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Comment by downvotetruth | Hacker News Reader

Missile was way overkill - your tax dollars at work! It had been observed for days: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinese-spy-ballo... A balloon's surface is not rigid. Clipping it with a wing would have been enough to deflate it as there is minimal to no risk of damaging a metal wing. Let alone the week or so they had to prepare a M61 Vulcan Gatling gun on an F15 that can fly at 65k ft above the 60k ft flight altitude of the balloon. Lack of air retrieval was also very disappointing. Imagine if it had a secondary payload that dispersed in the water or near the ground.

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How else would you aim to shoot it down? The published flight ceiling for most fighter jets is somewhere around 60,000 feet (I’m sure they can go higher if they want to, but exactly how high is probably valuable intelligence).

Weather balloons on the other hand fly much higher. This would have been likely (I don’t know) between 60,000 and 120,000 feet. You certainly couldn’t just do a gun run at that altitude. Clipping it with a wing is a great way of killing your pilot, as you’ve basically asked them to crash directly into an unknown object.

I was actually surprised there wasn't some energy-based laser that could be shot at it, even if from an aircraft, but I agree with your assessment.

Which brings up an interesting question: would launching thousands of balloons at the US be a good strategy to completely drain the A2A missile stockpile? It seems like a balloon would also be absurdly cheaper than the missile, not to mention having to get a plane out to intercept the balloon, therefore this is likely to be an incredibly effective war strategy.

There quite possibly are energy weapons that could shoot it down, perhaps some kind of spooky ship based anti missile systems (edit: I’ve looked into this and there’s definitely not anything public that can shoot that far). I suspect that if this were really a Chinese spy balloon, getting detailed data on such a weapon would be an amazing added bonus (think wavelength, energy output, etc). An AAMRAM is pretty well known tech at this point. On the other hand, it might have been a fun show of force to use something spooky. It’s hard to speculate.

As far as swamping air defences with balloons, yeah that’s a thing that’s pretty concerning. If you add swarm drones into the equation, it gets very scary.

Do we really want to be shooting classified energy weapons at surveillance devices!?

Clipping it with a wing would damage and/or destroy a multi-million dollar fighter, and put the pilot's life in undue danger.

This isn't like the pylons at an air race, which are designed to separate.

It's a practical training exercise and a worthwhile experiment to confirm the inventory can be used against a novel threat. You realize millions of dollars get spent shooting missiles into target drones every year. One extra on a real target isn't an issue.

Directed energy would be better. But then missles are something the general public can understand. It also falls in line with the US making a big drama about this

While these are all great points, I guess this has changed people’s perception of risks and we are now more open to spending billions of USD to close these perceived and real gaps.

It won’t be surprising if there is a huge defense spending bill in congress with carve out for war in Ukraine and this time it will go through as the Republicans won’t hold back.

You’re neither expert in military nor taxes.

Are you sure it was at an altitude they could safely fly a craft to carry out your plan?

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