From what I've read, it seems like a problem of being overly obsessed with the highest tech and most dramatic missions. Every new bomber is designed for the goal of nuking Moscow, including figuring out the best way to get past defenses. Never mind that if we actually wanted to nuke Moscow, we would use ICBMs instead.
What we really seem to have demand for is something that can carry a whole bunch of bombs cheaply and reliably in airspace that we already have air supremacy over. But apparently the Air Force can't get it's head around that design goal. Nobody seems to want to champion a cheap, dumb bomb truck plane that does simple stuff right every time. Instead, they keep going for the technological marvel designed for a goal that we'll probably never need to do and already have better weapons for anyways.
You can't have a cheap, simple plane! Lockheed-Martin have to eat!
(unless you can get some foreign chumps to sell you their cheap, reliable planes and order Lockheed-Martin's latest contraption, which will arrive Any Day Now - everyone wins!)
Yes, I'm aware of the value of having multiple weapons systems to do a critical job. But that doesn't mean that every new bomber must be designed to nuke Moscow. Let's make the bomber version of a 747 for when we need to attack Afghanistan or ISIS, something that we can crank out cheaply and is already proven and reliable. Then we can have another project to try and make a bomber that can hit high-value well-defended targets. Or at least decide how many billions of dollars we want to spend for a redundant weapon system meant for a deterrence mission.
You are pretending that "nuke Moscow" is some kind of specialized mission requiring specialized planes that can't be used for anything else, even though the B-52 itself is a glaring counterexample.
"Carry a heavy load of weapons anywhere in the world while having a decent chance of penetrating air defenses" is a better description of what a bomber does, but that doesn't lend itself to the kind of facile sneering that was in your original post, does it?
What we really seem to have demand for is something that can carry a whole bunch of bombs cheaply and reliably in airspace that we already have air supremacy over. But apparently the Air Force can't get it's head around that design goal. Nobody seems to want to champion a cheap, dumb bomb truck plane that does simple stuff right every time. Instead, they keep going for the technological marvel designed for a goal that we'll probably never need to do and already have better weapons for anyways.