Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over U.S., Pentagon says
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Google's project Loon (https://x.company/projects/loon/) did this and I thought it was pretty darn cool. The way it works is this: different layers of stratosphere have different wind directions. If you can accurately predict the wind directions in different layers, you can in theory move in horizontal direction just by changing your altitude. Loon had pretty good models and simulated the wind directions well. Their balloon used to take off from Nevada and reach Kenya (I believe) and hover there for multiple days to provide comms. They use a cool reinforcement learning based controller in their loop: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2939-8
I remember some Chinese researchers writing papers on this topic back then and them saying they'd have good results if they had access to data from Loon: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45976 I don't think Loon ever shared any data publicly (I was wrong, they did apparently open source a ton of data) but Loon did get shut down (like a lot of other Alphabet's moonshots) and I remember some of their tech and patents were sold to SoftBank and others. I was surprised US did not try to stop this in the interest of national security.
https://dlj.law.duke.edu/article/patent-laws-reproducibility...
What you're talking about is called a 112 rejection. Section 112 has to do with "written description," "enablement," and "best mode."
Getting a patent invalidated after it's issued can't be done on 112 grounds. It's done based on anticipation and obviousness (prior art, basically).
The legal fiction is that a "reasonable amount of experimentation" may be required, beyond what's in the patent. The notion is that a lab tech determines the exact concentrations, temps, and pressure to get the thing to work.
Of course this is abused.
He could have argued they maybe should have originally been covered by https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act to begin with maybe.
That's why important stuff is kept secret.
e.g. "How Turkey Defied the U.S. and Became a Killer Drone Power" https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/turkey-second-drone-age/
Loon was shut down because Google stole the tech.
"In February of 2008, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page visited Space Data’s headquarters with as many as 10 other Google executives in tow" https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...
https://9to5google.com/2017/07/10/project-loon-patents/
https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...
With various ground based data relays for aggregating traffic coming from the PtMP balloon-to-cpe radio links.
With advances in 600/700 MHz (and 2500 MHz band) based 3GPP rev-whatever tech for LTE-based last mile that can punch through trees, and starlink (and hopefully someday some viable non-spacex competitors for starlink), and other terrestrial WISP stuff, the need for something like loon is greatly decreased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque_International_Ball...
https://www.krqe.com/news/balloon-fiesta/local-pilot-explain...
Except the day I went, which is something.. Still quite the sight.
NM also has the “original burning man” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zozobra.
They fly past for a 1 mile distance in this example
It's a shame that Richard DeVaul got caught up in a political moment and a pearl clutching media that was eager to misrepresent burning man in the most salacious way possible.
Richard co-founded loon and is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met.
Awful what happened to him. Google's collective IQ dropped precipitously when he left.
2. Seriously, do we need more? He's not stupid, he took the same management harassment training as everyone else in the company, he should have known better, he did know better, and he fessed up to it.
When you're a director, your reporting chain is not your personal Tinder. Please inform yourself on the subject of illegal sexual harassment in the United States, you'll save yourself and your reports and HR a lot of trouble.
Because I was told a very different story. There's a lot more to it than what you may have read.
Perhaps you should consider reserving judgement until you have all the facts.
Consider for a moment that there may be important details and nuance that's missed by newspapers that are most interested in clicks.
Please inform yourself that accusations are not evidence, and maybe consider what you would feel if you were being judged by accusations alone.
I'm not at liberty to discuss the details, but I highly recommend you slow your rush to judgement. There's a lot about the whole situation that you are not aware of.
The issue is whether Simpson was denied before or after burning man. If it was before, which is apparently what Devaul was insisting, it really was inappropriate to take any action in my opinion. If you match on tinder with someone you once interviewed, after the hire/no hurry decision is made, then your company shouldn't be treating this relationship any different from a total stranger. Or are we supposed to keep spreadsheets of every person we ever interviewed? Because that's not in my sexual harassment training, I dunno about yours.
Think about how you would defend yourself if someone accused you of making a sexual advance in an interview after you rejected them for a job? If testimony alone is enough to get you fired, then that's a significant source of pressure to give female candidates positive outcomes even if their performance isn't up to par.
It was terrible timing given the other stuff that was going on with Google at the time, and he sort of got swept up in all that.
I do agree with Richard's statement that he had a lapse in judgement.
I think it's critically important to keep personal and professional life strictly separate, especially as an executive.
It's a fucking interview, not a date. Unless you are hiring an escort, it is not the place to discuss your sex life.
There's another side to the story that's very different than your belligerent assertions.
Are you interested in learning, or just cursing and throwing unsupported accusations?
And no, he didn't "fess up to it" as you've said elsewhere. He admitted to an error in judgement, without going into details.
I don't know specifically what he meant by that, but it's possible that he meant his error in judgement was trying to help the wrong person, in the wrong context.
Yes! Evidence.
I did briefly discuss the whole situation with him after it happened, and came to understand that there was a lot more to the story than what was reported.
I do think he made an error in judgement.
I also believe he's utterly brilliant.
Both of those things can be true.
The values for some materials are actually much higher than I remembered, with Kevlar reaching ~250 km. From a purely hold-its-own-weight perspective it seems like it might actually be possible!
Obviously there's a ton of other problems that wouldn't make it feasible, the first I can think of is the weight of a 50 km tether wouldn't allow the balloon to even take off. I'm sure you can think of another million reasons it wouldn't work.
The highest altitude recorded by a single kite is less than 5km. I understand the biggest constraint for higher flights is tether strength-to-weight ratio. Nylon is typically used - fishing line.
Tether diameter is another factor as the load from wind, on the tether alone, is considerable over such lengths.
Graphene does 50 GPa in bulk. A single atom sheet of it does 10 MPa on its own.
Take 75 metric tonnes of cable / space elevator ribbon.
That expressed as tensile pressure at an attachment point(s) is conservatively 7.5 GPa over an area about 10 cm^2. With sensible engineering, the entire craft (a very large one) would possess a web of attachment points across its perimeter to distribute forces more-or-less evenly.
I don't really think the three-buses-wide balloon is a good idea for spying since everybody (including the radar) can see it coming, but I imagine this will be quite effective for search and rescue support, battlefield surveillance and all the other short-term missions that could put such disposable flying electronics better good use.
If I remembered it correctly, China Mobile has tested a drone-based base station which can provide cell service over a short period of time, and they were using the system during a earthquake rescue with some success. Maybe using balloon is an better idea.
PS. Funny thing. I was planing to build and release a water probe since I live very close to the Yangtze river. Thought I can probably measure the water speed with the probe by letting it send back it's GPS position, plus some pretty pictures via cell/SMS. I haven't started the project though, due to many hurdles. One of them is to figure out what trouble I can get myself into after the probe encountered something it shouldn't have (because I have no control over it after release). I don't really want to have a chat with CIA, or even worse, the water police (yup, and they got jet boats).
I think it only makes sense for battlefield surveillance if its augmenting some small gap in existing ISR operations, combined with UAVs + satellites + whatever other aircraft. it definitely would not replace any of those aforementioned vehicles/technologies wholesale.
These won't be off to a good start if they'd shoot down something Chinese now.
The silence before the event went public tells me another story through.
Nobody's talking about the spy sats that are further up, balloon is just a caricature to drum up support for either side, humiliate one party, etc.
War never changes.
PS. Funny thing.
Who wants this to be news and to what end are they manipulating collective perception?
I am so cynical so I respond the opposite way. Good for China, I applaud them for keeping tabs on a nation that routinely use drones in foreign skies to murder civilians.
Normally, if you are feeling nice and secure, it is because someone has manipulated you to a place of vulnerability so they can take advantage of you.
This story wants me to feel like the US government is prudent, competent and observant. So, naturally, I am scared shitless.
It is probably not a coincidence that since the fall of the Soviet Union, income and wealth disparities have only continued to escalate in the United States, painting a stark picture of the consequences of unchecked hegemonic power.
It's just manufactured propaganda. The good thing about this is you can see how propaganda ( aka news/media ) coordinates with the pentagon/intelligence/etc.
China has spy sattelites that can do what this balloon supposedly can, and that's why the US isn't shooting it down. What a load of crap. 1) the US would shoot it down anyway 2) why would China send a balloon when they have sattelites?
The conclusion drawn must be that it's either not Chinese, or not a spy balloon, or most probably not either.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/05/u-s-militarys-newes...
Satellites have predictable orbits and are otherwise tracked, but a stealthy balloon might go unnoticed and manage to surveil sites that don’t mask their sensitive activities when they think the sky is currently clear. It’s possible that the ballon is performing signals intelligence gathering, or something else satellites at altitude can’t do.
Also, the perception (true or otherwise) that the US is not fully able to control its national airspace is something China can make propaganda out of.
There's simply no way one could ever be hidden from radar. So 'stealthy balloons' do not exist.
If you can make a B2 bomber stealthy then perhaps you can do the same with a balloon - the bags are thin polythene [1] and I assume you could combine geometry and radar absorbing material to make a payload disappear.
If it were that obviously visible why wasn’t it intercepted when it crossed into America’s air defence identification zone?
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/scientific-balloons/types-of-balloons
It wouldn't be magical for one to accidentally end up basically anywhere.
>Why do people suspect it's a spy balloon? No reasons are given in the article. Even if it did come from China, it could be nothing more than a mere scientific weather balloon. This smells like propaganda.
I think sometimes people complain that something isn’t news it’s just US news, while they’re on US channels populated or run by US folks. And you know, what do you expect?
So it always matters, but it's frequency determines whether it's newsworthy? I don't understand that position.
> “Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years,” Ryder said
Seems more like someone wanted to stir up some feelings.
also note in the DOD press briefing they stated that this was markedly different than previous incursions due to primarily the duration of loitering.
also what are these comments..? openly lauding an adversarial state which is conducting flagrant surveillance operations in the continental united states? yikes.
This is definitely one of those situations. If US can fly spy planes over say Russia or China, why shouldn't they be allowed the same? If you shoot their stuff, they can shoot yours. Fair game I say (not dragging current russian war in ukraine into this, to which I am strong opponent and even donated my own drone to AFU when it started).
And adversarial to whom? The west is as adversarial to China as China is to the west.
You sound put off that the comments don't have enough patriotism. Lacking blind patriotism would in fact be called "neutral".
> common != it has happened before
It would be atypical to say "over the past several years" about a unique occurrence.
Exactly. There is there is no true self under all the masks.
Why would you shift the overton window?
That? The US flies aircraft across the borders of all targeted nations daily and violates their airspace. But the Anglosaxon media always only talks about how others are doing it, deceiving people to think that only 'others' do such things. Textbook example of lying by omission explained by Chomsky.
Typical hypocrisy.
The balloon isn't on there, and the (presumed) fighter jets that are escorting it aren't either but you can see the fuel tankers.
How crazy...the future we live in.
The annual rendevous was held in Idaho. There are quite a few French named things around the area. Lake Pend Orielle, etc.
Also, lots of stuff named after Lewis and Clark, the Jesuit priests and the Mullan trail.
edit: from CNN article:
"“Balloon payloads can now weigh less and so the balloons can be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch” than satellites, Layton said."
TLDR they are cheaper
"“An advantage of balloons is that they can be steered using onboard computers to take advantage of winds and they can go up and down to a limited degree. This means they can loiter to a limited extent.
“A satellite can’t loiter and so many are needed to criss-cross an area of interest to maintain surveillance,” he said."
TLDR they can loiter in place compared to satellite
Something not being talked about.
A balloon can carry a weapon which could immediately have an impact if detonated at its current altitude (EMP, for example). A balloon can also descend to a lower altitude.
But a lot load balancers now fingerprint VPN addresses so that doesn’t work either
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/
(also for Firefox, which is the one I'm using)
This is what I do when stupid, horny websites just refresh the current, stupid website rather than actually going back to where I was.
(Tip: Keep clicking the next link / view the archive history to get to the latest snapshot)
There is also a risk of somehow triggering an unanticipated outcome due to e.g. unknown materials or chemicals on board.
Maybe they are doing signals intelligence on it.
Maybe it's a (fake) Chinese school project, and the world wide media will be like tomorrow "US gov shoots down Chinese little girl science project".
"Cool balloon Mei, want to bring it to the White House?"
>Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.
https://twitter.com/POTUS44/status/644193755814342656
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/16/440890750...
1. There's a high risk of debris falling on people on the ground.
2. Any sensitive information collected would have been sent home already, so shooting it now isn't going to do much good.
So Pentagon leadership recommended not taking "kinetic action". What's interesting is that they have been tracking it for several days over the US mainland. You'd think the strongest military in the world could do something other than...just watch.
Which is not at all what is occurring. Having flight tracks of multiple refueling tankers demonstrates far more resources have already been expended on this "not a concern to us" than was spent on deploying it...
That excuse seems really odd to me. Montana is the third-least densely populated state with 6.86 people per square mile of land.
https://www.malmstrom.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Ar...
They could probably shoot it down without making much debris. And even if it made debris, at most it would hit a cow. The reality is it's not collecting anything of value.
These have taken place numerous times
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/341st_Missile_Wing_LGM-30_Minu...
It's like a fly sitting on the windshield of your car parked in the driveway or something. It's there, it might be annoying if you think about it, but it isn't actually doing any meaningful harm.
Maybe they are planning to drop an insignificant number of small munitions on random locations in the US or something.
if there was any risk, it would be shot down. it it wasn't, it was probably observing wilderness/pastures
i say we launch a balloon that parks itself below theirs blocking the view. no capabilities given up then
The point is to use them on a real danger. Accurate or not, the Pentagon clearly doesn’t see this ballon as a threat in any capacity. Why would they do anything other than keep an eye on it?
Some bean counters decided this was low threat. And, more likely, China told us it was coming, and probably to just count silos like we’ve been doing back and forth since the 70s
If it was spooky, it wouldn’t be bright white…
Pretty sure they've got satellites that can do that.
There’s an argument to be made that the strongest military in the world showing restraint and just watching is probably a good thing.
This was unacceptable to the West, so we covertly overthrew their democracy and installed an unpopular autocratic monarch in 1953. This Monarch would then rule for the next 26 years until in 1979 they would have their own "real" revolution. It was largely led by Islamic extremists, and they replaced our puppet monarchy with an Islamic theocracy. And this theocracy not only has a pretty negative view of the West, but for some reason always thinks we're trying to engage in covert actions to try to overthrow them! Go figure.
1953 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
I’m not even suggesting this was good foreign policy, just that none of the above history proves the thesis that we set them back a few hundred years.
You are are aware of the difference between the 1820s and 1920s I hope.
Iran wasn't touched, you may mean Iraq.
In Western Montana? Rather doubtful. Just wait 5 minutes until it is over national forest land, which is the vast majority of the area, and then shoot it down.
https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/radiosondes
Tons more in amateur radio etc., see APRS
That said, "non-governmental" and "non-U.S." coverage can be suprisingly illusory. Pay attention to the sources next time you see a Xinjiang story, whether in or out of the U.S., and report back if you find out that it ultimately sources someone other than Zenz (of course, make sure to do this recursively).
It's also worth pointing out that non-governmental organizations get their funding from somewhere, and, surprise, the places most critical of China tend to get their grants from sources that are ultimately government funds. The National Endowment for Democracy and Radio Free Asia are particularly infamous for distancing themselves from their government ties (Allen Weinstein, a founder of the former, famously said in a 1991 interview that "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.").
B) China has probably cut a deal to “count nuke sites” which is informally allowed in request during times of high nuclear tension
C) They most likely told us before hand it was going over
D) this is almost positively a big ol nothing burger, and some back channel deal with China to get them not to support Russia
Also, the negative effects of a failed attempt to shoot down could be worse than the threat of the balloon. Both in terms of embarrassment and spent ordinance getting dropped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies
Military intelligence gathering is so common that countries basically agree to not start a shooting war for overflying each others country gathering military intelligence.
If every military intelligence balloon, satellite, aircraft, drone, etc, was considered an act of war and destroyed, the world as we know it would have ended a long, long, long time ago, and none of us would be here having this conversation.
According to a Pentagon source, the balloon offers "limited additive value" over satellites.
More interesting excerpts:
>The incident, which occurred in the last two days, marked the latest aggressive Chinese intelligence gathering maneuvers in recent years. U.S. defense officials said the balloon loitered over the U.S. longer than in previous similar incidents, which made this “different.”
<snip>
> Mr. Biden was presented with options and proposed that the high-altitude balloon be shot down after it was spotted and reported by civilians in a commercial airliner, U.S. officials said. The Pentagon feared civilian casualties, and opted not to shoot down the balloon, U.S. officials said.
<snip>
> The balloon “was traveling at an altitude well above the commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground,” Gen. Ryder added.
<snip>
> The balloon was observed flying over Montana after flying over Canada and the Aleutian Islands, one U.S. official said. It was large enough for its debris to cause damage, and while the U.S. considered shooting it down over a sparsely populated area of Montana, the U.S. opted to not shoot it down. It also flew over sensitive sites, a senior defense official told reporters Thursday.
Uh... no?
Mainly because satellites are known -- black sites like Area 51 reguarly put away the "good stuff" when they known a spy satellite is overhead. That's not possible for random Chinese balloons we only find out about when some commercial pilot phones them in.
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.
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.
Similar balloons appear to have been photographed in Hawaii, India (Andamans), Japan. A different type was recently photographed over the Philippines and there is a comment about use over Guam.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinas-spy-balloon-ove... https://twitter.com/steffanwatkins/status/162136299808111001...
The FAA closes off the airspace around the desert which allows the really powerful rockets to fly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h3HAv9ra9Q
It's where all the private individual owners of the biggest military equipment you can buy in the US go to shoot their equipment that would be basically illegal to shoot anywhere else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R02emks3BoQ
I like this one where they shoot a ball turret from a bomber from a different year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_TaK0WZj2k
https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/project-mesos-a-two-st...
There are ducted fan model airplanes which are absolutely nothing like cruise missiles because they aren't GPS guided.
When they asked an expert about the aiming issue, the response was basically laughter and "I'm not going to solve the precision guided munitions problem for you because of legal reasons, and you're not going to be able to figure it out."
I expect precision guided rocketry is going to be a lot harder than a chunk of steel barely high enough to reach terminal velocity.
Hobbiests are already making self landing (spacex-style) model rockets. That is a much harder problem.
AFAIK, in the US, precision guidance to a specific orientation on a amateur rocket is legal (i.e. active stabilization), but precision guidance to a specific location on a amateur rocket is indeed illegal.
Think the name was Baumgartner or something like it.
edit, however, lasing a camera sensor doesn't need a lot of holding time. so just keep bouncing it around and hopefully, eventually you'll cover enough to render useless.
Normal private property like someone's quadcopter, I would assume the owner still has rights to it (and possibly liability depending on how/where it fell). But foreign government property that's not supposed to be there in the first place?
Judges aren’t obligated to believe your bullshit.
(edit to add: i.e. field test planned comms and sensors platforms for use in future conflict scenarios)
Tracking: satellites are incredibly easy to track once you know their orbital parameters. A balloon, far less so. You need a lot of active tracking.
Altitude: a balloon is much closer to the ground than a satellite. That allows a much smaller camera to take the same picture. It also could give you access to radio signals that might not be as easily monitored from space.
Harder to spot: being closer to the ground, it will be beyond the horizon until it's much closer.
And of course it's far, far cheaper. The Chinese space program is doing well, but it's still very expensive to build and launch satellites.
There are of course numerous downsides.
Measure Response: Determine what an adversary nation does in response to the violation (what resources are scrambled, where do they come from etc)
Messaging: All the permutations of two sets of government folks trying to send a message the pair mutually understand re: defense etc
Tie up resources: Low cost provocation may divert higher cost resources and tie them up for a longer period of time since its a dwelling threat
Acquire signal information: Use sensors and measurement systems outside of the threat to measure the locations and signatures of tracking systems deployed to assess and monitor the threat
Deploy lightweight physical payloads: dust something of interest over an area etc
If that is the case, well, at least you know that the China threat stories by your favourite media outlets deserve a truck load of salt.
are they being looked into?
Yeah that doesn't smell in the slightest.
And how exactly do they know it's Chinese?
What if it was like WW2 and the balloons were carrying bombs? What's the national defense plan for that?
We definitely have high altitude drones.
Japanese balloon bombs from WWII
- The official added the surveillance balloon “does not create significant” opportunities for China to gather intelligence beyond other methods such as low orbit satellites.
- The US has observed similar activity over the past several years, including during the administration of Donald Trump. Unlike previous years the balloon “is appearing to hang out for a longer period of time this time around”, the defence official said.
Realistically, there's spy satellites anyway, the ballon seems more of a power move. Precisely because it's visible
I tried to search answer but not finding useful information so far
edit: wow, lots of folks apparently unfamiliar with the 1960's U-2 incident eh? Time to brush up on military aviation history.
If the U2 is amazing, which superlative is appropriate for the SR-71?
But unfortunately not cost effective.
The real crime isn't spying but getting caught.
Shooting down a balloon over US airspace, or better yet, grabbing it, should be a no-brainer. It's our airspace. Why is this being discussed? Get that thing on that ground, keep it, and study it.
What exactly did the Chinese learn from this? Feels like a misguided shit test. There will be a proportionate response.
The technology is pretty mature, Google ran a whole fleet of them with Project Loon back in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC
(Nowadays any idiot with some uranium could make a suitcase nuke, LMAO)
Luckily with balloons, if you're just going for "somewhere over there" and you have reliable currents at steady elevations then you don't need to worry much about that. So yes the hardware and telemetry is mature.
Accurate navigation of such balloons however was never viable, which is why Alphabet shut down Loon two years ago. Navigation is achieved by inflating and deflating the balloon to rise or lower to catch favorable winds. But the navigational planning algorithms were never good enough.
"four Soviet MiGs" (from the linked headline)
> back in the 40's
"On a cold November day in 1952" (linked article, paragraph 2)
> a guy
"Royce Williams" (linked article, literally the first two words), Navy Cross recipient and former US Navy pilot, not 'some guy'.
What kind of hasty carelessness causes you to share a link to a story, embellish it with details, but just screw up on key facts? Including, I might add, the rather significant difference in implication between a US pilot shooting down MiGs in the 1940s, when the Soviet Union was either an ally or a peacetime enemy, vs. the 1950s, when the Korean War happened.
That was 1946 and the start of the cold war
The answer is "I just woke up."
The GP is saying the same thing as you.
I had a mortgage during the 17-27% interest years of the eighties. I think about that when people kibbitz about inflation these days.
And just referring to a person who is named and credentialed in the article as 'a guy' just seems like throwing a layer of extra carelessness on top.
I just can't fathom how someone accomplishes this.
If there's one thing I try to encourage people to do in online discourse in general, it's to recognize that you don't have to guess. You have time to go look up the facts. Things are knowable, you don't have to vaguely gesture in the direction of the truth.
And in this case the op had the source right there! They must have googled up the link and opened the page and copied the URL! The facts were right there, in the next tab!
Person wakes up and browses interesting stories, remembers semi-relevant story, decides to comment about the similarity and forgets specifics. Realizes right before posting "oh shit I have to cite my sources or else pedants will ratio me into being unable to participate in other conversations" and quickly searches for a recent link that mostly backs up their commentary. Does not think to fact check every detail. Backfires.
The numbers matter too. Shooting down MIGs happened all the time. Dogfighting seven solo and shooting down four is a huge thing.