...probably around zero dollars. It would be different if it was above say active war zone but in this case it is almost as far from potential warzone as possible so probably absolutely nothing.
It would be naive to believe that military information is only important when bullets are being fired. This would be like saying that your class textbook is only useful when you're taking a test. (A cold war is like you have an upcoming test)
So now our leaders are trigger happy about shooting down any potential new balloons in order to try and save face while looking tough. Meanwhile, I’m sure plenty of Chinese officials are feeling pretty smug at the reaction they were able to cause and pride that they can present themselves as a capable challenger to American hegemony.
Only naive people would think so. 9/11 was 21 years ago. Where have you been?
> America is the one who brazenly flies and spies over other countries, that doesn’t happen to us.
Satellites have been used by all major powers since pretty much forever. As for other means, do you have insights of those brazen efforts by the US?
> So now our leaders are trigger happy about shooting down any potential new balloons in order to try and save face while looking tough
Lazy thinking. You don’t know if this latest incident was in response to the event last week or there was something specific that prompted them to shoot it down. They didn’t even say it was Chinese. Strange unknown flying objects are not new of course. They following article discussed something happened in 2019, and was disclosed a year ago:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/video-of-mysterious-dr...
Syria comes to mind. Russia was invited by Syrian government [0]. US was not, but still invading country and airspace [1].
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[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_interventio...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in...
I agree that a ballon over Alaska is unlikely to gain much intelligence, but with the right equipment at the right place you can get a lot of useful insights into your enemy's capabilities even at peacetime.
There's a school of thought that says the US won the cold war by convincing the Soviets to bankrupt themselves trying to keep up with the arms race. Now I don't necessarily think that fully explains things, but I do think there's a lot more politics to a "spy" device than the actual photographs, especially outside the context of a hot war.
But my dad, who worked on (British) military IFF stuff, did have a story about an ICBM early warning system (I think American) that determined an attack was inbound because someone forgot about the Moon.
More to the point, if one side keeps secrets and another doesn't, the secret keepers have an advantage. Its a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, where secrecy is defection.