It made them look extremely bureaucratic and slow.

We've been hearing about declassified reports about UFOs for years, indicating ignorance about airspace incursions.

It took a gigantic Chinese balloon slowly traveling uncontested across the country for the government to be sufficiently embarrassed and take action.

I think it's funny. It reminds me of a paragraph in Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" book in chapter six:

There are far-reaching, visionary, and even revolutionary implications to the space program. Communications satellites link up the planet, are central to the global economy, and, through television, routinely convey the essential fact that We live in a global community. Meteorological satellites predict the weather, save lives in hurricanes and tornados, and avoid many billions of dollars in crop losses every year.

Military-reconnaissance and treaty-verification satellites make nations and the global civilization more secure; in a world with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, they calm the hotheads and paranoids on all sides; they are essential tools for survival on a troubled and unpredictable planet.

Have you considered whether that's the point of these stories?

It was a strange few days. The big multi-bus-sized balloon was ignored for several days while it loitered over sensitive areas, then, suddenly, they turned up the sensitivity and may have shot down hobbyist balloons. It's as if NORAD etc., were caught unprepared and had no idea which way to go on this and were waiting for a decision higher up and then went bananas.

Still there's something incongruous, it was claimed the USAF did flybys before shooting them down to ensure the balloons were not misidentified manned balloons.

>The big multi-bus-sized balloon was ignored for several days while it loitered over sensitive areas,

Weren't they escorting the balloon with jets the entire time while pushing nonstop news stories about it? That's ignored?

They didn't escort the balloons. Maybe they made a flyby. A balloon goes with the speed of the wind, the f22 can't go that slow or it falls out of the sky. Especially at the heights we are talking about.

I suspect what the intelligence apparatus would recommend, and what the politicians _do_ for "optics" in any random context, are very different.

No comment on the executive, but the intelligence apparatus? They tracked the Chinese balloon from its launch on Hainan Island. They did their job. Identifying and tracking hobby balloons is somebody else's job.