Air Force Wanted To Turn Skunk Works' Mach 3 Capable Recon Drone Into A Nuclear Bomber - An M-21 carrying a D-21 during a flight test..jpg ...

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A newly declassified document shows that, during the Cold War, the U.S. military
considered turning Lockheed’s D-21 Tagboard supersonic spy drone into an
unmanned strike platform. The plan would have given the U.S. Air Force a
high-speed, deep-penetrating, air-launched strike weapon and it’s a capability
the service is still interested in acquiring today.

In January 1971, John McLucas, then both Undersecretary of the Air Force and
Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), sent a memo to Deputy
Defense Secretary David Packard about the armed D-21 proposal. NRO, the very
existence of which remained classified until 1992, released this record and
nearly 100 other documents related to the Tagboard program as part of its
continued transparency efforts, on Mar. 21, 2019.

“With respect to your question about whether TAGBOARD should be considered as a
drone/bomber, we have done some investigation and discussed this with the Air
Staff and SAC [Strategic Air Command],” McLucas wrote. “I will be glad to do any
additional analysis or other work which you might suggest.”

But Tagboard’s origins, and nearly two decades of development and operational
activities up to that point, were rooted almost exclusively in intelligence
collection. To rewind a bit, after the Soviet Union shot down Gary Powers flying
a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane over their territory in 1960, there was a
considerable impetus to develop less vulnerable intelligence gathering assets
that could penetrate far into denied areas with limited risk.

Lockheed, which had designed and built the U-2, was already in the process of
developing a successor, known as the A-12 Oxcart at the time. This aircraft
subsequently evolved into the Air Force’s famous SR-71 Blackbird.

The A-12 could fly at over three times the speed of sound at around 90,000 feet,
but there were still reservations within the U.S. government about sending any
manned aircraft on high-risk missions over hostile countries, such as the Soviet
Union. At the same time, NRO was pushing ahead with the first generations of spy
satellites, which, at the time, offered a way to spy on these areas with virtual
impunity.

The problem with early spy satellites was that they could only carry limited
amounts of wet film, reducing their capacity to cover large areas and do so over
a protracted period of time. In addition, they had limited repositioning
flexibility once they entered their orbits. On top of all this, it was a complex
process to prepare additional satellites for launch, making it difficult to
ensure one was ready to go on short notice in response to new developments.

https://youtu.be/9u7VnAkWvMY

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.....It's important to note that even as the D-21 program was getting underway,
the Air Force was already beginning to very seriously investigate radar-evading
stealth technology. As those efforts progressed and general concept became more
viable in the 1970s, stealth steadily replaced speed as the primary means of
penetrating an enemy's air defense network.

But the general concept behind the D-21 has lived on in many ways. In the 2000s,
Skunk Works worked with the U.S. Navy to design an advanced supersonic cruise
missile as part of the Revolutionary Approach To Time Critical Long Range Strike
(RATTLRS) program.

The resulting BGM-178 missile was very reminiscent of the D-21. It featured a
Rolls Royce YJ102R turbojet engine, a high-axial flow design that would have
been able to propel the weapon, armed with a penetrating high explosive warhead
or a payload of small submunition bomblets, to speeds around Mach 4. This means
it could have reached its maximum range of more than 500 miles in around 30
minutes.

Similar to how an armed D-21 might have operated, the Navy envisioned RATTLRS as
a sea-launched weapon that would have been able to penetrate deep into denied
areas and do so quickly in order to be able to strike time-sensitive targets on
short notice. This program disappeared from the public eye at the end of the
2000s before any flight tests occurred, but the missile’s development may have,
at least, helped inform the development of a more advanced and top-secret
supersonic weapon, known as Sea Dragon, which you can read about more here.

But whatever happened to RATTLRS, the demand for improved capabilities to allow
the U.S. military to hit critical targets at extended ranges quickly hasn't
dissipated. Quite the opposite has happened and there has been an explosion of
interest in hypersonic aircraft and missile designs as of late. Even the B-52 is
being eyed again as the ideal vehicle to haul and launch outsized high-speed
missiles, much like how it was used for the D-21 program.

At the same time, potential American opponents, especially Russia and China,
have been hard at work developing improved radars and other sensors so that they
can detect and possibly engage stealth aircraft. This has only further placed a
renewed premium on speed, not just to be able to hit targets promptly, but in
order to reduce the vulnerability of aircraft and missiles to enemy air defenses
in the process.

So, while the D-21 never achieved success in the intelligence gathering role,
and never transformed into a strike platform, it certainly helped blaze the
trail for new developments that we may come to fruition in the near future.



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