So I’ve been seeing posts on social media asking why we aren’t “shooting down” the Chinese Spy Balloon or otherwise asking why we’re allowing it….
My guess is that it has been assessed and it was decided it isn’t much of a threat – that they wouldn’t really find any more sensitive information than they already have access to (other than, would we allow it – and we apparently are). To test what our reaction would be.
An alternate explanation – one I really don’t like a lot, is that they now have enough political and financial leverage over us that we essentially can’t. That’s a possibility – don’t know for sure.
We should keep in mind that we have satellites orbiting that can get pretty detailed ground information from all over the world. The “sovereignty” argument is pretty weak in light of that.
Another perspective to look at it from is we have satellites and SR 71’s and they have … balloons.
I think the only meat in the sovereignty argument is the fact that it should probably fall under some sort of FAA rule. Though it is flying 18,000 ft higher than typical commercial aircraft, we know where it is, it’s moving relatively slowly, and we can predict exactly where it’s going — so it’s not hard to avoid.
I think that we’ve decided it’s not worth the trouble.
7 replies on “Identified Flying Object”
BWDC members are very smart and have varied areas of expertise. Do we have the ability to assess IF this balloon was NOT carrying a remotely triggered emp device?
Likely not until after we downed it. Unless it could be determined by flying near it with a sophisticated enough drone.
The other question would be, how big an EMP device could you attach to a large air balloon flying at 60K feet, and what would the impact be of the biggest one it could carry? Hopefully we have people in the intelligence community who thought of that.
If not I hope they’re thinking about it now.
Sorry, but it should have been downed the minute it was definitively into our territory. I don’t understand the position that a sovereignty argument is pretty week just because we have satellites. Our sovereign reach goes up to the barrier of space. Satellites are above that.
Should a foreign naval ship be allowed to saunter to within 2 miles of our shore just because we have more air carriers? I don’t think so.
The sovereignty argument is pretty weak because I think we’re splitting hairs by claiming our satellites don’t violate sovereignty by looking down at other nations with cameras and other sensors …. getting all pissy about spying while everybody knows that everybody who can, including and probably especially us … spies.
So the solution is … be observant enough to catch others spying on us and do what it takes to stop it. But whinning that they’re spying is just weak.
Your last point was the one of interest. Is it being allowed to do low-level surveys of important military bases because “we” don’t think it’s a problem, or because “certain’ people don’t want to make it a problem?
My last point is basically that I *HOPE* that we decided the threat was so small that the damage shooting it down would do outweighed that threat – so we didn’t until the physical threat had passed.
I DID bring up the possibility that it was because we’re afraid of them. And I said yup, there it is, and I hope it’s not that.
I also have to wonder if we didn’t try jamming the signal from it. If not, we should think about that capability. It was so slow moving it could have been intercepted and had a jamming device planted on it, or we could have done something to damage the electronics, or perhaps target it with a directed beam of radio signals to jam it … and who knows? Maybe we did. I’m sure we haven’t heard everything. (if we didn’t I hope we’re coming up with something should something like this happen again).
I still think they sent it mainly to see what our reaction would be. That is valuable intelligence.
Will the Chinese get a lot of information from this balloon that they aren’t already getting from satellites? Not in the macro, but at least some detail will fill in. Does this demonstrate that the US is afraid to upset the ccp?
Now there’s a question for ya.