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.
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.
Yeah, that’s OUR racket!
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.
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...
Be careful how many times you prod the beast.
https://www.ft.com/content/96992b83-58f7-4cdb-9900-a2bc59677...
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 true: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-balloon-carried-antenna...
- 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.
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 S analysis missing strategic calculus on PRC side.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experime...
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.
E:over post limit but Streak Eagle was high performances 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.
And then the Chinese, knowing the US would use it to undersell capabilities…
The F-22 and other "stealth" jets can carry radar reflectors to intentionally make themselves EXTREMELY visible on radar.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/82798/how-does-...
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.
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.
Obviously simplifying, but that's the essence of what ECM is.
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.
This is simply not true. The artificial hysteria manufactured by the pentagon and media is what caused the outrage. No different than the "chinese rocket debris" hysteria the pentagon and media manufactured last spring. Anyone remember that? Or the chinese man-made island hysteria. Or any other anti-china propaganda which turned out to be nonsense.
> weather balloons fly through our airspace all the time.
Exactly. And yet, the pentagon and the media manufactured a crazy propaganda campaign out of it. Is that china's fault?
> 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.
Or maybe there was a reason for the manufactured "outrage"? Has nothing to do with the size of the balloon. Maybe people want the unwashed masses distracted with nonsense. Like they always do.
Imagine if china got hysterical over a silly balloon. We'd be laughing at them. Hopefully china and the rest of the world is having a big laugh at our expense. A supposed superpower losing its mind over a weather balloon. If we weren't a joke before, we are one now. The sad thing is the gov/military/media planned this for days/weeks and this is the best they could do.
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.
What does this mean? I don’t see a reference to tea in the comment you are replying to.
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.
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...
[1] - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/11/politics/unidentified-obj...
"How do you become an F-22 pilot?" - https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/e76db/how_do_you_...
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.
https://www.icao.int/APAC/Documents/edocs/International%20Ai...
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 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.
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!
It's definitely a wierd one.
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.
An appropriate quote to the situation
“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.”
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1927
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
Trying to stir up an impeachment case over the response to the first balloon is just projection as usual from the GOP.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/border-free-biden-republica...
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.