The unit provides experienced operations, maintenance, engineering, and analysis personnel who plan and conduct ground and flight tests, and analyze, evaluate, and report on the effectiveness and suitability of B-2 logistics support, tactics and survivability, foreign military exploitation, weapons and mission planning.

[1] Reorganized in 1923 as a reconnaissance squadron, assigned to 5th Composite Group in Hawaii as part of the islands air defense organization.

Activities included training, participating in Army-Navy maneuvers, staging aerial reviews and sowing seeds from the air for the Territorial Forestry Division.

The group suffered devastating personnel and aircraft losses in the Pearl Harbor Attack, remaining in Hawaii until September 1942 re-equipping.

The squadron's reconnaissance missions included electronic and weather monitoring flights used to track Soviet activities in the area.

Between 1948 and 1949 the Boeing RB-29 Superfortresses of the 72d conducted numerous photographic reconnaissance and ELINT missions over the Soviet Arctic and Far East.

Equipped with cameras that enabled then to remain in international airspace, whilst photographing targets deep inside Soviet territory, the aircraft searched for evidence of Soviet military activity, but unsurprisingly, found little going on in the inhospitable Arctic wastes but nobody knew what was happening further inland.

Even longer flights soon became routine with aircraft operating up to 35,000 ft, covering 5000 miles and remaining airborne for occasionally up to 30 hours.

[3] The most significant of these missions included one on 3 September 1949 which identified the first evidence of a successful explosion of a Soviet nuclear weapon in the Semipalatinsk test site in Eastern Kazakhstan on 29 August 1949.

[1] Reactivated as a B-52H heavy bomb squadron at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota in late 1994, but inactivated on 1 July 1996.