I thought all these years that the U2 spy plane had been done away with, replaced by the SR-71 which was replaced by a plane that we know little if nothing about. Then Powell goes and shows a picture of a U2 during his speach at the UN. Is the U2 the primary spy plane of the US? If not what is its purpuse and what is the primary spy plane of the US?
Yes, the U2 has been variously upgraded over the years, and is still the primary spy plane of the US. They mothballed the SR-71 several years ago.
There has been much speculation about a replacement spy plane. In one year’s budget there was an unidentified item, “Aurora,” so many people thought this must be it. I guess it could be, but I’m not betting on it.
Most visual surveillance is done nowadays with satellites, but the problem is that you can’t control when a satellite will be somewhere, so we supplement the satellites with U2s.
I won’t get into it here, but there are other platforms which gather visual intelligence. A well-known unclassified example is the UAV.
Asking what our primay spy plane is is like asking what our primary assault weapon is. What kind of assault? Where? What are the objectives? How long is it required for? When it comes to a combatant commander, we have what we call the ISR (intel, surveillance, and reconnaissance) architecture. Into that system is pumped all of the intel gathered by all of our assets, both man and machine. There isn’t one aircraft or platform which carries a burden to produce more intel than another.