My “wild conspiracy theory” continues to be that this was a well-known part of mutual spying and was tolerated up until the Chinese screwed up and one was seen by civilians. Now the US has to act surprised, outraged, and responsive, and the whole thing that was being tolerated is being unwound.
The follow-up to my wild conspiracy is wondering what American spy program will be unwound in response.
I have no evidence for this. It’s a long-shot silly theory that I think is at least plausible.
It would be quite a screw up as the balloon over the US was white (not transparent) and massively visible. It was meant to be seen.
The American spy/military program involving Low Earth Orbit satellites is a potential target. SpaceX is launching tons of these satellites over China as part of the Space Development Agency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
This has had me wondering if there is an amateur/civilian role in spotting, (optically or otherwise) high altitude unidentified objects.
I know amateur's are involved in meteorology, aircraft tracking, even spotting asteroids and meteors. It would be awesome to have something pointing up all day with software on the back end — pinging you if a small object traverses its CCD.
An additional, 4d chess theory, is that the US now has something they wish to hide (for the time being) and intentionally leaked the first balloon to the media to cause uproar and “have to shoot them down,” establishing a new boundary with other nations over the use of high-altitude balloons.
The counter position is the idea that these have negligible benefit over satellites, so it is irrelevant. However, why send them if they don’t add new capabilities beyond satellites?
They’re much lower cost than satellites, and if you think you kind find yourself in a war where access to space and/or durable space assets might be denied, good to have an agile backup capability. Might as well just run it to gain expertise and tech.
It might be true that a mass produced balloon would be cheaper than the Sidewinder missiles being used to shoot them down currently, but that is because the missiles are way overkill for taking out a large, slow moving, easy to detect target. A dedicated missile could be way cheaper, whereas large balloons will always be quite expensive since you have to buy the helium.
The US has no armed drones that can operate at such high altitudes, and the UCAVs that do exist don't carry machine guns that could be employed against airborne targets. In theory it would be possible to design or modify such a drone but that would take a while.
Using guns against high-altitude balloons is also challenging just from an aerodynamics standpoint. Stall speeds get pretty high up around FL600 even with large wings, so the airplane would have to fly straight at the target with a high closure rate in order to get within effective gun range. This creates some risk of a mid-air collision. Using a guided missile is much safer.
Problem with shooting them down is that you need a lot of bullets to get the thing to plummet. Helium is always leaking a bit anyway across the entire surface, so adding a few hundred small holes doesn't accomplish as much as one would hope.
In WWI the UK developed AA rounds to shoot down zeppelins and balloons. They were basically tracer rounds with a bigger incendiary charge that ignited when fired and set the skin and hydrogen of balloons on fire.
Modern incendiary and explosive rounds fired by fighter jets aren't effective against them becayse they are only triggered by their impact against a hard target, but I'm sure the DoD could come up with a more effective version pretty quickly if it came down to that.
At their size, the balloon would slowly descend (into public airspace) when shot at with even high calibre jet mounted guns, if i understood correctly.
> when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires fewest assumptions
Occam's razor would say that this is the first time we've noticed a balloon over the US, so we shot it down. Believing that there is an unspoken agreement between the US and China to allow a certain amount of spying and we're only taking a hard stance because the Chinese fucked up and got their balloon noticed by civilians has far more assumptions baked into it.
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To be clear, I'm not saying the theory presented by OP is wrong, I'm just saying that it's not backed by Occam's Razor.
Occams Razor is “pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate” - “Pieces ought not to be positioned without necessity.”
You must you believe spy balloons are [always, sometimes, never] reported to the press, and the press [always, sometimes, never] reports them to the public, and the public [always, sometimes, never] reads the reports.
These pieces are already in position.
Do you really think “you ought not to position pieces without necessity” really favors “always” over sometimes?
Likewise, there is evidence the air balloons fly over America more than the authorities recognize.
What explanation has the fewest unnecessary parts: we have perfect tranferreance of knowledge from Air Force Intelligence to consumers of the press, or the phenomena are witnessing are normal and expected?
Edit: I removed some parts I placed without necessity.
I think the explanation that assumes there is an unspoken secret spying agreement between the two most powerful nations in the world without any evidence has the most unnecessary parts.
A theory I heard (on HN) that resonated with me is that the Chinese did this to provoke a response. Now they can take out US spy satellites in orbit over China in retaliation without it looking unprovoked. The degree of escalation is less than if they'd started with that salvo themselves.
Another theory I heard is that they're poking the US to see what responses would be employed, how quickly detection happens, the radio signal / signals intelligence environment, etc.
Shooting down a spy satellite would be a huge escalation, an act of war. The balloon/objects were shot down in US/Canada airspace. Shooting down unauthorized aircraft is allowed by international law. China also hasn't claimed the later two objects.
Space is regarded similarly to international waters. Spy satellites are free to overfly countries.
Counter space unlikely, but there's no international treaty stipulating where air space ends except fl600, US shooting down PRC assets at fl600+1ft gives PRC openning to mess with US intel gathering in PRC EEZ where at least international law has interpretations for such activities being non innocent passage. I'm not sure if it will get that far since those activities are done by mostly manned platforms, but wouldn't rule out another EP3 tier event or PRC taking more US subsurface monitoring infra in SCS.
How about the military sees UFOs on a regular basis but only started telling the public after this balloon thing? After all, we still don't have any information on the 3 things they've shot down since the original balloon.
If this is true, and we are incapable of identifying a simple balloon, god help us all. Imagine an unfriendly third party did something like hang a nuke off of such a balloon????
He's claiming they're all balloons, and that recovering them has been an intelligence windfall for the US - and Schumer would be in a position to know that. Then again, Schumer has seemed to have an obvious anti-China bias in recent years.
I suspect the language used by the USA/Canada concerning these devices is meant to obscure an uncomfortable truth.
These balloons are significantly cheaper to manufacture and operate than the stealth warplanes that are being used to shoot them down. Instead of manning AWACS and defending them, China could flood the airspace with thousands of these balloons and it would be too expensive to take them all down with our current technology.
By publicizing the F22 mission to shoot that balloon down, we kind of showed our hand and it's a really bad hand. Hence the obfuscating language now being used by officials on the matter.
I don't think Chinese military is so incompetent as to believe that the 1st response demonstrated is indicative of the nth response.
Besides, no one's going to run out of missiles, balloons, or money before this escalates in another fashion. This is a rather short stage, not an indefinite future.
It's hardly a "bad hand". If this continues, look for the US, and the rest of the West, doing direct flights over all of China.
Eg, retaliation in kind.
There's zero difference, as said balloons could have any manner of nefarious purpose. Chemical/bacterial/viral, or just plain spying, airspace is airspace, protecting it is a thing, and China has the bad hand now.
What they were/are doing is well thought out, and technically a good way to spy. But the political aspect shows (again) just how poorly China understands the West.
To burn so much political capital, over so little gain, is immensely stupid, a diplomat's nightmare, and completely incompetent.
I feel for China, I do. A huge chip exists on its shoulder, it spent centuries bowing to the West. The betrayal during WWII likely still stings.
So it wants to flex, to be the big man, to strut its feathers, but wings made of wax only take you so far...
US already overflies what PRC considers to be her territory, if anything this is PRC retaliating in kind - state media had clip in 2020 of shooting down foreign ballon that landed in mainland but simply didnt make a big fuss over it. It's amusing people think PRC is burning political capital when these overflights will likely continue, there's no reason to stop prodding just because western media throwing conniption about their sovereignty getting violated in retaliation. It's more domestic political nightmare for US than international diplomatic nightmare for PRC.
That weapon is only being deployed on a test basis. It is rather short ranged, unable to shoot through clouds, and too heavy for use on aircraft. But the next generation of laser weapons might be usable on tactical aircraft.
I feel like at any kind of scale this would be an incredibly slow type of strategy. An F22 could have been used because initially the DoD had no idea what the thing was and if it was hostile, but as time goes on I really doubt that deploying F22s would continue to be the American strategy. The irony of this strategy is that the US absolutely LVOES to spend money and resources on defense, so this isn't exactly hitting 'em where it hurts.
>These balloons are significantly cheaper to manufacture and operate than the stealth warplanes that are being used to shoot them down.
Not convinced this is true for the large balloon. The helium alone will have cost 6 figures, which is comparable to the cost of the flight time of the F-22.
Also, it's not like the US has a shortage of F-22s and air to air missiles.
Has the US ever bombed a country with a GOOD air defense?
Aerial warfare (which is the US doctrine) is hard to conduct when there is a proper air defense. I'll be happy to be proven wrong by a specific example.
> Has the US ever bombed a country with GOOD air defense, give a specific example
You should probably provide a timeline because I would just give examples from World War II or something and that would effectively "prove you wrong".
But my response was to your initial statement that the US can't bomb anything that has air defense, which is incorrect, as you know. Secondly you are probably thinking about bombing strictly in terms of aircraft bombing things, but you're neglecting that the US can launch missiles and take out air defense elements and so wondering whether the US can bomb a country with good air defense probably isn't the right question to ask because the US would destroy the air defense elements and then bomb the country.
But even so, yes the US can bomb a country with good air defense because the US has developed weapons platforms that can do so.
Oh, don't get snarky. "Functional" air defence, whatever. It's just worth to filter out anything with the kind of air defence that's just dude with a machine-gun shooting in the air or something that wasn't operational or whatever.
Providing an example is always good for a substantial discussion.
> You should probably provide a timeline because I would just give examples from World War II or something and that would effectively "prove you wrong".
I don't suppose it's worth discussing anything that cannot be relatively safely considered as "modern warfare".
> which is incorrect, as you know
I don't, that's why I am asking.
> the US can launch missiles and take out air defence elements
Air defence is kinda also supposed to protect from missiles.
> the US has developed weapons platforms that can do so
Are you implying hypersonic missiles? They are relatively new and poorly tested, not even in serial production AFAIK.
Yes, but where does the US launch them? China can launch a swarm of these from the Pacific and guarantee they'll overfly the US and Canada due to the jetstream. Where can the US military launch a counterswarm that won't have to overfly a bunch of other countries with unaligned military strategies? All that does is create a negative diplomatic situation with those countries, and they'll likely shoot them down before they reach China.
Bias necessarily means you’re not thinking straight.
Did you mean “agenda” or “strategy” or “vision”? It is possible to see the CCP as an opponent that should be mitigated without distorting one’s thinking.
Yes, but it doesn't mean you're not thinking straight. Everyone has biases, learning how to navigate them is important. Expecting them to not exist or dismissing people's expert opinions because of them, rather than weighing them against their bias, seems ridiculous.
I think we’re in agreement. Biases are distortions in thinking, and of course we should try to be aware of our own. They are distinct from our strategies, which are conscious decisions about desired outcomes and means to get there.
Many US politicians have a bias against China due to racial animus and/or populism. Many US politicians have a well-reasoned belief that China poses security and economic threats to the U.S. and should be contained and managed. Some US politicians are in both groups.
Biases are more like statistical thinking. I'm biased that any statement Putin makes is much more likely to be false than true. But I also think that is likely to be the case based on his history of lies.
The majority of high-level US politicians have had an anti-China bias since about 2011 so Senator Schumer is squarely in the mainstream on that issue. This bias is completely reasonable given the rapid growth of Chinese military capabilities and the malign intent of the CCP leadership. Look into the history of President Obama's "Pivot to Asia" policy; he wouldn't have made that move without broad support from the political establishment.
I came close to launching a weather-balloon with some simple hobbyist sensors for a school project back in 2011 but my team ultimately ended up going with something much less ambitious. Now I'm a little horrified that we came so close to picking the weather balloon because I realize how irresponsible it would have been (although I'm still more horrified at how we were going to just assume the parachute works with no testing or understanding of wind currents; this thing could easily have killed somebody if we had made it and it went down over somebody's house or place of business or a highway).
Another group at my school did actually end up picking the weather balloon project and it landed in a tree in Amish country in Pennsylvania after having been launched from northern VA (somewhat ironically, it was the only tree in a wide open farm of dozens of acres). I wonder how many hobby weather balloons there are up there every day?
I wonder how ironic the tree landing actually is. Assuming a weather balloon doesn't land vertically, but drifts at low altitude for several miles, it probably acts as a kind of tree-finder.
A plane with it's ID as "blocked" took off on a steep climb from near Sudbury ON and is headed in that direction as well. I'd imagine it's a CF-18 jet or something similar...
* The balloons/objects are well known by intelligence agencies and generally tolerated for strategic reasons, but then one becomes visible to the naked eye by the general public, and the agencies must suddenly respond and pretend it's a brand new threat, because the news cycle operates on simplistic headlines. OR
* This is an entirely new and surprising development, and now intelligence agencies are aggressively scanning airspace for more of these objects and taking them down.
* These balloons/objects can't actually provide useful intelligence for China, but by sending them as sacrificial lambs and eliciting a military response, it sets the precedent for China to do the same for any US intrusion on their airspace. (This one could be combined with either of the above two)
* The timing of these balloons corresponds to other intelligence happenings that the general public doesn't know about - i.e., there is something happening in the intelligence space between the US and China, and these balloons signal some message that the intelligence agencies of the US understand, but which the public does not know about. But, again, the news cycle and the voting public demands a response to what they understand, and they do not accept "Trust us, we're handling it behind the scenes" as an answer. End result, you get an F-22 shooting down a balloon, in a highly visible operation. It's unclear if this demonstration was directed more at China or for the voting public.
One final note - we're talking about intelligence warfare between massively powerful nation states, which makes it tempting to theorize and hypothesis like I just did above. But possibly there is nothing much to think about, and the truth is exactly as it seems: China sent some balloons in a spy program of unknown scope, possibly to elicit this response or possibly not, and it became a political mishap for the current administration so it was forced to respond in a public display. And now the event has more implications for US political pundits and news cycles than it ever did for intelligence warfare between these two countries.
>Another high-altitude object was shot down Sunday, this time over Lake Huron, three U.S. officials confirmed to ABC News. According to one of the officials, the object was shot down by a U.S. military aircraft.
>At 2:45 p.m., a U.S. Air Force F-16 fired a sidewinder missile at the objects, the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday.
>The Lake Huron object was an octagonal structure with strings hanging off but no discernable payload. The official also said that there is no indication of surveillance capabilities but they cannot rule it out.
I guess it's open season on spy balloons now that they have authorization to shoot them all down.
I suspect both Russia and China were operating different model balloons for different mission types.
What are your guesses on their purpose?
If I had to guess, I wonder if they are data relay nodes to collect information from Chinese/Russian bugged equipment that cannot transmit over the internet (eg. compromised equipment in secure military facilities).
> If I had to guess, I wonder if they are data relay nodes to collect information from Chinese/Russian bugged equipment that cannot transmit over the internet (eg. compromised equipment in secure military facilities).
An interesting theory, although I would be at least a little worried if secure facilities did not already have some form detection of signals they do not expect.
OTOH, you could instead have something gathering data, and the passing balloon could send a signal to the listening device(s), and then quickly dump+relay the data collected over time.
And balloons have the option to loiter longer than say a satellite or other means.
I assumed they were doing some sort of RF monitoring more than the photo type monitoring.
A lot of the comments focus on "Why would they use balloons when they have satellites?" But the reality is they are cheaper, can be oriented inexpensively and can loiter. Not to mention the lower radar signal and other detection issues (made clear by the revelation that this has been going on for a while).
Now that launching/steering balloons is down to the hobbyist level...it seems a larger corp or state actor could easily use them in a way that seemed impossible 30 years ago.
At least WRT the first balloon that kicked off all of this hubbub, NYTimes report that the State Department have disclosed it was "equipped with an antenna meant to pinpoint the locations of communications devices and was capable of intercepting calls made on those devices": https://www.nytimes.com/article/chinese-spy-balloon-mission....
Isnt this the 4th incident in like a week? Seems like its actually a routine occurence but the media is choosing to fixate/overreport it after the spy baloon.
Either that or china’s genuinely trying to test our response times and protocols in preperation for something down the line
I think policy shifted. I think overflights by balloons are routine. See as evidence reporting that the balloon that started this news cycle was number 4 in the past handful of years, but after the media attention a decision was made to have more of a zero tolerance policy
My understanding was that we may have been filtering these objects out as noise of our sensor arrays, and only just started listening more closely for smaller anomalies.
It's possible this balloon traffic has been relatively routine but we are only recently noticing them and responding to them.
My money says yes, these are routine events. I don't blame the media, though, not directly. I blame the warmongers that have been pushing the anti-China line, starting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
It could be a test but is there any doubt worldwide that, of all branches of the US military, the US Air Force is the last thing you want to tangle with?
I don't know about stupid. If you can spend X dollars to "force" your opponent to spend X*10 dollars it can be a viable strategy.
I recall the reported costs of "junk rockets" vs those surface-to-air defenses, which I believe are a similar case of the attack being orders of magnitude cheaper than the defense
Sure, that may be the initial ratio, but if it becomes a regular thing, as in sufficiently regular to strain one of our budgets beyond (substituting a few live target shootings for training exercises), we can rapidly develop an appropriate response.
E.g., when there was a new bunker-buster bomb in the initial Iraq war, one was developed in 28 days. Similarly, the MOAB was developed in about a year. There are plenty of teams of highly skilled and well-equipped engineers who will happily undertake to solve that problem.
Also, weapons systems with higher expected rates of use can benefit from economies of scale-ed up production.
Unless they're sending a million balloons this week, it won't be that kind of problem.
No, it doesn't take "far more resources." All pilots, military or civilian, need to accumulate hours to stay current. Flying to investigate or shootdown a balloon isn't going to take more resources than ordinary training would.
The recovery might be something else, but then again, those groups are constantly training anyway, so I'd venture to guess the difference is negligible.
please explain why they shutting down airspace without a statement. If they think its a balloon, why not just say 'radar detected a probable balloon and we are shutting down airspace while it is being investigated.'
Why was the incident over Alaska described as a metal cylinder or whatever if its another probably balloon? This doesn't make much sense.
If I was China and I wanted to disrupt Space Development Agency plans over my country (go after and destroy low orbiting satellites). It would make sense to me to strategically provoke my opposition into being the bad guy (shooting down benign low orbiting stuff) setting a precedence so I may be free to "retaliate" with less recourse of public opinion.
I'm curious, does anyone here have an understanding the kind of information gathering you can do from a balloon that you can't with a satellite? Is it a cost issue? A don't know how do it in a satellite issue? or maybe a tech/physics issue?
Could this be an image analysis advance? Perhaps someone through some machine learning at Planet labs or otherwise imaging satellite streams and got more than they expected?
Is the fact that all of these sightings happening in the US not suggestive enough to be from one of the US’s enemies? Why would aliens solely target the US
the public-at-large i'm exposed to seems to be more apt to assume they're aliens -- so frankly anyone that assumes it's just an innocuous weather balloon is a breath of fresh air for me.
The follow-up to my wild conspiracy is wondering what American spy program will be unwound in response.
I have no evidence for this. It’s a long-shot silly theory that I think is at least plausible.