I don’t think it’s trivial though. The slow speed makes use of aircraft tricky. The thing may have countermeasures, like a self-destruct mechanism for if it detects anything approaching it. Perhaps not an explosive self-destruct (flying explosives over a foreign country would be brazen indeed), but perhaps something electronic that scuttles the interesting equipment. And finally, perhaps the response to its presence is precisely what its owners have sent it to observe. An up-close streaming webcam view of a US Air Force operation surely has some value.
Because there's a good chance America's three letter agencies have that figured out already anyway and the thing is technically ten years out of date.
Conducting some potentially risky and costly shootdown of a balloon over US territory seems out of proportion.
Scrambling F-22s to intercept something harmless we understand so deeply makes no sense.
> Conducting some potentially risky and costly shootdown of a balloon over US territory seems out of proportion.
I didn't say anything about shooting it down. But if that's the US's only option, it speaks volumes to how incapable we are of handling such a threat without undue risk to ourselves. Embarrassing if so.
One hypothesis: because we got high-resolution photographs of it, identified it, and we already have comprehensive intelligence and possibly one or more captured examples of the model, so we don’t expect there to be any particular intelligence value of getting another one.
> By not doing so we imply that’s not something we’re capable of.
Or not something we need to do.
Why wouldn't we prioritize simply acquiring the thing for analysis of what sort of optics and other capabilities they're floating through our air-space?
Who cares what "limited additive value" we presume it to have over satellites.
It's a huge psyops value, and a huge opportunity to demonstrate we can trivially acquire and reverse such items if they'd like to send us more of their state of the art surveillance gadgets to take apart.
By not doing so we imply that's not something we're capable of. Not a good look at all.