I think China erred by sending such a large balloon that was visible to the naked eye, causing the American public to demand it be shot down.
There's no hard rule about where national airspace ends and space begins.. a lot of times they fly too high for planes to reach, and under certain circumstances balloons are allowed through national airspace.. so if the balloon isn't causing a problem (like being a hazard to air traffic), people just ignore it... weather balloons fly through our airspace all the time.
But the US public saw this massive balloon and demanded it be shot down, even if it caused an international incident.. and luckily nothing serious happened. So now that the cat is out of the bag, we're going to shoot down every balloon that hasnt filed all of the required paperwork that enters out airspace that's reachable by our aircraft... because 1) the public demands it; 2) it'll become political fodder if the white house doesn't; and 3) the international issue it generates is easier for the white house to handle than the political criticism.
If China never sent that large balloon.. they could have sent a dozen more small ones and no one would have cared.. just like we never cared about the 3 during the previous administration.
Since that likely settles the balloons intent… we can add 4) now that we know it’s a spy balloon, we’re going to shoot down all the balloons. Before the large balloon was shot down, no one would have bothered to check. No one is stopping weather balloons at the border. Big mistake on chinas part.
They are probably going to keep making blunders like this, now that internal leadership (source of many internal blunders in recent years) has been consolidated / stabilized, and they are still aiming for more international power.
The degree of de facto stabilization will dictate whether e.g. the US may be able to transform this opportunity into an effective new policy framework aimed at leverage in rather obvious blind spots. That could be pretty huge.
I have a hunch that we'll also see an increasing number of opportunities for the US or other nations to effectively call out China's future tendency toward expeditionary blunders in South America, Africa, etc.
Right now Chinese leadership does not want to be seen "bending" in this way or that, by their internal audience. But not doing so is a huge risk factor for them in international diplomacy.
Whether the US or any other country really takes advantage of the opportunity and resulting partial leadership vacuum in the international space will be interesting to see.
It's the classic dilemma that most people who prefer expedient governance don't always understand. When a government is paralysed by too much bureaucracy and corruption, everyone craves for something lean and expedient. Anyone who wants to combat that will want to consolidate power. Once they have successfully consolidated - usually by eliminating anyone in the way irrespective of whether they're someone who speak truth to power or a bureaucrat trying to preserve their fiefdom - all that's left are the yes-men. Then starts the bungling and fumbling and doubling down and over-corrections.
This describes the current situation in Russia with Putin surrounded by yes men. But it is not true about China where officials are frequently fired loosing pretty much everything. I.e. if one always say yes in China, the consequences for not delivering are high so one is under the pressure to say no at least sometimes.
There are indications that even in Russia Putin got that and tried to introduce harsher punishments than assigning the failed official to less prestigious positions. But it seems they did too little too late.
> I have a hunch that we'll also see an increasing number of opportunities for the US or other nations to effectively call out China's future tendency toward expeditionary blunders in South America, Africa, etc.
We are totally clueless about the PRC's objective to say whether they erred.
One plausible (though entirely speculative) explanation could be they wanted the US to react this way. Now we will waste our military resources responding to these balloons and they in turn will learn about our military readiness. They could be intentionally probing and start sending smaller and smaller balloons to figure out where our detection limit is. They could want to understand how information flows and decisions are made by our government and have already tapped into other intelligence signals that this pen test is helping them monitor.
Again all speculation. But my fundamental point is you don't know their intention to know if they erred.
> We are totally clueless about the PRC's objective to say whether they erred.
We don't even know if it was the PRC's object. The PRC has taken responsibility for the first balloon, but denies involvement with this one. This isn't a big-budget project. A startup company or a university could launch some balloon-borne instrument package.
It's going to be embarrassing if it turns out to be somebody's solar telescope or high altitude pollution instrument package, both of which have been launched on balloons of that size.
Science balloons have to go through a rigorous, and constant, check with DOD to ensure no mis communicating happens. I have first hand experience with this. We had to constantly ping our DOD channels to make sure they knew where we were and how long we would be staying there or risk being shot down.
Now that US has learned that the big ballon was spy one, it would not be an embarrassment but a reasonable assumption that smaller ones could be spy ones as well. So they should be stopped.
Might not be a probe of military capability, but rather a probe of diplomatic stance. US govt is forced to make a statement about the balloon -- which normally they wouldn't care about -- to the public: US govt can choose to either lie and save face for China, saying it was a weather balloon, thus demonstrating earnestness in building relations, or tell the truth and say it was a spy balloon, thus demonstrating unwillingness to paper over such a diplomatic faux pas.
It doesn't matter what their 'objectives' are really.
Yeah they are not worried about our 'detection limits' and definitely not 'wasting our resources'.
They might possibly be hoping to pick up some F22 signatures or something like that but even then very unlikely. They have ships that can do that.
And given the 'free publicity' the China Hawks are going to get (not quite 'Sputnik Moment' but a bit like that) I suggest it can't bode well for them, unless are playing real 3D chess and some internal guy is trying to get America to 'wake up' so as to prevent a war!
I suspect they won’t learn much other than how the US responds to balloons. It’s not like the US is revealing anything novel or secret. They’ve used already unclassified and publicly available aircraft and ordinance.
> If China never sent that large balloon.. they could have sent a dozen more small ones and no one would have cared.. just like we never cared about the 3 during the previous administration.
As evidence to this claim, you'll see that many articles are actively discussing the fact that these balloons are relatively common. The big difference here, American citizens could see this object with just their eyes (uncommon for a balloon). I do buy the argument that China overplayed their hand.
>If China never sent that large balloon.. they could have sent a dozen more small ones and no one would have cared.. just like we never cared about the 3 during the previous administration.
But we certainly _should_ have cared. People want to turn this in a purely objective moral game. "Well we've spied on China, so therefore this is fine." If you think of it more in terms of war, you'd never draw such an equivalence: "Well, we've shot down their planes so it's fine that they shoot down ours." The advantages that China can take against us matter, and it's important not to be reflexively passive.
> If you think of it more in terms of war, you'd never draw such an equivalence: "Well, we've shot down their planes so it's fine that they shoot down ours."
People make these equivalencies constantly. Fortunately I don't think either side has been dumb enough to kill an soldier from the other yet, but once we get that pot cooking, WWIII here we come!
I'm a China hawk, but I hope it doesn't come to that.
Would like to point out something relevant: China and India kill each others soldiers fairly frequently. I find it rather remarkable their issues haven't escalated.
They kill each others soldiers, yes, but they are always small engagements because it is very difficult to transport a large formation of Chinese soldiers to Indian territory (specifically, any territory India cares about) or vice versa because the mountains are such formidable barriers.
The second object has not been called a balloon by US Air Command. Most interesting are some reports of pilots saying the object “interfered with their sensors” on the planes. [1]
Interfering with F-22 sensors? If they sent an airborne jamming platform over US space it's serious.
On a more positive note, now that private observers report the skies over the Artic, Northern Canada and Alaska border, have a constant presence of AWACS and other multiple airplane sorties, the Aliens everybody was talking about here days ago, seem to have vanished...
F-22 pilots are not scrubs that got the job by luck. To be one, means being among the best. If it is being reported accurately, that the F-22 pilot says there was some kind of interference coming from the object, then there likely really is something to it.
"Some pilots said the object “interfered with their sensors” on the planes, but not all pilots reported experiencing that.
Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet."
This article and any other that mentions these two things has absolutely no source for the statement. There is a 0.0% chance F22 pilots are talking to the press, so I really believe this is a complete fabrication.
Weather balloons are tiny, enough so they need to attach a specific device to reflect radar signals properly and these massive payloads are not innocent climate collection devices
Maybe in the near future you won't be able to attach a full tube of toothpaste to a weather balloon and send it high up into the air, just a 3 oz size.
Weather balloons are tiny, yes, but they aren't tracked by radar anymore. Generally, it's a set of meteorological instruments and a GPS to track the location. It's a bit easier to get that to work, as you no longer need to make sure your radar works, but rather, just that the GPS is working before you let go. That said, payload is substantially smaller than these things (<1 kg for current tech).
I assume this would be slightly more clear as "aren't tracked by radar anymore [by their controllers]" -- who does what tracking and how, of course, wildly varies. (Not trying to be overly pedantic, just saying out loud my internal thought reply.)
That's speculation on your part. The DoD has not released any information on what the payload of any of these balloons contains.
And going by the size isn't conclusive. The ICESat-2 weather satellite is over 3000lbs, for example. So instruments larger than found on a typical weather balloon clearly do have their place in weather/climate science.
Not that it's necessarily indictatory, but this balloon had a payload the size of a small jet. By my understanding (I could be wrong) that's very uncommon for a weather balloon.
I don't fully agree with the political assessment because the WH gave the Pentagon permission to shoot it down when they deemed appropriate. They didn't order the pentagon to do it immediately. I'm not sure (someone please chime in if you know) if the WH 'ordered' the Pentagon to shoot it down in the sense that it HAD to come out of the air at some point, or if the message was just "shoot it down if you think that's the best thing to do".
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
>But the US public saw this massive balloon and demanded it be shot down
1. Where can one find evidence of this mass demand?
2. How does the US government gauge this mass demand without formal voting/polling?
Were people phoning their senators, "SHOOT IT DOWN!"? I'm sure crazies phone in all kinds of things from time to time - what's the threshold for acting on demands/mass demand?
> There's no hard rule about where national airspace ends and space begins
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? There's no hard rule about when life begins but killing a 5 year old isn't a 22nd trimester abortion, it's murder. 18-60'000 feet is class A, controlled airspace in the US and Canada.
When the US sent U2s over the USSR, the rationale wasn't that 70,000 feet was "space", it was that it was that 70,000 feet was too high for soviet radars detect and and soviet planes to intercept.
I don’t know where the parent got their wrong information but US airspace is pretty clear to anyone that knows anything about aviation. It’s not sone vague thing no one can define. That’s pretty silly.
It’s a euphemism for a nonsequitor, OP is asking what balloon size has to do with it being okay to shoot it down since there’s nothing about size in protected airspace laws.
Maybe would have been clearer to use a nonseqiotor that doesn't involve China- for a second there I thought that there was something linking these balloons to tea trade or sanctions or something
It's an uncommon expression then. The commenter might be British. Anyway, anyone reading this thread knows it now.
I recently met someone who uses the expression "country mile" all the time. Hadn't heard it before but it's cool. "That's more popular by a country mile" Country miles are obviously better than city miles. So now I'll probably end up using it.
A country mile is often hot and dusty and walked uphill both ways by your grandpa. Time stands still and the cicadas buzz. It’s bigger than a city mile even in how much imagination it takes to conjure.
"But the US public saw this massive balloon and demanded it be shot down"
You mean saw with their eyes or on the news? If it was with their eyes then it wouldn't lead to public demand since as you say "weather balloons fly through our airspace all the time." and there's no way to attribute it to another country. If it's on the news then physical size is not relevant but detectability and newsworthiness are. People would have cared.
- the balloon was required to file a flight plan or have an ADS-B transponder
- the balloon did not file a flight plan or have an ADS-B transponder
So either the balloon's operator didn't know about the requirements, which seems unlikely given its apparent sophistication, or the operator was deliberately hiding the presence of the balloon, in which case I think it's reasonable to call it a spy balloon.
Looking on from UK this all seems like a big joke. Slow moving, massive balloons, visible for hundreds of miles are sophisticated spying apparatus? But all the previous encounters over the years have just been unremarkable weather balloons?
I don't see this as anymore aggressive than yearly war games, and significantly less aggressive than claiming islands and ocean territories that are contested and building military installations on them...
Yes it suggests our military has the right to defend our sovereign airspace and that of our allies as well as the ability and will to do so until these outrageous and arrogant acts of escalation stop.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but, honestly, I think it's pretty obvious to most adults that an aerial, or even multiple aerials on a balloon does not rule out it being a weather balloon.
What could rule that out in your mind then? Seems to me that if it had hardware that didn't serve any purpose with regard to weather data collection, calling it a weather balloon is, at the very least, an incomplete description, if not intentionally deceptive branding. Especially when said hardware has very clear use cases for intelligence collection.
How about China stops flying those things? While we are at it, how about the forever friends China and Russia stop dragging the world towards World War 3?
Ranking members of the previous administration have publicly denied that there were any previous balloons and no evidence has been presented that there were previous similar incidents.
No evidence has been presented to us. It sounds like the info came from the intelligence community, and they likely wouldn’t tell how they know what they know.
I surmise you need large balloon to carry required instruments on one platform. Going forward IMO PRC just going to fly them higher, US can keep shooting them down... possible until they can't, both will reveal US capabilities. At minimum, finding out f22 + missile ceiling is worth the cost. PRC isn't going to stop program just because US domestic politics goes full retard, if anything, that's strategically exploitable especially if PRC can make current WH admin look weak by flying a balloon at height that can't be shot down. Medium/long term, PRC building/exposing CONUS vunerability is net benefitial for PRC posture - it's their version of, in DoD parlance, integrated deterence. IMO US analysis missing strategic calculus on PRC side.
Higher would be more expensive to shoot down, but given that we have missiles designed to shoot down satellites - at least in LEO - I don’t think it’ll be possible to use altitude as a means of evading response.
US switching platforms itself has information value. If it takes expensive ASAT tier platforms to take out balloons then saturation with higher ballons might be viable. Like if US has to start trading 5M USD SM6s to hit 110ft ballons, then 100K USD balloons might be economic way to trade sap US advanced missile inventory in future war.
Serious question: was there ever any doubt that US military could shoot something down out of the sky no matter how high it flies? If they are doing this to determine capabilities, it's like staking at a grocery store to see if it sells milk.
Removing doubt has value. If US has to shift to another platform to hit 80k feet ballon reveals specific capabilities. Like if US has to start using advanced ground based interceptors, it will inform PRC on constraints relevant in IndoPac scenario. If US has to break out asat tier weapons, ASM135 cost 5B for ~15 missiles then PRC can start developing capabilities to accordingly to shift strategic math. Imagine if balloon threat forces US to reorient billions on homeland balloon defense, that's potentially billions not going elsewhere.
E:over post limit but Streak Eagle was high performance preproduction airframe specifially designed to hit 100k for a few minutes. Hard to say if current blocks can do the same or reliable prosecute mission at 100k, finding out is value itself.
> knowing the US would use it to undersell capabilities
Simultaneously capabilities can be prodded, i.e. PRC start testing counter measures on balloons, and if successful reveal gaps / cause more drama - US domestic politics may constrain how much US can undersell. Ultimately getting US to change ROE and consistenly enagage with live weapons is opportunity for both sides.
Yeah. I'm kind of flabbergasted by 99.9% of the comments on this topic, which assume the US is just chasing these things blindly without taking countermeasures.
The F-22 and other "stealth" jets can carry radar reflectors to intentionally make themselves EXTREMELY visible on radar.
Why would they carry such a thing? For one, it helps reduce the risk of accidents during training and other situations where they are flying in friendly skies. Two, helps prevent nosy enemies from learning about the true radar cross section of these planes.
It's hard to find concrete information on the USAF's practices here, for the obvious reasons.
The following is speculation, but: one imagines that the F-22/F-35/etc carry these as standard practice when not flying combat missions/patrols. One also imagines that they can be jettisoned midflight (like drop fuel tanks) in case e.g. a patrol turns into a spicy situation. That's a guess, I don't know if that's true.
Tangential, but you may also want to fill the skies with noise when flying a stealth mission.
The rationale being that you may be able to hear a cat's claws on floorboards in the middle of the dead night, but you'd never hear it in the middle of a rave party. So pairing F-22s with eg F-15s becomes a valid strategy.
They could be observing specific things about the planes sent to intercept them, such as their heat signatures and radar cross sections.
But also, don't assume that the US was naive here. The USAF is pretty good at electronic warfare. It's very possible they were jamming the object's sensors in various ways.
I don't think they can send a balloon the US can't shoot down, but the problem with using ground or sea based interceptors, or longer range jet-launched missiles launched from below is identification and proper targeting. The US might not want to take the risk of hitting the wrong thing/a misidentified object.
Bug reason why PRC aviation / airspace is stressed is because PLA has priority intercepting US recon. If balloons cause comparable stress on commercial US aviation then problems with ID becomes part of the strategy. Exposing CONUS vunerability and fallout of domestic politics might be the point.
You could but confirming US has that capability is significant. The purpose is to gather intelligence after all.
E: Lunar ranging = ground stations. Not feasible to cover CONUS with network of ground based laser for forseeable future. If anything, balloons will try to bait responses from SHiELD/air based laser ABL interception (YAL1) that can be extrapolated to IndoPac theatre.
Not feasible to cover CONUS with network of ground based laser for forseeable future.
It is also not feasible to keep using million dollar missiles to shoot down thousand dollar balloons.
I kind of doubt that the planes are cheaper than ground based lasers. Even so, a mobile ground station could avoid giving away the US position and allow them to cover more area. Not sure how feasible that is.
Even if eventually technically feasible, imo it will take multi decades to acquire finish program and acqure platforms in sufficient numbers. Missiles feasible short term because there's airframes and stockpiles. It's a function of what's available. I think PRC can mass weaponize balloons to drope guided munitions much sooner than US can build up economic counter measures. Silly as meme is, balloon gap might eventually be real.
I actually wonder why not burn holes in them by laser… maybe the US doesn’t want to show their capabilities, but that was the first thing that came to mind
I was curious about part of the description given by the pilots who shot down the object off the coast of Alaska. It was described as being at about 40000' altitude (12192 m) and moving about 40 mph (64 kph) with no visible means of propulsion.
To me, that implies that it was drifting in the wind at that altitude since it had no visible means of propulsion.
I took a look at Ventusky (ventusky.com) to try to get an idea of the wind speed at that altitude so that I could know whether 40 mph (64 kph) made any sense.
Ventusky gives wind information at various altitudes though I have no idea how accurate the information may be. I checked the available altitudes for one close to 40000 feet and found a listing for 12000 m (39370 feet). That's close enough for the girls we go with as the old-timers always said.
For several days before the reported shoot-down (use the day selector at the bottom of the screen to see data for each day and the slider for time of day) the reported wind speeds were in the range of 20-35 mph (32-56 kph). As they say, close enough for the girls we go with especially when you consider the likely observational error associated with estimations made from a moving jet.
The first reported sighting of that object was over Nome, Alaska and it was tracked across Alaska until the shoot-down just off the north coast in the Prudhoe Bay area or just east of it.
Backtracking along the jet stream into China, the most likely source for the object, I decided that there was probably a balloon launch facility in north-eastern China, possibly near Harbin since a launch in that city will carry an object along that general route. It was just a guess and someone in one of those twitter threads actually found a balloon launch facility to the southwest of Harbin, near Hohhot that is a much better candidate for the origination point of these objects.
Anyway. It was fun looking at all this stuff but to me, these last two cylindrical things are balloons. The question about whether the balloons serve some intelligence gathering function for the Chinese will likely be answered in the coming days.
Maybe penetration testing, testing response times. Could even be trying to monitor various network traffic and communications signals in relation to activities around responses. Lots of possibilities, it's hard not to speculate.
Specifically, this could be amazing to map out non-public comms, radar and AA systems. This could provide the sort of information you'd want for a future military conflict. I hope I'm completely wrong about this.
You are probably not wrong about this since we know China wants to take Taiwan at some point in the future. It makes sense that they would map out any vulnerabilities of potential adversaries who might be involved in defending Taiwan since the battle for Taiwan will not be easy.
There is some truth to this. We don't want to have to find out though since this will go nuclear as soon as military operations start to affect mainland China. They will launch first and then hope for the best. They know they will only have one shot at it.
There will be no time for the "free world" to meet and decide how to respond since it will be every man for himself at that point. There will be no true winners.
When the dust settles, most of the world's population, including everyone north of the equator, will be dealing with the fallout of something that did not have to happen.
If anything of American society remains then they will find themselves needing to manage their own affairs with no central government or services to fall back on. Other adversaries may try to land forces here to sweep across the nation while we are down. It will be up to us to stop them and to restore some local semblance of law and order so that we can all organize a strong defense.
China doesn't have the industrial ability to build a navy strong enough to counter the US Navy so they have to carry out these intelligence operations in order to identify any exploitable weaknesses in communications infrastructure, military capabilities, etc. They have the manpower that they can call on to conduct a large scale invasion of Taiwan but they have no way at the moment to transport them to the island in large enough numbers to hold a beachhead. They are rapidly expanding their landing craft fleet though and their "civilian" navy is large. We need to arm Taiwan to the point where it is obvious that any attempt to float an invasion fleet across the straights will be a disaster. We also need to maintain regular patrols through the South China Sea including past all of the recently fortified islands claimed and manned by China so that we have the assets in position to mount a credible defense and to deny China the opportunity to prevent reinforcements or to blockade the island.
We have gamed this many times over the years but all things considered, we wasted the opportunity to prevent it entirely. Had we taken economic steps to prevent the growth of China's economy and the strong dependence of the west on cheap Chinese products by bringing industries back onshore in the US and Europe then we could have moderated their growth in a more controlled fashion instead of dumping cash into their economy that effectively set us up as the financiers of our own destruction. Today, we are looking at the near certainty, unless Xinping is replaced, of a war with China after several decades of allowing them to make up a huge technological deficit by stealing intellectual property on a huge scale so they could turn it against us. We can always strike first. That would make us the asshole though so it is better that we exhaust every other option before pushing those other buttons while we scramble to produce things we developed years ago but put on the back burner since there was no pressing need for them against less capable adversaries.
Like the Russians, China can throw millions of men at any adversary and many of those men know, because of the One Child policy, that there is a demographic situation where they will never marry or have families. The next 10 years will be quite interesting.
> China doesn't have the industrial ability to build a navy strong enough to counter the US Navy . . .
and, yet, . . .
As China Expands Its Fleets, US Analysts Call for Catch-up Efforts
The disparity has prompted U.S. maritime experts to call for a "Ships Act" comparable to the recently enacted "Chips Act" that supports the return of chip manufacturing to the United States.
..
Bryan McGrath, managing director at The FerryBridge Group, told VOA Mandarin that the shipbuilding bases of the U.S. and China are simply not comparable.
"The Chinese industrial base is a behemoth, and the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base is freakishly undersized as a function of the size of America's economy and its influence in the world," McGrath said.
As of 2020, the U.S. Navy had 297 battle force ships, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. China surpassed the U.S. as the world's largest navy with an inventory of about 355 vessels, according to a U.S. Defense Department report released in 2021. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) projects that China will have 400 battle force ships by 2025 and 425 by 2030.
This is true and I actually read that report so I obviously forgot about all that.
The one thing that is not covered well there is the type of ships in the Chinese versus US Navy. Even with fewer ships we have more tonnage. A large part of the Chinese Navy consists of coastal defense assets which are smaller vessels. With that said they do have excellent anti-ship defenses and are gaming to be able to manage a conflict where we bring our carriers and air assets to bear.
This is the reason that we have inked defense agreements in the region. Spreading the costs of defending the free passage of goods through the South China Sea with other nations allows us an opportunity to build a larger, more modern navy and buys time.
We should be investing in naval assets too since some of the most recent programs ended up with us buying fewer vessels than originally contracted and with those vessels being ill suited for the original task they were designed to handle.
As the VOA article mentions, we will likely run into problems mobilizing for a ship-building effort since it already is hard enough to find skilled workers (welders, etc) for industries that employ most of them today like the pipeline and oil and gas industry. A return to teaching trades in high school would be a great start that would pay dividends nearly immediately as the first class graduates into the work force.
Feel free to double check everything I posted. I could be totally wrong about any or all of it. Thanks.
I'm Australian and aware that China buys from our state alone (Western Australia) 16x more iron ore per annum than the US has ever managed to produce in a year .. this figure alone undercuts many arguments about China's perceived industrial capacity.
They are easily capable (for example) of producing 14x more shit steel than the max US steel capacity .. while at the same time producing 2x the max US quality steel capacity.
Any China-US naval engagement could very well see a new strategic inflection in any case.
Theres's been ironclad supremacy, an age of battleships, and a time of carriers as king.
China has put up (and taken down) several videos of highly coordinated unmanned drone swarms, in the air, on water, under water.
Very large swarms of drones that are nothing but sensors, engines and explosives that can react and maneuver are very asymmetric in cost.
Ehh, why, in the 80s and 90s, should anyone have assumed that an economically advancing China would continue to be authoritarian and illiberal? Genuine question. It's easy to say globalization and free trade didn't deliver on the democracy and international norms promise in hindsight, but was there much reason to doubt that idea before it was too late?
Not very fun fact: Japan tried to use the jet stream to bomb America via incendiary balloon. It was largely unsuccessful of course, but still a creative way of bridging the Pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb?wprov=sfla1
I went down a shallow rabbit hole about this event. The man who survived the Fu-Go Balloon Bomb event in Oregon, Reverend Artchie Mitchell, went on to be captured, as a Christian missionary, by the Viet Cong in 1962 and he was never seen again. Given enough time lightning strikes the same spot more than once, I guess.
Which was censored until after war because the idea that CONUS is vunerable to JP attacks is itself significant. Media spasms around PRC balloons reflect that. Except with current capabilities, it won't be 9000 primitive balloons with single digit % arrival rates and ineffective incendiary payloads but 100,000s of modern balloons with high chance of arrival and potential to deliver guided bombs. Possibly sufficient to satuate CONUS defenses and loiter around to hit strategic targets of opportunity. The unspoken narrative behind PRC sending cheap balloons over CONUS is PRC sending thousands of cheap bombs over CONUS. The conniption over PRC hypersonics was also over US homeland vunerability, but the balloons IMO represent a new type of vunerability both in scale and economics of defense.
US warplanners considers sending 100,000s of bombs on PRC mainland targets in case of TW scenario all the time. Is that 10D thinking? It's basic escalation dynamics of recipricating homeland attacks with home land attacks, the difference is up until recently CONUS has been shielded from both precise and volume of long range strikes from her adversaries, largely due to technologic limitations, enabling US to project power with impunity. This is PRC incrementally establishing mutual homeland vunerability to deter US from messing in her back yard. It's trying to deter US from intervening in TW by raising costs to CONUS, just like US is trying to deter PRC from moving on TW by raising cost to PRC mainland. Except until recently, only PRC had to factor in homeland attacks due to asymmetric US power projection capabilities. More and more, and for the first time since revolutionary war, US now has to factor in serious homeland attacks with respect to PRC. Demonstrating CONUS is vunerable, especially if it influences public thinking, is as strategic as it gets. Lots of Americans are still operating off the notion that Fortress America is impervious and US mil actions abroad stays abroad, and generally that's true, until it's not.
Ability to generate simultaneous bandwith of 100,000s of fires is also significant, most conventional long range strike / projection platforms are severely limited in how much fire they can deliver / unit of time. It's not feasible to sortie past limit of carriers or air bases, but the amount of balloons (or land based missiles) that can be delivered is much easier to scale, which means it's easier to satuate defenses. At the end of the day PLA is going to have very limited traditional methods of projecting power to CONUS (lack of carriers, or local basing), so they're going to latch onto any asymmetric platforms that can reliably bring war to CONUS. TBH I was not really anticipating mass balloons, and PLA planners probably weren't either. But the idea of hitting strategic targets with expensive long range missiles (i.e. prompt global strike) is something PLA is pursuing, now I imagine PLA planners are likely going to explore the virtues of cheap balloons that can scale more economically than missiles.
If you send 100,000 bomb-balloons at your nuclear-triad-possessing enemy you have telegraphed the world’s worst sneak attack. You’d better get it over with and try your first strike after launching your balloons because your enemy will probably initiate one against you.
Balloons won't be used for sneak attacks, hypersonics might. Regardless, nuclear powers also don't launch on warning post second strike, PRC has no first use, US has launch on attack, both postures has built in allowances for conventional war. PRC isn't going to nuke US for homeland strikes and vice versa until things get existential. And the greater purpose is in deterrence - give PRC option to move on TW with relative military impunity like RU on UKR or US in middle east.
I think this is a neat idea in theory, but for any long term value to be gained, a military power would need to practice generating at least medium-scale sorties many times to know if this strategy was really viable, and specifically, since this strategy is so reliant on scale and weather - you would need to also test launching at some scale at your actual target (even with dummy payloads) prior to the real attack (i.e.: what if once you get to a wave that's 10k/100k strong, they start to mess with your weather projections?)
Basically, I think this is a strategy that's effective at scaring the US citizenry, but it is such a bad idea in practice no good adversary would choose this instead of the usual nuclear deterrent.
US seems invested in interceding in PRC-TW scenario, nuclear deterent will set ceiling of escalation but conventional deterrent raises floor of US particapation. PRC needs credible conventional CONUS vunerability to deter US conventional intervention in first place instead of relying on nuclear to limit scope of conventional war that current US admin/blob still thinks can be fought.
A bunch of incendiary balloons in a dry windy summer on the west coast would be rather messy for a rather large area. We've already had a million+ acres per year burning as it is. Wouldn't be hard to burn 10M+ acres that way. That said, I do believe we'd consider that an outright act of war if it wasn't in a middle of a war.
Of course on all things relate to fire it seems like the US has been about dumb as possible. 99% Invisible podcast episode 'built to burn' goes over this rather well.
“ Another official from the Department of Defense told the New York Times that the object broke into pieces when it hit the frozen sea” - Guardian article on the Alaska downing
How could a balloon break into pieces? Doesn’t it need to be made of flexible material?
Edit: WSJ is now reporting unnamed sources confirmed Alaska was a metallic balloon w suspended payload.
Perhaps at the temperatures in that area the material used to construct the balloon becomes brittle enough to shatter. I didn't look at temperature data from that altitude to see whether common materials would lose flexibility.
the chinese have been spying on us navy ships for a long time with drones. the public is just becoming aware because there was a big ufo awareness campaign that ran online for a few years and now we are shooting down their spy crafts.
Yeah. I have been following those reports on The Drive for a long time. It is the most plausible explanation for the events reported by Naval personnel. It still doesn't change the fact that the objects shot down in the last couple of days are probably just balloons or other lighter-than-air crafts. It will be interesting to see how much information the DoD releases.
Exactly. If you are planning challenging your adversary at some future point then it pays to know how they might use their resources to respond and whether those resources are vulnerable to any of your existing assets. China has been making noise about attacking Taiwan and the US has a pact to defend Taiwan. We know that China does not have the capability to carry out this attack right now but there is no way that they would do it without understanding how to defend against US naval and air assets.
Is there a plausible explanation as to why the US government has not announced objects 2 & 3 are balloons, if they are balloons? They call them "objects", yet must know what they are. They wouldn't randomly missile unknowns.
If it's for reasons of secrecy, why announce it at all? The second one was in the middle of nowhere, it could easily have been ignored, or dismissed as a military exercise if anyone had made a fuss about it.
They are now saying they don't know how it was staying airborne (no visible balloon or propulsion) and when they approached to observe it interfered with instrumentation.
The Pentagon confirmed this on Sunday, which is why they said they weren't referring to them as balloons. They did hint that it's likely that the balloon part may be within the object itself to obscure its true nature. I don't think they are saying it's aliens, just that a pass by couldn't determine the exact nature of the object.
Because at least the 2nd object wasn’t, it was described as a cylinder about the size of a car which is where all the UFO tic-tac victory mark memes came from.
> One official told ABC News that the object was “cylindrical and silver-ish gray” and gave the “balloon-like” appearance of floating without “any sort of propulsion”
> The object, shot down on the order of President Joe Biden, was flying at a high altitude of about 40,000ft and was the size of a small car, the White House said.
Could be they thought it was a balloon originally hence the immediate press conference, but now they've received conflicting accounts from the pilots (some reported experiencing sensor interference for example) so they're not sure what they are anymore.
I know this is Hollywood magic thinking, but in the the spirit of no dumb questions, for an object like this, are there no capture devices besides just letting it crash?
I've had the same question, and it seems like there aren't really.
It's too high for helicopters or rotor drones so there's no kind of aircraft that can get their quickly and just hover next to it and retrieve it. (And sending an airship would be so slow and hard to control I'm not sure you could ever get it to reliably intercept in a reasonable amount of time.)
So since you've necessary got to launch something at speed, the only conceivable capture device would seem to necessarily involve 1) a missile to puncture and deflate the balloon/buoyant part, 2) a giant net to wrap the entire thing, and 3) a parachute attached to the net to let it down gently.
But I can't even begin to imagine how you'd get all three elements working together reliably, rather than interfering with each other.
Helicopters are really expensive and that's the only way I can think of getting a delta V low enough so the device, tether or aircraft doesn't shatter/snap on capture.
But more importantly, it sends a message - don't fuck with our airspace, we won't even send body bags
most plausibly it's because it's a balloon carrying something, not just a balloon, and the bit that is worth shooting down is the bit that's not a balloon.
they said the second object was freely drifting and not self-propelled or guided, so whether it's technically a balloon or just something that behaves like a balloon is kind of irrelevant to anybody who isn't working for whatever government department is tasked with analyzing it.
Right, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this thread. Just because we shot down a balloon recently everyone on here seems to assume the two new objects are also balloons.
Sure, but those have wings. A cylinder would have to maintain altitude with some kind of thrust. Lets imagine something like a jet engine oriented vertically. How much flight time do you think that could manage?
I don’t personally think that the 2nd object was a drone at least not a traditional aircraft UAV, I just replied to correct the assumption that drones have a relatively short range and low endurance.
Ofc how they perform in reality vs their published specs no one knows.
In the past at least likes of China and Russia tended to inflate the specs that they made public whilst the west tended to keep the real figures hidden and release far more conservative figures especially when it came to things like maximum speed, range and operational ceiling.
> I feel like I'm thrown back to the 80s, all this military and fear mongering and propaganda and war.
I can't imagine what sort of lens you were using to view the last thirty years, such that those were the peaceful, propaganda-free times and all this shit with balloons is troubling.
The 80s is too far back, probably 2003 was the last peak, but since it became clear Afghanistan and Iraq were disasters the war propaganda complex was muted for years. Remember when Romney said Russia was the US's biggest threat in 2012, and Obama mocked him? Now both parties are back in on the war machine with Ukraine and Taiwan, and the propaganda's running at levels we haven't seen for twenty years.
Leaving Iraq earlier would have been fucked up. We would wrecked the country, destabilized it, raised the problem of sectarian warfare, and then bounced. We still basically did that, but at least helped it with ISIS before leaving.
As it is, we arguably owe it more.
You can see what the result of leaving Afghanistan has been. We should have devoted more resources to nation building there.
For all its flaws, I'd take a democracy over the Soviets in the 80s, or CCP/North Korea today. I can't imagine what the world would have looked like if the Soviets had won the cold war, or if the CCP wins the next.
Most counterfactual fiction in this space has the repressive state continuing to be repressive and normalising "othering" of <bad people> and it's a well trodden path. Robert Harris, Len Deighton, Ira Levin, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Harry Harrison, Ward Moore.
Winning under MAD is moot. There undoubtedly will be losers at scale.
Historians differ if forcing the soviets to bankruptcy was necessarily better than a rapprochement. It worked, sure but like the end of ww1 gave birth to stab in the back rightist views of history, the FSU is now a kleptocracy and minor fights in Africa and the Middle east are now entrenched social cancers.
Afghanistan and the role of US funds to Pakistan on the region. Not a net benefit all told.
cute quote, but meaningless. ask anyone who lived in a communist/ex-soviet state which is better. also why [over 100,000 citizens of east germany](https://www.berlin.de/mauer/en/history/victims-of-the-wall/) tried to escape, many dying in their attempts. its without a doubt which is better.
Never mind the 80s, I feel like I'm thrown back into the 1950s with all this talk of surveillance balloons. What kind of oddball nonsense is China playing. Haven't they heard of satellites?
These articles are making me realise just how much of the HN demographic is Chinese. Either that or simply naive when it comes to international affairs.
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Both parties seems to be ready for a war. At least, the US seems to want it. Time to prop the propaganda agenda and psychologically prepare the minions.
The source article says they would be used to detect Chinese and Russian missiles. But that doesn’t mean the US had any plans to just float them over China or Russia.
It does however suggest a possible explanation that the Chinese are floating them over the US to detect tests of US hypersonics. It does seem like a good reason for it since just about everything else can be seen by spy satellites much more easily.
You raise a good point, and are right that the linked article doesn't explicitly say this. And searching a bit, I didn't find any other clear claims about how these would be used. But is there actually some other way that would make sense to deploy them? At 80,000 feet or so, I think it would only work as a sensor platform if it was close to the area you were monitoring, and being a balloon, it would be difficult to stay at an exact location just outside of a country's airspace.
The context is that US is developing high altitude balloons for detecting hyper-sonic weapons. Developing a technology and actively using in another country's airspace are quite different things, so it's not really that surprising that articles don't find it important to include.
I present to you Tu-128, the USSR's dedicated NATO balloon buster [0]. US found it quite funny to send in hundreds of balloons to reconnoitre and send a message[1][2].
This is third shoot down we’ve been told about. First was the Chinese balloon, second was the small less maneuverable vehicle off of Alaska, and this third one in Canadian airspace. Feels like some cold conflict we’ve been unaware of is heating up.
Yup, a switch has been flipped. Actions that may or may not have happened in the past, and are happening now, are no longer being tolerated. Between this and the CHIPS act I expect the current divestment from China to go from a trickle to flood..
UFOs are just spy drones with sensor jammers and detectors that are designed to look strange and unnerving to pilots so they will scope them out. Pilots are trained NOT to go by them or engage with them for fear of secrets leaking.
I think what changed is that the US decided to stop ignoring the "UFO"s. The Ukraine war has shown how important drones are and it's obvious that drones and balloons will play a huge role in any Taiwanese war.
Adversary drones are spying on the U.S. and the Pentagon is acting like they are UFOs. This gross inaction and the stigma surrounding unexplained aerial phenomena has led to a massive failure in U.S. military intelligence. It is likely that a wide array of explanations exist for the UFO mystery, and America's prevailing cultural issues and the general stigma surrounding UFOs was successfully targeted and leveraged by our adversaries. The U.S. Navy has a program of record for a Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors, or NEMESIS, which is a quantum leap in electronic warfare. There have been reports of large drone swarms spotted over the U.S. and its outlying territories, especially near strategic installations. The U.S. Navy's top uniformed officer says the craft involved in the 2019 incidents off of Southern California remain unidentified. It is possible that the Pentagon's investigations into these matters is a lack of real expertise to properly evaluate the evidence. Step one is to admit that we have a major drone problem and fund a real intelligence fusion center to work these cases.
> Does anyone else think these have been happening a long time but now they make front paper news because of recent activities?
Possibly. I wouldn't use that information to be overly dismissive of the importance of the news. "Well shit, let's just start shooting them down" is a newsworthy change in a government's policy regardless of what it applies to.
If a couple of (supposedly bad and kinda not working) chinese spy baloons were suffient to suddenly make the US go nuts, and spend a lot of defense budget scrambling fighters around and shooting down UFOs, that was a lot of bang for the buck.
> spend a lot of defense budget scrambling fighters around and shooting down UFOs
I doubt if the expenditure has been significant. The US has a lot of air to air missiles, pilots who need flight time, etc., and a lot of that stuff is a sunk cost.
There could potentially be a big increase in cost in the days that follow, for the US and for Canada. It's valuable, fragile human beings who need to do dangerous things like dive for surveillance balloon parts, or go out onto the ice to collect them, but the cost of scrambling some fighters and firing some Sidewinders by itself can't be that high. If scrambling fighters was all there was to it, the costs could probably be rationalized as a valuable training exercise.
I would venture to guess that if you tried to reduce everything to a dollar cost, the cost to the civilian economy of closing a portion of the airspace on the East Coast a few days ago to facilitate the interception of the balloon was higher than the cost of all these military operations to date.
> make the US go nuts
Yes, measured by the whole "make the Americans act crazy" metric, they're doing great. It's like Judo or something: we Americans just need a little push...
No, it's to find out how little/much/slow/fast you need to be before the USA detects it and starts launching interceptors.
Or, if the USA just shots down everything once it enters its territory, future dirt cheap, "don't even have to be smart" bio/chemical weapons platform.
The demonization of China is politically advantageous. Publicizing incursions like this assists in the demonization (to be clear, it is think it’s warranted — the amount is espionage perpetrated by China on the US, corporate and cyber and governmental, Is insane)
Forced labour camps, genocide, authoritarian, cyber warfare against other nations, salami slicing neighbours, purposefully violating air space over other nations. I don't think China needs any demonisation. This is just showing its reality.
If anything both sides of the political spectrum doesn't want to get into showing China as the demon because unlike the previous cold war, they are not sure if they can win it or even force a draw. China is too powerful as it stands and getting more powerful as years pass while the current superpower is busy fighting it self with culture wars.
China is weakening. Centralization of power is making the government brittle. The government is deeply unpopular domestically, and there is no outlet for this resentment so it's continually building. China has no real allies; most countries, especially their neighbours, deeply distrust them. China's demographic outlook is terrible; the population has peaked and they've transitioned directly from enforced one-child to hardly anyone wanting more than one child.
China is indeed extremely powerful but it has peaked.
Its basically a pressure cooker. It's strong but there are no relief valves (apart from nationalistic saber rattling on various internal social media). When the pressure is sufficiently built up and the valves aren't sufficient they will blow but that is also why they keep taking provocative measures. To keep the valves working.
China has been providing military support to Russia. With a certain lens, you can see the proxy war growing from Russia and Ukraine to Russia-China and Ukraine-NATO.
I have a strong hunch the US had known about them for a long time and maybe decided it’s better to let them hang out so they can be studied and secretly test measures against them, versus reveal response patterns and weapons capabilities. But something recently has made that calculus change.
Russia did, and I guess still does, this a lot. Flying their planes constantly in European airspace to see if what the response is and also make it more normal occurrence. If they one day attack it’s harder to tell if this again one of those random times or an actual attack
That is one of the reasons the US left the Open Skies treaty, Russia kept breaking the agreement doing things like that making the entire thing a handicap to the US.
> The Soviets recovered many of these balloons and their temperature-resistant and radiation-hardened film[8][9][10] would later be used in the Luna 3 probe to capture the first images of the far side of the Moon.
I don’t know exactly how fast the air currents at 40,000-60,000 feet will drive a balloon, but I would assume that this most recent balloon was already airborne by the time the previous one was discovered. As long as they don’t launch anymore starting last week, this particular episode should wind down peacefully.
As to why use balloons instead of satellites, the most reasonable speculation I’ve seen is that they’re collecting signals intelligence (radio traffic, etc.) which is not accessible from orbital distances.
Large controllable balloons could probably be 'recalled' by instructing them to crash into the ocean. If any more big ones like the first balloon show up, it's probably on purpose.
I was wondering why China wouldn’t include a self-destruct feature. My daughter pointed out that crashing into a US city, even unintentionally, would probably be seen as even more hostile than sending the balloon in the first place. You obviously could choose to self destruct in a remote area or over water, but they may well have considered the escalation risk to be too high if they added potentially destructive capabilities.
WSJ, linked in another comment on this post, “The craft came outfitted with small explosives to disable the surveillance equipment, an official said, though they weren’t detonated.” https://archive.is/oORem#selection-677.0-677.133
Shooting at unidentified and nonresponsive unmanned aircraft over your own airspace has never, ever been considered an act of aggression. That is a ridiculous suggestion.
I was joking in the other thread, that soon people will be buying weather baloons and setting them off "for the lulz" (youtube videos, tiktok, or whatever) :)
That's a good point though - people seem more worked up about the data collection balloon than they are about the little data collector in their pockets.
Nah. I remember this went viral at a point when the first developer betas of iOS 14 (or was if 13?) came out and IOS started reporting clipboard accesses. For a while during those early betas, it seemed TikTok was accessing the clipboard every few minutes. Apparently it turned out to be innocuous—the app qas checking for TikTok links on the clipboard to show them to the user? Something like that.
Other apps had the same issue (I think Telegram comes to mind?)
Actually, though, sling some detcord over the enemy balloon and set it off... (I don't know if detcord really works like that, but I'm pretty sure razor blades won't do the job either. :D)
It's much more likely that the US government is wanting to tell the press, leak to the press and get the spin cycle going. There are spy events all the time, it's rare something gets actually reported proportionally.
I've noticed that as well recently an increase in coverage of Ukraine and antagonistic articles of China while at the same time what could be termed as "anti-woke" media.
Seems to me like the military-propaganda apparatus is spinning up to prepare the populace for a war. But it's more of a gut feeling at this point.
Based on quick search, these have been happening also before.
"an official revealed during a briefing on Saturday that the U.S. was aware of three other instances during the prior administration and one instance earlier in the Biden administration that such an apparatus “transited” the country."
Yeah, but if you read, they didn't know about the incidents until well after they happened; also, they never shared if they were over US coastal waters or over actual US soil.
Also the source was anonymous "a senior U.S. defense official" while ranking members of the previous administration publicly denied that any such incident occurred.
It wasn't anonymous, it was confirmed by committee members that deal with this topic. The White House/DoD has also offered to brief the previous administration members on the topic. The entire premise is that the previous administration just didn't know about it because they only just discovered this occurred (I assume by putting together multiple pieces of evidence from the various intelligence apparatus.) Keep in mind there are various new programs dealing with this exact topic to monitor unknown arial crafts over US assets. So of course, the previous administration could confidently deny they were briefed on it, because no one has even claimed the previous administration was ever briefed on it.
Anytime the media gets focused on unimportant things like this, I'm looking to see what the actual news is? Is it the Ohio train thing? Covid treatment stuff? Who knows?
Because of our shared landmass USA and Canada cooperate closely via NORAD.
The US and Canada have gameplanned for all sorts of scenarios similar to this, and up to and including full nuclear war. They have established playbooks for alllllll kinds of scenarios. Because when shit goes down, you there is NO TIME to gameplan. No, you pull binder #568 off of the shelf and get to work executing gameplan #568, "US jets pursue craft into Canada" or whatever.
There is a playbook for this kind of thing, and they are following it. The playbook possibly does include some kind of explicit authorization from the Canadian PM for the final shootdown.
So in reality this is certainly more "Trudeau authorized it" than "ordered it", because the US and Canada definitely can't order each other do things. However, for obvious optics purposes, they phrased it as "Trudeau ordered the shootdown." Because it looks sort of weak to the untrained eye if Trudeau just sort of allowed it.
However, the actual wording is sort of irrelevant. The reality is that it was a fairly seamless bit of cooperation between two close allies.
Authorize US jets you mean? Canada is a close US ally, norad allows both US and Canada to learn about the object at the same time, and US may have offered to shoot it down with Canada’s permission since we probably have some new patrols in the area since Friday’s ballon
> […] and US may have offered to shoot it down with Canada’s permission since we probably have some new patrols in the area since Friday’s ballon
The US was monitoring it on Friday:
> A statement from Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the object shot down on Saturday was first noticed over Alaska on Friday evening. Two F-22 fighter jets “monitored the object” with the help of the Alaska Air National Guard, Ryder’s statement said, “tracking it closely and taking time to characterize the nature of the object.”
> Defence Minister Anita Anand said in a news conference the "small, cylindrical object" was about 40,000 feet above ground and downed — due to possible risks to civilian aviation — at around 3:40 p.m. ET about 100 miles from the U.S. border in central Yukon.
> A senior government source with direct knowledge of the situation told CBC News that the Canadian government was first alerted to the object Friday night when it was still travelling through Alaska.
> The source added the object crossed into Yukon on Saturday morning and Trudeau ordered the shoot down by whichever country arrived at it first.
So it looks like the US 'took too long' to decide to shoot it down, and once it crossed the border Canada had final authorization. The US jets just happened to be closer (CA jets were scrambled as well).
A close enough ally that the US was willing to sell nuclear tipped SAMs to Canada during the cold war. The only reason it didn't happen is because the general public flipped shit when they found out about the plan.
It's not so much that he commanded US jets, he gave an order for the object to be shot down by the first able aircraft, and included authorization for that to be US aircraft. I don't anything is implying that the US pilot bypassed US chain of command to do so. Trudeau had obviously been discussing strategy with the US, but it's important for Canadian sovereignty for the order to come from Canada.
I think so; the volume of comments implying that either:
1. The US is just amplifying this to justify a war
2. The balloons are totally civilian
3. Aliens
Strike me as a relatively coarse influence campaign, notable mainly for its volume. Not sure if the ramp up is to save face, or part of a larger effort. Similar efforts were notable before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Taiwan has enough missiles to sink and shoot down a significant portion of China's navy and air-force. This would then open them up to attacks from India or Vietnam to claim territory currently under dispute, and create openings for China's rivals to destabilize their government by agitating existing aggrieved political minorities towards action.
China getting serious over Taiwan would be them creating deeper ties with Taiwan's economy and ruling body, and just waiting a few decades.
Seriously! All official statements so far have been pretty clear that they're not labeling it a balloon (yet).
A CNN correspondent [0] just claimed that there were conflicting statements from the pilots that it interfered with their sensors as they approached it. And that they couldn't figure out how it was staying in the air. I have no idea where she got those updates, but it certainly adds mystery to the situation.
Because we very famously shot down a balloon and everyone is talking about the balloon that we shot down from the air and now there's more objects being shot down from the air and everyone is talking about it.
The government is apparently not saying what these objects were, so people are assuming they're balloons.
Asked if was "balloon-like," the official said, "All I say is that it wasn't 'flying' with any sort of propulsion, so if that is 'balloon-like' well -- we just don't have enough at this point."
I'm convinced that's why the balloons haven't been shot down in the past. Learning our detection abilities is probably way more important for China than anything they would be able to take a picture of.
We spent multiple days soaking information from them and monitoring them from high altitude. We almost definitely know more about them than they know about our defenses.
The immediate assumption that the Americans are being snookered comes off like reflexive anti-Americanism.
People can see these with the naked eye (or with cameras). If our sophisticated defense systems are failing to match the naked eye... something is wrong.
My understanding is that only the balloon from last week was huge and easy to see with the human eye. I believe the other UAFs are much smaller. Also there were 3 or 4 during the Trump administration and noone noticed them with their naked eye
People think they notice lots of things with their naked eyes all the time and it doesn't make the news. Reports this week were that they didn't detect them in transit at the time, we only found out after the fact.
Another plausible theory is the Trump administration covered it up because of their deference to Xi in early 2020 (see: comments on COVID being under control).
I'm not a radar expert, but maybe someone who is can enlighten us?
They can detect an incoming missile, so I don't see the problem. Maybe the one today IS a lot smaller; I don't think we're getting a whole lot of details on that.
As for the money: definitely. The same would be true of drones.
From someone that has done a much smaller balloon launch, it's not the balloon that gets detected as much as the payload. Our civilian weather balloon launch had a metallic reflector in line specifically to make it more visible on radar. The images I've seen of the payload under the large balloon from last week didn't look all that stealthy in shape, but I have no idea what it was made from? If it was made of plastic, would that reflect radar?
The USAF (and any functional air force) has lots of flight time budgeted for its pilots: for training, patrols, etc.
Active duty pilots must fly X number of hours per month to maintain their fight status. Essentially, they practice like athletes (because they are literally athletes, among other things)
So intercepts like these, and even silly stuff like sports event flyovers, come out of their existing budgets.
To actually cost us money in some meaningful way they'd have to send over extremely large quantities of drones that absolutely blow out the existing budgets for our bases.
The missiles are expensive, of course: $400K a pop for those AIM-9X. But the budget for the USAF is ~$160B/year, so again, drop in the bucket.
So far they're offering good sport for the USAF. I'm glad they decided to take action and shoot'em down instead of letting them pass undisturbed through US airspace. This should send a clear message to uncle Xi to keep his lantern festival at home.
Then stop using expensive missiles to pop a balloon. Are we so scared of a balloon to get into gun range? A short burst of 20mm would be pretty cheap compared to an AIM-9
Ordinance has a best used by if not a shelf life. Use it or lose it probably matters to someone.
Missiles can detonate near a painted target, instead of needing direct contact. If the thing being exploded is hazardous (when exploded), you don't want to be flying nearby.
This is not an exercise. Combat time is valuable, even if shooting down drones/balloons.
Politically popular optics. Everyone likes a boom, just to be sure. What happens if it falls to the ground and on to someone or someone grabs the wreckage or worse, it's never found? Bad optics.
The common tactic of dismissing high stakes situations as idiotic, is intellectually lazy.
I was wondering if modern planes even still had ballistic weapons, since engagement range for missiles is measured in miles. For anyone else wondering, according to [0] they still have guns, since most missiles have a minimum engagement range so there is still a need for short range weapons.
I think its usually a bad bet to assume to know better than military intelligence that has been circling these balloons for several days now (and yes, they were right about Iraq, it just was ignored as pretext to invade)
My gut feeling, having read all about how the balloon was NBD, and it wasn't worth the risk of shooting down over land, it happens all the time, etc., was that the publicity of an airspace incursion this time around required a response along the lines of, "F*CK YOUR BALLOON!".
"Some pilots said the object “interfered with their sensors” on the planes"
"Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet."
That sounds vaguely similar to the one purportedly shot down over Russia last month:
"Vasily Golubev, the governor of Rostov oblast, wrote on Telegram that a "small-size object in the shape of a ball" had been discovered flying "in the wind" at an altitude of around one and a half miles on January 3."
Any connection to the spherical metallic ball UFO caught over Iraq by U.S. reconnaissance aircraft in 2016?
If we take one question mark from each event, we can construct a very spooky narrative. But none of the question marks, on their own, seem all that peculiar.
HN vibe when ET life is finally acknowledged by government: “ is it just me or does this sound unremarkable? I mean think about it the universe is so big. We’ve always welcomed open minded scientific inquiry on this forum, I don’t think any of us ever seriously doubted we’d eventually find ET life. Why is this on front page? Let’s get back to bickering over the latest shiny tech fad.” Hehe
1. It is lowest of the low rhetoric to argue from what a hypothetical exaggerated caricature in a hypothetical situation would say. If you want to upset people then keep doing it, but I advise punching above the belt.
2. We've got a bunch of balloons in the air. Balloons are a technology dating back to before they started keeping records [0]. If it turns out people aren't registering every single balloon flight with every government then that isn't really a surprise. Drones are in the mix now too.
2b. People are going to use balloons to spy on each other. That isn't new. Governments spy on everything all the time. These comments are probably being logged in a super-database somewhere in the NSA, in the GRU and the Chinese Ministry of State Security. While it makes a good story it is not evidence of change unless someone does the legwork to show that it wasn't just a slow news week.
That's like you saying you want to be above everyone else and be the "highest of the high", and while trying to upset people with this (or obliviously thinking you "won't" because it must be your "natural place above everyone" and they'll just accept and worship you for it, haha...how ridiculous!), you try to chastise other's for wanting to upset people. This is the same pathology where someone who needs to dominate, but doesn't know how to achieve, has to invent and fabricate "wrongs" everywhere so they can "legitimize" going after people and trying abusing them. Hahah, the very punching above the belt that you advise, is something you would never do, because you'd lose. So you have to "skew the field" and do the very same "hypothetical exaggerated caricature" (really...not just a caricature? an exaggerated caricatured? are you sure?) that you try to blame someone else doing, is what you do!!! Hahaha. Ridiculous.
Anyway your point is invalid. The situation I described is exactly the HN vibe you see. Hypocritical, lacking in self awareness, desperate to be seen as smart...well, hey...whaddayouknow...exactly like what you've displayed here. Hmmm, not a caricature at all (tho I admit it was satirical) and also not intended at everyone! Totes makes sense now that the person most wounded by that satire and thus prompted to reply would be the person most likely to demonstrate the very same! Thank you for revealing yourself! :) ;P xx ;p
All your other points are valid but uninteresting, they don't disprove anything. But yeah...this whole thing seems like a distraction for the current tumult. There's 1000s of other cases if you're interested in something real...but you're probably not, but second I'm guessing maybe you are into this (maybe you're just too scared to admit it in public?)...anyway whatevs...this thing's probably a distraction. Well except for your comments, they just revealed you. But, yeah, the balloon thing: probably a distraction.
Just because you found a branch of wood in front of you doesn't imply that you must be living in the forest.
Just because we found metallic balls doesn't mean it must be alien. It's far more likely an SCO state that's spying on the US.
Additionally, the last fictious alien event series around Roswell turned out to be the A12 prototype (aka SR-71 Blackbird) that was being tested for its radar stealth capabilities.
Yet none of those tinfoil hats ever realized that...so...here we are, with "aliens" supposedly using a crappy technology like a balloon instead of warp-drive capable space ships. Because you know, space can be travelled in a balloon and there must be oxygen of identical density on every single habitable planet /s
The only tinfoil hats are you guys, these days. Tin foil on your head keeps the new info from getting in. So you can protect the existing "everything is bland and normal" cognitive bias. (I'm not attacking, it's not you-personal---it's a whole phenomena of people who wanna believe the boring shit, and never anything else).
Me looking at your first 3 lines:
...Uhuh...
...Good...
...WTF!?! Roswell was A12?!
Come on man, you can't believe that hype. Even the "tinfoil hat space weather balloon" bs cover story, has a guy holding a telegraph memo. You can zoom in on that memo and clearly make out a communique that details the coverup.
Also, read Corso's Day After Roswell (available in 1 click probably). It details an extensive chronology for the events of the crash, initial unsanctioned info release, and subsequent coverup and reverse engineering efforts.
It's just nuts to wave it away with a magical swoosh of your hands and say, "It was A12, nuff said." Some disinfo agent probably fed that story to the press, just like with the balloon. Please, please, please read more before you speak more about this. Actually read it for yourself, not just the "internet crib" notes and then make up your mind to confirm your existing bias because some 12-year-old commenter said "Contains many logical fallacies" on Goodreads or whatever. I don't know if there's a goodreads, don't go lookin' for it--just read more please!!! :P :) xx ;p
I'm not even saying these latest things are legit (probably just disinfo distraction)--but there's so many others--so, you know, look into it!
Doesn't strike me as weird at all. Saying you shot some unidentified unmanned stuff out of the sky sends a much different message than saying you possibly shot an unidentified someone out of the sky.
Not wanting to disclose what it was isn't the same as being fine with any interpretation of what was done.
Balloons are treated differently under the Chicago convention. There’s a little bit more leeway for balloons when it comes to overflights on sovereign territory.
Before we jump to alien spacecraft, the US Government was quite forthcoming about this even, so let's see what they say when they gather up all the wreckage and analyze it.
We're rolling into an election season, and the minority party loves conspiracies. I have a good feeling that information will be shared shortly about what they shot down.
Tangentially related, but this site (and its editor, Tyler Rogoway) are my go-to news source for anything military aviation related. Consistently great reporting. He’s worth a follow on Twitter [0] if this sort of thing is of any interest to you.
They've been doing it for a few years. The US did it in the 50's. The reason we're talking about them is two fold: 1) the "first" one had such a massive payload that people could see the object from the ground. People were posting a bunch online even before the media picked it up. 2) It became a political issue about the US's strength in response to China. That amplifies the former to be a larger and broader discussion(s).
This could also indicate China's surveillance capabilities. Need to use balloons to get high resolution rather than relying on satellite imagery (kinda why we don't really use U2s anymore and why that Trump tweet was seen as a big deal). It could also be trolling. It could also be testing (including of cameras that would be put on satellites). It is hard to say anything with certainty tbh. Militaries work in secrecy and that's why information is so valuable (despite what many think). But the objects will be recovered and you'd be surprised what can be reverse engineered from an exploded pile of scrap.
The US Government shooting down an Unidentified Flying Object sounds like the start of a science fiction film. If there were ever a bad time and place for actual aliens to come visit...
The most interesting thing to me is that the US federal government isn’t calling them “balloons” - or even “lighter than air craft”. It leaves open a lot of conspiracy type theories, and I just don’t see the motivation to do that
It “feels” to me like there’s something more than US/China brinksmanship going on.
> Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”
Let's say we're at war with Alpha Centaury. They'll get news of the downing of their flying cylinder in 2027 and will retaliate in 2032. If they can't send much more than a few small ships the logistic is pretty bad for them. Even if they are loaded with nukes, it's not much damage on the planetary scale. If they can send one thousand, it's a different matter.
What will happen when a real alien UFO comes. Nobody will care. Ah look, another bloody unoriginal, booring fake spaceship. People will shout: GO HOME! Not interested! :DDD
I wonder what the cost is of sending such a balloon vs shooting it down. If I was China I would be sending thousands of these. It's not going to cause an all out war, but it does impose some security threat which should be dealt with and can't be ignored.
This is the wrong question. Large militaries spend a fortune anyway on firing ordnance anyway for training purposes. Doing so in actually uncertain conditions is in many ways more valuable than pre-planned exercises. There's also a political attention focusing effect that allows rapid realignment of priorities away from status0quo maintenance towards novel readiness postures. So in strategic terms, it can be a net benefit rather than a net cost.
The flip side of this is adversarial observer(s) can learn all sorts of things about readiness, detection networks, response times, and tactical doctrine if well-prepared in advance to acquire and integrate that information.
Kinda wish I had a way to bet on the popularity of search terms because I can practically hear the rattle of doctrinal articles being furiously drafted at military institutions of higher learning right now.
It might not be the best thing to do our training with complex adversarial information gathering devices rather than more inert target dummies under our control.
I've not looked into it - but it's possible there is zero or negative cost to shooting down a small number of balloons. Imagine each pilot needs X hours of training or to fire Y missiles in training. A couple balloon missions could just replace training exercises, on net saving money because we wouldn't need to setup the target.
Also, the US has a ton of Sidewinder missiles. I thought I saw 20,000 of AIM-9X; it is at least 5,000. The US may have a ton of older variants but it sounded like they need the imaging sensor in the new variant for balloons.
There may be cheaper ways to shoot down balloons. Unguided rockets might work. There are guided rockets that would work better and still be cheap.
I don't see how China would willfully continue send these balloons without expecting a symmetrical escalation. Sure, they managed to send a few relatively undetected until the past recent weeks, but continued attempts would surely produce a physical response from NATO states, whether that's sending balloons of their own or overflying Chinese territory with other aircraft, or increased signals intelligence operations.
The press conference yesterday, the WH spokesman explicitly corrected someone who called the second object a balloon. They're being a bit cagey about whatever it actually is
They didn’t say they weren’t balloons, just that they were calling them “objects” and not balloons. Sure, that could be because they definitely want to emphasize the “we don’t know who owned them” aspect and calling it a balloon would immediately evoke China associations, or maybe they already know they’re not balloons. Either way, they also didn’t say “it wasn’t a balloon”
Used to be that everything was explained away as "probably just a weather balloon".
Now, when asked specifically if it was a balloon, the govt is like "Welllll...I can say it used no method of propulsion known to science, so if that's balloon-like..."
One effect of this is that China now has more concrete information on North American air defense systems. When analyzing hostile events proceed from the effect backwards to determine motivation.
>One official told ABC News that the object was “cylindrical and silver-ish gray” and gave the “balloon-like” appearance of floating without “any sort of propulsion” It was described as "cylindrical and silver-ish gray" and seemed to be floating, a U.S. official said.
Any idea why they refuse to confirm that its a balloon if it is? The pilots confirmed its "unmanned" but why wont they confirm if its a balloon or not? strange dont you think.
"Some pilots said the object “interfered with their sensors” on the planes"
"Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet."
That sounds vaguely similar to the one purportedly shot down over Russia last month:
"Vasily Golubev, the governor of Rostov oblast, wrote on Telegram that a "small-size object in the shape of a ball" had been discovered flying "in the wind" at an altitude of around one and a half miles on January 3."
Any connection to the spherical metallic ball UFO caught over Iraq by U.S. reconnaissance aircraft in 2016?
> ffs, Do the downvotes mean "obviously there is" or "obviously there isn't"?
Downvotes on HN are handed out like candy to mean anything. Some people think obviously there is, and so downvote, others will think there isn't and downvote. Others think this is a stupid idea and will downvote. Others might think it's a good idea but disagree with the way you framed to the question
I wouldn't really worry too much about the votes here. They mean nothing.
I predict I will get downvoted on this comment, I don't know what it's meant to signify.
> The Pentagon said the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) detected the object over Alaska late Friday evening. U.S. fighter jets from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, monitored the object as it crossed over into Canadian airspace, where Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joined the formation.
I did read the article, yes. It was the US plane that did the actual take down. Of course RCAF planes joined, how much more pathetic would it have been if only foreign planes did the work. Did Canadian planes join in the other day when the Alaska one was shot down? Of course not, because the USAF is able to do it on their own, unlike the RCAF, which was my original point.
Because that's how it's supposed to work. The US and Canada work together to defend their combined airspace. They're literally under the same chain of command, hence "NORAD". It would be rather inefficient to set that up and then have both countries redundantly responding everywhere.
There's no reason for a country to be able to defend their airspace without the help of their allies? That's a defensible viewpoint of course, but the opposite is too.
Fair enough. It appears to me that Canadian fighters could have done it (see my other reply to the articles you posted), but it ultimately doesn't matter whether a US or Canadian plane did so, because air defense is shared. Recall that during the flight there was a period when a possible second balloon had been detected, and a US General, via NORAD, ordered Canadian CF-18s to search for it, as they were most readily able to respond.
If for some reason Canada felt it could no longer rely on the US for shared air defense, then I would agree with you that it would be important to build up domestic capability to do so independently—but as far as I can tell, that isn't currently a concern.
> Should Canada have acted when it flew into Canadian airspace?
> The short answer, according to military experts, is no.
> "To say that, oh, Canada should have shot this balloon down on its own — that's just silly," said University of Calgary history professor and military historian David Bercuson.
> "That just completely ignores the fact that NORAD exists that we're part of it and have been part of it for almost 80 years now."
And yes, it also says this:
> The operating altitude of Canada's CF-18 Hornet fighter jets is 50,000 feet (15,000 metres), while Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the balloon had been flying at about 60,000 feet (18,000 metres) — potentially out of range for those jets.
However that ignores the fact that the F22 that shot down the balloon did so from 40,000 feet. Using a similar missile, a CF-18 certainly could have done the same.
Your first quote, about "should", is not relevant, as I was talking about "could". The second part, about it being 'potentially out of range for those jets' is indeed what I was talking about.
But it makes no sense. You can't view it like that. Canadian fighter jets are part of the same organization as the American fighter jets.
We don't need to own those jets for them to be useful for us. Why would we buy jets for this purpose if the US is already guarding our skies with jets having this capability ?
Why does it matter ?
Also, the articles you linked aren't saying that "the RCAF can't defend their territory". They are stating capabilities. You are twisting facts or you really don't understand what is going on. Canadian medias are not making that mistake you make.
Even F-35 criticisms don't hold all that much water, at least in terms of cost, given they are actually cheaper than the F-14 was when you adjust for inflation.
Well, it has a very niche application. It is absolutely the best at what it does, but an air superiority/dominance fighter is not typically useful in the conflicts that the US has been involved in since the F-22 entered service. The fact that it has been in service for almost 15 years before seeing any air to air action has meant it has been a cost that is tricky to justify.
"What we don’t yet understand is what sorts of technology are in there,” the official said.
Are we at war with extraterrestrial aliens without even realizing it?! In all Hollywood movies the aliens attack the US first, so this hypothesis checks out.
Canada contributes to North American air defence and it's F-18s (to become F-35s) fly norad missions. Americans also contribute, and obviosuly have more fighters. The article says both countries dispatched planes, the americans ended up shooting it down. It was over the Yukon which is very close to Alaska so not surprising both were present. It would have been a bit odd if it was over saskatoon or something
There's no hard rule about where national airspace ends and space begins.. a lot of times they fly too high for planes to reach, and under certain circumstances balloons are allowed through national airspace.. so if the balloon isn't causing a problem (like being a hazard to air traffic), people just ignore it... weather balloons fly through our airspace all the time.
But the US public saw this massive balloon and demanded it be shot down, even if it caused an international incident.. and luckily nothing serious happened. So now that the cat is out of the bag, we're going to shoot down every balloon that hasnt filed all of the required paperwork that enters out airspace that's reachable by our aircraft... because 1) the public demands it; 2) it'll become political fodder if the white house doesn't; and 3) the international issue it generates is easier for the white house to handle than the political criticism.
If China never sent that large balloon.. they could have sent a dozen more small ones and no one would have cared.. just like we never cared about the 3 during the previous administration.
Edit: bobbyjo pointed out this link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-balloon-carried-antenna...
Since that likely settles the balloons intent… we can add 4) now that we know it’s a spy balloon, we’re going to shoot down all the balloons. Before the large balloon was shot down, no one would have bothered to check. No one is stopping weather balloons at the border. Big mistake on chinas part.