturing line to the boneyard!!!!
Grrrr.....