Unsung ISR Platform Key to Counterdrug Ops

Based on Fairchild Swearingen’s Metroliner twin-turboprop commuter airliner, the RC-26 is an Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) platform in service with the United States Air Force, Navy, and Army. In keeping with convoluted Pentagon nomenclature, the C-26A is the military version of the Model SA227-AC Metro III; the C-26B is the military version of the Model SA227-BC Metro III and Model SA227-DC Metro 23; and UC-26C is the military designation for the Model SA227-AT Merlin IVC.

By dint of its small logistics footprint and rapid deployability, the RC-26 facilitates counter-drug and counter narco-terrorism operations, as well as national special security events, crisis/disaster response, maritime patrol, homeland defense, and counterterrorism operations undertaken by US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), US Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the Department of Homeland Security, and the United States Secret Service.

Notwithstanding the extent to which the aircraft is relied upon to monitor fentanyl smuggling across the U.S./Mexico border, the National Guard received orders in November to advance the RC-26’s retirement date from April 2023 to year’s end 2022.

No plans currently exist to replace the platform.

Adam Kinzinger, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air National Guard and Republican Congressman representing Illinois’s 16th Congressional District, has fought to have the RC-26 program extended or replaced, stating: “Law enforcement lives have been saved by having this asset available. We [by virtue of the RC-26] can see anything weird that’s going to happen.”

Rep. Kinzinger states he met with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall but was summarily informed there was no way the RC-26 program would be sustained.

Kinzinger claims Secretary Kendall made clear "that DoD business is not, in essence, domestic drug issues even though DoD is one of the primary people responsible."

Kinzinger, writing for the Air Force Times in 2019, criticized the service’s decision to retire the RC-26, stating the measure "undermines Trump's border security priorities."

Air Force officials, however, have contradicted Kinzinger’s narrative, setting forth that ISR voids left by the retirement of manned aircraft will be filled by USAF drones.  

In November 2022, RC-26s contributed to three discrete fentanyl busts, each of which yielded approximately 22,500 pills.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, fiscal year 2022 saw nearly 15,000 pounds of fentanyl seized along the U.S.’s southern border—the fifth-highest seizure rate of any one drug, with methamphetamine and khat—a stimulant derived from the leaves of a wild, East African shrub called Catha edulis—tied for the number-one spot at 175,000 pounds respectively. Current CBP projections suggest fentanyl seizures will more than double in fiscal year 2023. Those compelled to optimism by such predictions would do well to bear in mind that CBP also projects it intercepts less than five-percent of illegal fentanyl inbound to the United States.

The poorly-timed retirement of the RC-26 will occasion the displacement of highly-trained air-crews possessed of backgrounds in the majority of military aviation platforms. Subject personnel effectively bridge the gap between Department of Defense and civil authorities—at no cost to law enforcement agencies.

The first C-26 aircraft were delivered to the US military in 1989, and plied straight away to counterdrug and related operations. By the early 2000s, the National Guard Bureau's Counterdrug Directorate had amassed a fleet of 11 specially-equipped C-26 aircraft which it positioned throughout the United States. The counterdrug configured C-26 aircraft included C-26B-CD ("Counter Drug") and UC-26C aircraft. In 2005, the C-26B-CD received the designation RC-26B.

FMI: www.af.mil