The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance; the U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 1954-1974

## SUMMARY OF THE OXCART PROGRAM

Intended to replace the U-2 as a collector of strategic intelligence, the OXCART was never used for this purpose. Its brief deployment was strictly for obtaining tactical intelligence and its photographic product contributed very little to the Agency's strategic intelligence mission. By the time OXCART became operational, photosatellite systems had filled the role originally conceived for it. The most advanced aircraft of the 20th century had become an anachronism before it was ever used operationally. $ ^{70} $

The OXCART did not even outlast the U-2, the aircraft it was supposed to replace. The OXCART lacked the quick-response capability of the smaller craft: a U-2 unit could be activated overnight, and within a week it could deploy abroad, fly sorties, and return to home base. The OXCART planes required precise logistic planning for fuel and emergency landing fields, and their inertial guidance systems needed several days for programming and stabilization. Aerial tankers had to be deployed in advance along an OXCART's flight route and be provisioned with the highly specialized fuel used by the J58 engines. All of this required a great deal of time and the effort of several hundred people. A U-2 mission could be planned and flown with a third fewer personnel.

Although the OXCART program created a strategic reconnaissance aircraft with unprecedented speed, range, and altitude, the program's most important contributions lay in other areas: aerodynamic design, high-impact plastics, engine performance, cameras, electronic countermeasures, pilot life-support systems, antiradar devices, use of nonmetallic materials for major aircraft assemblies, and improvements in milling, machining, and shaping titanium. In all of these areas, the OXCART pushed back the frontiers of aerospace technology and helped lay the foundation for future "stealth" research.