U-2 spy planes have lurked all over the world for 64 years ? here's how the Dragon Lady keeps an eye on the battlefield

The U-2 is probably most famous for what pilots call "the optical bar camera," Maj. Travis "Lefty" Patterson, a U-2 pilot, said at an Air Force event in New York City in May. "We have a number of antennas all across the aircraft [with which] we're able to just pick up what other people are doing." "Some of these sensors can see hundreds and hundreds of miles, so even if we're not overflying, you can get a real deep look at what you actually want to see," Maj. Matt "Top" Nauman, also a U-2 pilot, said at the event. US Air Force/Senior Airman Valentina Viglianco "I got more of the quick-time, actionable intelligence" from U-2s, Siler said. Lee The reason the U-2 funnels that intelligence back to crew members on the ground is that "it's so much data that we just simply can't process all of it on board," Patterson said. what we call the forward edge — like right on board the aircraft — [and] disseminate that information to the fight real-time, without having to reach back, and those some of the projects that we're working right now," Patterson said, describing what senior leaders have called "algorithmic warfare." "It's easier to put racks and racks of servers and [graphics processing units] on the ground, obviously, to do the processing, but how do we take a piece of that and move that to the air?" Nauman said.