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Comment by sabujp | Hacker News Reader

Spy balloon cost : $3k - $50k , you can even buy them on alibaba and some other sites:

    https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-hot-sale-surveillance-balloon-with_60454941082.html

    https://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/jennerjiang/product-list/catalog-1.html?view=0

Cost to shoot down balloon with F22 $400k for the AIM-9X, ~$85k for 1 hour of flight time, so ~$400 - $500k to shoot down one balloon that cost < $50k

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Meh. Complaining about the cost of shooting this down is pretty silly. F22s are already flown on a daily basis. And munitions are spent regularly in training excersises. It would cost far more millions to set up a training excersise even half as valuable. But that is just the cost of maintaining a capable fighter fleet.

There's probably been sports event flyovers that have technically cost many times this.

ahh yea i forget that the amount we budget every year for training is basically the cost of a war

Train hard means fight easy.

The US has always had excellent pilot training, and it paid off handsomely in war after war.

This sort of calculations are slightly silly. F22s take off for training flights all the time, having one training flight switch to operational does not affect the cost.

It’s similar for using missiles. The opportunity to shoot a real one at a real target is good training.

Those things costs this money perhaps, but it’s not a useful way to think of it this way for such a case.

I think the implication is not that the cost in this specific case was very high. I think the point was that there is an assymetry in cost. So, if someone wanted to have balloons over the USA, it would be much cheaper for them to try than it would be for the USA to stop them. By the time someone starts sending 1000's of balloons, the costs to destroy them may add up.

'someone'

I mean it would be pretty easy to figure out who it was, if at nation state level enact things like embargos against them which would cost them quite a bit more. If not at nation state level they'd likely be taken care of much more quietly.

Agreed, but consider wartime.

You could also just be trying to apply logic to someone with a low-cost, nonsensical argument. The irony being that it's the same sort of attack you're describing, but on your brain.

Threats that are few in number and great in number are handled by different sorts of countermeasures. If China really did flood the west in balloons, then alternate measures would be used to handle it, perhaps measures that aren't public.

High altitude balloons are very fragile (you need to wear gloves to avoid getting oils on them because those can dissolve the balloon material causing them to prematurely burst). I'm sure there's many counter measures that could be used if needed.

China already does something similar to Japan. They fly hundreds of flights a year around Japanese airspace, forcing Japan to constantly scramble jets just in case. This tires their pilots, puts wear on their planes, and costs a ton of money.

Are you serious? This is like looking at a F1 car and going "oh yeah, that's super cheap. Go carts only cost a couple thousand dollars". DoD says that the payload of the balloon is as long as three buses lined up end to end. The balloon itself is likely bigger than many office buildings. A state of the art sensor suite is going to run in the millions. Claiming you can get all that for sub 50k is laughable.

The balloon that was shot down was visible to the naked eye at 60k feet. It would have had to be far larger than the products you have linked to.

they expand

Not to 200 feet across they don't.

You've left out the cost of the payload, which is probably substantial.

If I weren't retired, I'd be interested in reverse-engineering it. I'm sure NASIC will be all over it, but we (the general public) will never get the details of what the payload was really doing.

What's your point? We should make military decisions based on how much the target costs? You don't understand why that's ridiculous?

> We should make military decisions based on how much the target costs

Yes?..

> You don't understand why that's ridiculous?

No?.. Don't you understand how the cost of action is the base of military economy?

This is hardly a military decision, it's purely a PR decision.

In a war of attrition, yes, but this is a one-off.

It’s not purely PR, I am sure the primary motivation is actually counterintelligence, which is why they are recovering it over shallow water.

> which is why they are recovering it over shallow water.

They shot the payload with a missile over the sea. What's there to recover?

It's you who doesn't understand. We don't care how much the target costs. We care about how much not taking it down can cost us.

We stand to learn a lot from capturing the surveillance platform. This alone is priceless. We send a message that Chinese aircraft that violate our airspace and leave in tact. If data was stored onboard, it's possible that we prevented a large cache of surveillance data from making it back to China.

So that $400,000 missile had a benefit that is hard to quantify, but is easily in the multiple millions of dollars.

Your argument makes no sense. Let's say a sniper is in a building and is about to fire on a high value target. Before he can fire, we hit that building with a missile to take him out. According to you, we paid $400,000 to take out a sniper and his $1 bullet. The truth is that we spent $400,000 to protect a high value asset that may have been worth far more.

> We don't care how much the target costs.

Except with military you actually have to, which is perfectly demonstrated right now in Ukraine.

> We stand to learn a lot from capturing the surveillance platform. This alone is priceless.

Well since it was shot down over the sea, by a missile targeting the payload, it definitely won't be the case.

Sorry, I don't see the point of this conversation, when you base your reasoning on a fantasy, instead of a factual chain of events.

Presumably if this becomes common we can think of cheaper ways to do it.

i wonder if we could do it with a SHIELD laser weapon

Quite different if it's a one-off, this was nearly experimental expense for the US on various levels.

I wonder why they didn't just use 20mm.

> I wonder why they didn't just use 20mm.

Canada tried that once, with poor results.

https://news.yahoo.com/weather-balloon-went-rogue-almost-161...

Real footage of the interception: https://youtu.be/Zb03buggCcw?t=1596

F22 service ceiling 50k ft, M61A2 vulcan 20mm effective range 2000ft, balloon was at 60k ft

Those 20mm will land… somewhere

Ceiling for F-22 is 'above 50k' feet. I think the balloon was at 60k.

What is the value of

1. The intelligence collected by China 2. Learning more about Chinese intelligence collection methods

I guess China just discovered a strategy how to drain US of some resources. Just let out a lot of scientific baloons and let the dirft away.

I don't think anyone considers the expenditure of 1 AIM-9, probably the most ubiquitous A2A missile platform in history, a drain of resources.

Money is money.

1000s of AIM-9s have probably expired in storage. Money is relative.

I mean if it became enough of an issue it would not be hard to deal with them with some other type of weapon.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA425537.pdf

Laser weapons were not highly effective against fast objects like ICBMs, but a slow moving weak object like a balloon should represent a pretty easy target.

Congrats to China for wasting about 3 seconds worth of US military budget. How will the US recover from this catastrophe?

Why would they use an AIM-9X? This is the kind of thing guns are for.

It was the size of 195 Goodyear blimps, and bigger than a football field. I imagine bullets would do nothing to it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/02/03/bustin...

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