US Sends Reconnaissance Plane To Snoop on Russia

A U.S. reconnaissance aircraft specializing in signals intelligence collection has arrived in Europe, part of an annual transatlantic mission to assess enemy radars.

Data captured on August 20 by the aircraft tracking service Flightradar24 showed the U.S. Air Force’s RC-135U, known as the Combat Sent, had already conducted an hourslong flight in the Baltic region bordering Russia and neighboring Belarus.

The Combat Sent—one of only two in the Air Force’s inventory—landed at the U.K.’s Mildenhall air base in eastern England on Sunday, having departed its home at Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base and stopped in Delaware on its way across the Atlantic Ocean, according to the GPS data.

The Combat Sent collects electronic intelligence. The Air Force says it can locate and identify foreign military land, naval and airborne radar signals, which are analyzed automatically and by onboard electronic warfare officers, allowing it to process multiple signals simultaneously.

Intelligence collected by the Combat Sent helps determine the “detailed operating characteristics and capabilities” of foreign military radars, the Air Force says. This enables U.S. defense planners to develop evasion techniques and equipment that can “detect, warn of, or defeat” adversary systems.

On Tuesday, the Boeing-built aircraft took off for its first sortie since arriving at RAF Mildenhall. It flew eastward and transited Dutch, German and Polish airspace before bypassing the Russian semi-exclave of Kaliningrad, which is sandwiched between NATO members Poland in the south and Lithuania in the north.

Newsweek‘s map, displaying Coordinated Universal Time or UTC, traces the Combat Sent’s flight path in the Baltic Sea as it flies through Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian airspace to reach the shores of the Gulf of Finland. It then passes northwest of Belarus and north of Kaliningrad before returning to Mildenhall.

Kaliningrad falls under Russia’s Leningrad Military District, which was reestablished on March 1 as a “retaliatory measure” after both Finland and Sweden joined NATO. The Russian navy’s Baltic Fleet is also headquartered there, making the territory an important outpost in the region.

The flight lasted approximately six hours, but its exact purpose and the length of the Combat Sent’s deployment to Europe were not immediately clear.

The Air Force did not immediately return Newsweek‘s request for comment about the mission. The U.S. Defense Department typically declines to comment on specific operations.

The Air Force’s Combat Sent aircraft belong to the RC-135 family of reconnaissance airframes, which were developed from the Boeing C-135 Stratolifter transport jet. Others in the line-up include the RC-135V/W Rivet Joint and RC-135S Cobra Ball.

The Rivet Joint detects, identifies, and geolocates signals throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, while the Cobra Ball collects optical and electronic data on ballistic missiles. Variants of RC-135 are forward-deployed worldwide and are expected to remain in service until the 2040s.

One of the Air Force’s Rivet Joint aircraft returned to the U.S. this week after five months at RAF Mildenhall, according to a post on Wednesday by X user MeNMyRC, an RC-135 airframe specialist.

Other frequent visitors to NATO’s northeastern flank in August included the Air Force’s RQ-4B Global Hawk, a spy drone. The unmanned aerial vehicle was spotted patrolling Finland’s border with Russia on Thursday, its fourth flight to the area this month.

The U.S. Global Hawk is stationed at Naval Air Station Sigonella, on Italy’s Mediterranean island of Sicily. It is a high-altitude, long-endurance drone capable of all-weather, around-the-clock intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR.

Sigonella also hosts NATO’s own ISR force, which operates five units of the RQ-4D drone variant known as the Phoenix.