I am sure that the orbital capabilities are also vastly improved from what the public has ever seen. But I think there's likely a high degree of tactical value in having something that can keep station over a certain active conflict area (as an RQ180 can, maybe flying in a racetrack pattern at altitude, with sensors aimed down).

If you've ever seen the publicly released videos and audio of an RQ9 operator in communication with ground units watching the activity of a group of men/vehicles on the ground, in live real time, something like that.

As compared to periodic revisits by LEO orbit satellites that don't maintain persistent live coverage, or the extreme distance and data acquisition problem that aiming sensors in geostationary orbit at a 10x10km target area might pose.

For visual and SAR, sure, but there are other missions like electronic warfare and signals intelligence that are still well served by aircraft.

The problem is the people in charge now have not earned that kind of faith. If they’re truly trying to relight these things, my heart goes out in advance to the neighborhood in the Southwest that burns down before they rethink it.

Or something as mundane as cleaning up and fixing something that's been out in the weather for 20 years so it doesn't look shabby at the front gate of their base.

The SR-71 is because they need to test for speed.

That serves a huge number of things both offense and defense: engagement, radar, missiles, trying to boost the speed capabilities of new planes & weapons. And it applies both to manned and unmanned planes.

Russia is less of a concern now, however China is coming on very fast in terms of leveling up their military capabilities. I'd be very surprised if the US military isn't looking to push its capabilities around increasing speed generally, just as it does any other aspect. There hasn't been a significant leveling up in US Air Force speed capabilities in many decades (since the F22 supercruise three decades ago?).

Yeah it seems most likely it's because someone connected to the administration just thinks they're cool.

Trying to find reason behind so much of this shit is a fools errand. Vibes based presidency.

>but it wouldn't surprise me if a bulk load of ufo sightings were black projects being tested.

Sure, I'd bet a lot of "black triangle" sightings are exactly that. But if the "tic-tac" lore is to be taken at face value, the implication is that the US military has invented antigravity technology, or reverse engineered it from alien spacecraft. I really don't think that's plausible. If the US had that kind of technology we would be so far ahead of the rest of known science that there would be no value in keeping it secret.

If those tic-tac videos were actually a classified aircraft, those airmen would have signed an NDA before they left the carrier. The fact that we know about it (and see the FLIR videos, regularly, released by the government) suggests that they are exactly what they claim to be; UFOs. It could be phenomena, it could be noumenon.

We've seen a lot of the stuff that used to be classified from Skunk Works, none of them are supersonic orb prototypes or flying tic-tacs. I'm not saying they can't develop that technology and hide it from the public, but it's unclear how all of the puzzle pieces we have fit together to support "Lockheed sends flying orb to Syria without telling CENTCOM" in any way.