I recognize I'll get my mancard revoked for saying this but the A-12/SR-71 was a boondoggle. Never overflew the USSR, never generated useful intel over contested airspace, needed more power than the Queen Fucking Mary to stay airborne at cruise, and wasn't nearly as stealthy as Lockheed wanted it to be. Thus, "let's create an ionized cloud of plasma so we don't have to worry about missile lock."
Fun Fact: The Soviets had a Mach 4 surface to air missile two years before we had a Mach 3 spyplane.
I never realized that an SR-71 had ever even been put in danger by a missile. But dude seeing 5 of them launched at him, and then finding a piece of debris from the missile embedded in the skin of the plane...? That i DEFINITELY never heard before...
I am concluding, in my dotage, that the SR-71 was a show pony. Fundamentally, RAINBOW was "make the U-2 harder to see through RCS reduction" while GUSTO was "make the U-2 harder to hit by making it go faster than fuck." The utter lack of restraint with which GUSTO was undertaken is amply demonstrated by Lockheed initially offering a hydrogen-powered office building And Convair legit preparing top secret slides that said "First Invisible Super Hustler." That level of insanity makes the A-12 look positively reasonable by comparison, especially when the whole stupid misadventure only exists so that Richard Bissell can piss off Curtis LeMay with his own private air force (an air force that provoked LeMay into providing no air intelligence for Bay of Pigs, which caused Bay of Pigs to fail, which cost Bissell his job, which gave the U-2 and A-12 program to LeMay, who promptly renamed the A-12 the RS-71 so that it would fit into his B-70 nomenclature, which LBJ called "SR-71" because he misread it). But the SR-71 is a stupid plane. The A-12 was a stupid plane; you could shoot down an A-12 with a Nazi V2 if you had the right spotters. The trick isn't going fast, the trick is going fast with a dude on-board. Why do you have a dude on board? So you know what to take pictures of. You can try it without the dude but look - The NRO had better resolution from a KH-7 (2 ft) in 1963 than they had from a U-2 (3 ft) and better resolution from a KH-8 (4") in 1966 than they had from an A-12 (6") in 1967. The principle intelligence lesson from the Cuban Missile Crisis was "don't fucking rely on planes." So then LeMay tried to use his toys over Vietnam and nearly got 'em shot down; from that point forth the SR-71 was an air show favorite that did unspoken spooky secret shit and conclusively demonstrated that America has total air superiority. Even now, everyone knows that everyone knows that the SR-71 was the fastest fucking thing in the sky bar none so of course the Russian flyboys used this poke in the eye to get their own uselessly fast aircraft. But it never fucking mattered. That entire article is about whether or not some squares on the ground were a bomber problem or an ICBM problem and the fact that they had to measure tail fins from space. If they cared, they could have flown over Finland - fuckin' Talinn is 50 miles across the water from Espoo. But by the time the A-12 was flying they had a pretty good idea that any missile the Soviets were developing could paste the shit out of a Mach 3 aircraft with very little difficulty. Which is why they doubled down on the F-117, which ended up clobbered by 30-year-old radar. There may have actually been a debate there but the tea leaves were that the Soviets weren't interested in American overflight at all and had conclusively solved the problem by 1965. Meanwhile no actual intelligence analysts gave much of a fuck since we could automate the shit out of film return and get spectacular IMINT in a matter of days. Meanwhile, the Soviets needed dudes. When I was a little boy I thought the SR-71 was an aviation tour de force. Now I'm a jaded old man and I think the SR-71 was a propaganda tour de force.
