And I'm not trying to drive it to a 'flame fest' either but I'm not saying who is doing more work - I thought we were talking about FLE and airframe fatigue here. The carrier can't possibly produce what a land based squadron can - that is not their strength. My land based squadron alone would outfly the entire carrier air wing probably on a daily basis during OIF1 (I was Al Jaber based and comparing our sorties (not hours) and ordnance dropped to some of my peers out of the gulf and the med) - but they are not only flying missions in the box either and they rely on tanker support for those long 4-6 hour missions or so; but I digress.

Point was about "If you want to roll back all the way back to pre-Desert Storm 1 then just pull up the flying hours of ALL the fighter aircraft (I'm keeping this narrow folks) involved and look at which fleet has the most hours for it's age."
The Hornet fleet is averaging between 5,000-7,000 right now depending on model. Four things kill a Hornet: 1) Pure hours (10,000 is the newest number), Landings (17,000 is what I was told last night), Cat/Trap (you should see how quickly the Navy scarfed up the older Marine planes with no cat/traps) and 4) basic fatigue (pulled so many G's over time)
Now I don't know what the average F-15/F-16 airframe life is out there; but if in the above highlighted quote you were including USN/USMC fighter aircraft then we haven't even broached the subject of how many hours the F-14 had on them!