These articles/debates wind up being nothing but admiring the problem. The defense blogging industry is good at that, but I've yet to see any that both address the problems honestly, and offer practical solutions to demonstrate that the benefits would outweigh the costs.
In the matter of the Zombie Hoov, the author of this article does address some of the problems, albeit in a single sentence, and immediately hand-waves them away:
In other words, throw some money at it and we're good?
CNAF doesn't have a contingency slush fund or 'innovation capital' laying around. Money for bringing the Hoov back to life would have to be taken away from some other aviation program. Anyone got too much money laying around in their community that they'd willingly give up?
How much would this actually cost, and how long would it take to get it going? As
@Flash pointed out, just bringing back the two jets for VX-30 took a lot longer and cost a lot more than forecast (which
never happens in DoD procurement) because of the unforeseen problems and knowledge/skills loss at the depot. And that was just restoring them to a basic flying state - no sensor/payload updates, etc. A KS-3 would have to be capable of being fully integrated with the CAG and strike group, otherwise what's the point? And nobody really knows the condition of the S-3s in the Boneyard. Until they're actually torn down and surveyed, at which point you know damn well there'll be an endless list of "oh shit..." discoveries.
Restart the training pipeline? With whom? The former VS aircrew and mx guys are scattered to the winds, the buildings given over to others or demolished, the sims long-gone.
Recreate the maintenance supply chain. That means getting L-M and all the subcontractors - many of them out of business or absorbed by bigger fish - to agree to start manufacturing parts they haven't made in decades. Either that, or we hope that they can pick-a-part the Boneyard fleet indefinitely. You can keep one or two planes going for a long time. NASA has four S-3s, and AFAIK they use three of them as parts lockers to keep one flying. Hell, Raytheon kept their A-3 flying until just a couple of years ago, and they're still flying one of those Mars water bombers up in BC. But this idea is on a whole different scale.
And finally: recall that all this time, effort, money, and disruption would be for the sake of a temporary, stopgap program. I absolutely agree that retiring the Hoov was premature and a bad idea. But trying to hit 'Undo' is fruitless at this point.