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From: mitel!sce!cognos!roberts@uunet.UU.NET (Robert Stanley)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: What Happened to all the A-12s?
Message-ID: <1990Oct10.000624.375@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 10 Oct 90 00:06:24 GMT
References: <1990Oct8.030649.12453@cbnews.att.com>
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From: mitel!sce!cognos!roberts@uunet.UU.NET (Robert Stanley)

In article <1990Oct8.030649.12453@cbnews.att.com> henry@zoo.toronto.edu
           (Henry Spencer) writes:

>The survivors have been seen at one of the storage depots in the Southwest
>(Davis-Monthan? not sure), mothballed but perhaps still flyable.  They were
>retired due to a political decision that actually operating strategic
>reconnaissance hardware was the USAF's job.

Which makes the recent decision to retire the SR-71 more than a little
ironic.  The USAF requested that the operating costs (some $210M/year)
be deleted from their budget on the grounds that they were unable to
justify the cost of information gathering for their own needs.  It appears
that the people who really wanted/used the information gathered by SR-71
missions were not the ones having the appropriation show up in their 
annual budgets...
-- 
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         [Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.]