The Air Force is forging ahead with its plan to retire the storied U-2 Dragon Lady spy aircraft in fiscal 2026, as a part of a yearslong effort to reshape how the service surveils American adversaries from above.
Air Force leaders have considered retiring the U-2 fleet for nearly twenty years, asking Congress in some years to ditch the Cold War-era workhorse or, in others, to retire the RQ-4 Global Hawk drones that were meant to interchange it. Now each are on the chopping block.
If Congress approves the divestment and lets the Air Force retire its remaining RQ-4s one 12 months later, the service would finish out the last decade without the high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft that peer across borders and track enemy movements.
Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., noted the service’s plan for the U-2 on Tuesday in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Department of the Air Force’s fiscal 2024 budget request. The pending retirement was briefly mentioned in military budget documents released earlier this spring.
The service’s previous spending requests have foreshadowed the tip of the U-2 fleet within the mid-2020s, including in its asks for fiscal 2021 and 2022. Last 12 months’s request didn’t specify when the airframe would retire but zeroed out modernization funds after 2025.
The latest slate of budget documents acknowledges that the Air Force plans to maintain the U-2 fleet viable through the tip of September 2025, before shifting that cash to higher priorities.
The Air Force said it expects Congress to remove legislative language that has blocked the jet’s retirement up to now, allowing the service to “move forward with U-2 divestment in FY 2026.”
The annual defense policy acts approved by Congress have sought to be sure that the Air Force has an acceptable alternative for the U-2 and RQ-4 before yanking the assets that commanders all over the world depend on for intelligence.
But once it cuts those fleets, the Air Force would as an alternative turn to space-based sensors to gather the same set of high-altitude images, its budget request said.
The Air Force’s 27 U-2s are housed at Beale Air Force Base, California, and rotate through military installations all over the world. The aircraft are famous for the 105-foot wingspan that permits them to glide at the sting of space, the pilots clad in astronaut-like pressurized suits, the bulbous nose radars and the chase cars that follow the wobbly planes down the runway to make sure they land safely.
Known for capturing the pictures that proved the Soviet Union was constructing nuclear missile sites in Cuba in 1962, sparking the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U-2 gained recent fame for tracking a Chinese surveillance balloon’s journey across the US earlier this 12 months.
Until recently, the jets relied on wet-film cameras with enormous film canisters that needed to be shipped to Beale and developed by the ninth Reconnaissance Wing there. That practice ended last summer in a pivot to the digital era.
Dragon Ladies have currently taken on a brand new role as testbeds for a number of more advanced reconnaissance and communication technologies, and have helped vet recent artificial intelligence tools within the Air Force’s quest for more capable drones.
The U-2 can be getting used as a surrogate platform within the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System program, which looks to dramatically improve data-sharing capabilities amongst military assets.
It’s unclear how the Air Force would repurpose U-2 pilots and others in that enterprise if the airframes are allowed to retire.
Rachel Cohen joined Air Force Times as senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Air Force Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), the Washington Post, and others.