Son Of Blackbird

[Aesop]

I'm hoping it will be Ed Snowden shedding some additional light on things, rather than Art Bell, George Nouri, or Peter Arnett.

[randy]

Lets just say it will be fun having these conversations when it's all in open sources.

We need a smilie for "whistling noncholantly as I walk by, nothing to say, nope, no knowledge of the subject"

[BobbyK]

I'll have my graphic designer whip one up.

[Mike OTDP]

There have been various stories floating around. Not sure how much credence I give them. Once they went to direct downlink from recon satellites (as opposed to dropping film cans), the SR-71 really was obsolete.

Kindly note that the real fight is over the persistent ISR assets. Much harder to play hide-and-seek with the equivalent of a hawk orbiting overhead.

[Aesop]

The capability you're overlooking is that you can direct-link product from a plane just as well as a satellite (presumably built in on a next-gen aircraft), and the people you're trying to surveil already have a pre-printed list on when your satellites are passing overhead posted on the latrine walls 6 months in advance, and it can take up to a day to retask a bird, and they run out of fuel after a certain number of such fiddles.

Whereas a bird you launched an hour ago from, say, Kadena AFB is up their ass 3000 miles away right now, in between scheduled sat passes, and the target usually can't even coordinate the phone tree to call ahead that fast. Worse, you don't know when the next one is dropping in either. And still worse, they can come back at will, and like the U-2 prior to Francis Gary Powers, you don't even have a missile to shoot at them if you wanted to try.

We agreed to stop flying U-2s over the former Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, mainly because we had to.

Notably, we've made no such agreement with Cuba, North Korea, China, Syria, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, or anyone else at any time, AFAIK.

So I'm thinking maybe not quite so obsolete.

[Mike OTDP]

Ah, but the fast-movers have the same basic problem...they are predicable. And they go away after a little bit.

Go back to the Gulf War. The Iraqis knew the satellite ephemeris, could detect the SR-71s. When our ISR assets were overhead, they hid. When our hardware went away, they rolled the Scuds out and launched.

This is why there was a massive push in the 1990s for ISR systems with much higher persistence. The original spec for what became the RQ-4 was for 42 hours endurance - enough to fly out and back 2,000 miles and have 24 hours on station. A robotic vulture, circling. Keeping the enemy's head down 24/7.

[Aesop]

I'm fine w/ satellite improvements, but I suspect the fruit of F-117 and B-2 research will have had more than a bit to do with any notional successor(s) to the SR-71 as well.

The fact that the Iraqis could see the SR-71s may have had more to do with their rather abrupt retirement than any other sort of obsolescence, considering the flight speed records it set on retirement exceeded those set shortly after entering service, which were even then still unapproachable by anything with wings.

I always enjoyed the SR-71 takeoffs from my cubicle over the hill from Kadena, because they unquestionably had the effect of taking all the F-15 pilot's manhoods down about 3 pegs. Something about a near-vertical climbout that resembled a space shuttle launch more than an aircraft sortie probably had a lot to do with that.