Not only is all that stuff there, but they’re performing missions with their transponders switched on.
In other news, the tanks finally won one. Mildly surprised Mariupol defenders still have anti tank missiles when they have been cut off for weeks.
https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1508541661533638659?t=oTIgQj5s-EcWO2TjmFavag&s=19
Speaking of friendly fire, I’m amazed there haven’t been more incidents on the Ukraine side. You’ve got dudes rolling around all over with appropriated Russian tanks, sounds like a potential disaster. Sure they paint Ukrainian colors over the Zs but man I would not want to be driving around Ukraine in a repurposed Russian vehicle right now. The coordination and fire discipline must be incredible.
We’re mostly seeing the war through the lens of Ukrainian propaganda. Why would Ukrainian propaganda report Ukrainian friendly fire accidents?
U-2s? But not over Ukraine, surely? It’s almost 62 years since Gary Powers was shot down.
Just what the wily CIA wants you to think
well, the U-2 can see everything without flying over Ukraine or Russia, so it really doesn’t matter too much, I guess. That doesn’t mean they aren’t flying over Ukraine and Russia, of course.
I actually wonder when they started watching that area of the world more closely. February? Earlier? There’s been a MOBSTR (Mobile Stretch, which allows the U-2 to operate outside the areas traditionally covered by the Air Force DCGS) unit in Turkey since I was working on the U-2, and that was 20 years ago. So it would have been super easy to redirect the mission to covering Russia/Ukraine as opposed to the middle east. I suspect they’ve moved the other one that was somewhere in the middle east to Poland or Romania, as well.
No one calls it the Sentinel. It’s always DCGS.
There have been B-52s patrolling the western border of Ukraine for weeks. I’m sure they have quite a bit of electronic intelligence capabilities, right?
B-52 is a strategic bomber that can carry nukes. They don’t do intel collection. Ostensibly, the B-52s and other strike aircraft that have been deployed to the region are there to fly missions to practice integration with our NATO allies (comms, command structures, etc), but really it’s a show of strength and a way of saying to Putin, we’re here and if you fuck with NATO, we are ready.
We’re still flying U2s in 2022? What the hell.
I figured they’d have good equipment to figure out what sort of air defense radars are active over Ukraine at least. Do the dedicated elint aircrafts do more intercepting battlefield transmissions and the like?
Yup
The video I posted of a tank bouncing an NLAW was geolocated to downtown Mariupol. At this point I hope.the Ukrainians there surrender, they have more than done their duty.
haha, it’s not Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 that we’re flying. It was upgraded and modernized in the 1980s, with a glass cockpit upgrade in 2012.
The U-2R and U-2S are larger and can carry much more payload than the original plane.
DoD has wanted to ground them for decades, but there is literally nothing to replace their capability. It is the only platform we have capable of stealth (by flying higher than anything can hit, basically), long range, and the ability to carry more than one type of reconnaissance payload at once. All of our other ISR aircraft sacrifices at least one of those three things.
By changing out the pods on the wings and in the nosecone, the U-2 can do 2-3 of SIGINT, ELINT, radar, and TV (photographic) reconnaissance on a single mission.
Every time the Air Force brass talks about standing down the U-2, in-theatre and operational commanders throw an absolute fit. There’s nothing we have that can compete, and nothing on the horizon, either. So we keep modernizing the payloads that the U-2 can carry.
Everyone loved the SR-71 because it was designed by the same guy/shop and was flashier, but to me, the U-2 is the most important aircraft the DoD has ever produced.
I get that, but if you make a list of aircraft that ought to be obsolete in the era of drones and satellites, it seems like the U2 ought to be up near the top. Might as well take the SR-71 Blackbirds out of the museum and put them back into service.
Drones can’t do what the U-2 does. Satellites aren’t as flexible/mobile.
Too expensive. We tried it in the 2000’s, then realized it wasn’t worth it. SR-71 uses a unique fuel that is stupid expensive to produce, and it loses a lot of it through the seams until it reaches a certain altitude/speed. NASA still flies one, though!
Damn 
Well it sounds like the Russians made a mad dash to the city center and there’s still a ton of pockets holding out.
I thought the biggest issue with satellites is that the major powers all know exactly where they all are and what they are looking at. So you can hide things from them if you want to.
The biggest issue with satellites is you don’t control where they go or when they are on station. The ones that take the best pictures are in low orbit and can go several days between photographs of a specific site.
