The US Air Force leadership is now set on retiring the Dragon Lady in Fiscal Year 2026. Oh, we’ve heard this all before, say the U-2 ‘brotherhood’. I don’t share their complacency. Let’s examine the issues in detail.  

Here’s what Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall told me at the recent Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) in the UK, when I asked him why he wanted to retire my favorite jet:

“We’ve been retiring the U-2 for a long time! It’s like a lot of other aircraft: it’s very old, it’s expensive to maintain, it’s not as effective as it once was. A lot of platforms are not going to be what we need in the future. There’s a real urgency to roll out the next generation…”

Very old? In fact, the U-2 fleet is much younger than, for instance, the B-52 and the RC-135 – two aircraft that the Air Force plans to retain for another 20 years. It spends most of its time above 70,000 feet in benign airflows. A flight loads survey a few years ago showed that the aircraft were good for thousands of more hours.

Expensive to maintain?  It’s true that these costs have gone up. All except the newest fleets suffer from DMS – Diminishing Manufacturing Sources. There have also been some particular issues with U-2 depot overhauls at Palmdale, which take place every 6,000 hours or seven years, whichever comes first. Some very experienced workers left during the pandemic (as they did from many other companies). There has been a learning curve for their replacements. Other challenges have included corrosion and deterioration of paint coatings. This has impacted on the aircraft’s availability rate. But the U-2’s mission-capable rate was still 73.5% last year, which compares favorably with most other US Air Force aircraft.

Not as effective? Even this year, the Air Force budget request states that the U-2 is a “high demand/low density aircraft providing essential ISR to the combatant commands, joint and combined forces and intelligence community”. The jets fly almost daily from three overseas locations, with others available at Beale for contingencies, such as monitoring the Chinese balloon incursion last February. A new mission for the Dragon Lady!

The next generation? In general, Kendall wants to ditch older platforms such as the A-10, B-1 and older F-16s, as well as the U-2 and the remaining Global Hawks, in order to pay for new platforms such as the B-21 bomber and the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter. Indeed. Have you seen the projected spend on these two projects over the next five years? It’s over $20 billion for the B-21 R & D plus  procurement, and $16 billion for NGAD R & D, plus another $6 billion for the associated Collaborate Combat Aircraft (CCA)!

The amount being spent on the U-2 pales in comparison. Still, a serious amount of money has gone into upgrades to the jet, its sensors and datalinks in recent years. By the end of the current fiscal year, the Air Force will have spent $835 million on these over a five-year period. It plans to spend another $88 million next fiscal year. Not a good deal for the American taxpayer, if the U-2 is to be retired in three years time!

The upgrades include:

 – the Avionics Technical Refresh (ATR), which includes an Open Mission Systems  backbone. The U-2 will thus become the first operational aircraft in the US inventory to be OMS-compliant. The ATR will also solve DMS issues, and provide pilots with enhanced, touch-screen displays. The first flight of an ATR jet took place recently at Palmdale.

 – an active electronically-scanned antenna (AESA) and a new commercial of-the-shelf (COTS) processor for the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System (ASARS). Together with a new receiver/exciter, these will increase the range of the U-2’s imaging radar, and provide new modes such as ground moving target indicator (GMTI) and maritime search-and-track. Production models of the new ASARS will be in flight test shortly with first deliveries in mid-2024.

 – enhancements to the optics and focal planes of the SYERS multispectral sensor.

 – enhancements to the U-2’s SIGINT system

 – further development of the data links including the tactical Link 16 as well as the familiar satcom and line-of-sight links for transmission of reconnaissance data

 – navigation software and infrastructure improvements

 – enhancements to the ejection seat and pressure suit, and

 – a new mission planning system

This is all good stuff for operational missions. But don’t forget that the U-2 is also a valuable platform for the flight-testing of various new communications and sensor equipment that will eventually find a home elsewhere. I previously discussed some of this here and here. 

Despite all the above, the Air Force hierarchy is confident that it can get its way. But it must first overturn a provision that was inserted by Congress into the National Defence Authorization Act back in 2018. It is required to certify in writing “that the costs of the replacements for the aircraft are less than the costs of the current aircraft…and that the capability to be fielded at the same time or before the retirement of the U-2 would result in equal or greater capability.”

That’s a tough ask. The Air Force’s public position is that satellites can do the job. This is the same argument that has been used to justify the retirement of the JSTARS without a replacement. The US Army – the main customer for JSTARS intelligence – doesn’t agree and has started its own program for a high-altitude ISR jet converted from a business aircraft.

There’s no doubt that satellite reconnaissance has advanced in leaps and bounds. The US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) operates highly-classified satellites with so-called “exquisite” ISR capabilities. But they are relatively few in number and hideously expensive. Today, the real pacemakers are the commercial satellite providers. You are probably familiar with the excellent high-resolution multispectral imagery now available from Maxar Technologies and the like. But companies like Capella Space are offering synthetic-radar aperture imagery similar to that of the ASARS. At RIAT, it was showing a 50cm-resolution spot SAR image of the airshow site taken just hours earlier. Another company has launched ELINT satellites, and GMTI is on the way.

Proponents of airborne reconnaissance say that satellites on fixed orbits can’t provide the same flexibility, particularly dwell times. A U-2 can orbit close to areas of interest for eight hours or more. But the commercial providers are launching the new breed of “smallsats”, and can therefore afford to place a large numbers of them in low-earth orbits. Capella told me that it could image RIAT several times per day. Revisit rates from most of the commercial providers are being further increased as more satellites are launched. No wonder the NRO has given contracts to many of these companies.

But greater satellite capability is only one part of the U-2 retirement debate. Another key part of it takes place only within sensitive information compartmented facilities (SCIFs). That is because the Northrop Grumman stealthy high-altitude UAV for ISR and communications relay has still not been declassified. I described its characteristics and progress here more than three years ago. I still don’t buy the commonly-quoted designation RQ-180 for this wonderplane. But since it has acquired a nickname – The White Bat – let’s use that.  

The Air Force has done a great job of keeping The White Bat secret. There have been a few sightings of it at high-altitude, but that’s all. Is the classification maintained in order to protect clever new technology such as adaptive wings, ceramics, and conformal load-bearing antennas? Perhaps, but maybe also because this 15-year project has cost $$billions more than anticipated. The American public should be told!

There are strong indications that the Air Force wants to expand operations of The White Bat to RAF Fairford. New hangars are being built at this British base that is currently home for the U-2s of the 99^th ERS. But if the Air Force thinks that it can keep its new super-UAV hidden from the legions of aircraft enthusiasts that routinely surround Fairford, then it should think again. I look forward to its declassification, so that mere mortals can make an objective evaluation of its potential to replace the Dragon Lady.

Mind you, we’ve been here before. The Air Force twice tried to replace the U-2 with a high-altitude UAV in the last decade. Wiser counsels intervened, and most of the Global Hawks were retired instead.  

So what’s my considered view on U-2 retirement? I think it would be prudent for the Air Force to hedge its bets. It is taking undue risks: the new satellite capabilities are not yet fully developed and robust, and they are not invulnerable to attack. As for the cost and viability of The White Bat, who knows? It surely makes sense to keep the Dragon Lady flying until the end of the decade, perhaps downsizing the fleet in the meantime, keeping a smaller total of aircraft that have received the new set of upgrades.

It’s been done before. After the Gary Powers shootdown in 1960, the CIA consolidated its U-2 operation and maintained a smaller unit at Edwards AFB that was ready to deploy quickly whenever required. It worked well. The Air Force could learn from that.

I’ll end this post with some wise words from John Clark, the head of The Skunk Works. He wrote recently: “The modern U-2S is characterized by intuitive design, rapid technology deployment and an open architecture. Its superior size, weight, power and cooling capacity, combined with technological flexibility, make it the preferred aircraft to showcase new capabilities quickly and cost-effectively in support of the Joint All-Domain Operations vision. Its enduring capabilities have played a pivotal role in keeping our Combatant Commanders informed ahead of need. If information is power, the U-2 is the conduit!”