US aircraft shoots down new airborne object over Canada
bbc.com
bbc.com
There's no hard rule about where national airspace ends and space begins.. a lot of times they fly too high for planes to reach, and under certain circumstances balloons are allowed through national airspace.. so if the balloon isn't causing a problem (like being a hazard to air traffic), people just ignore it... weather balloons fly through our airspace all the time.
But the US public saw this massive balloon and demanded it be shot down, even if it caused an international incident.. and luckily nothing serious happened. So now that the cat is out of the bag, we're going to shoot down every balloon that hasnt filed all of the required paperwork that enters out airspace that's reachable by our aircraft... because 1) the public demands it; 2) it'll become political fodder if the white house doesn't; and 3) the international issue it generates is easier for the white house to handle than the political criticism.
If China never sent that large balloon.. they could have sent a dozen more small ones and no one would have cared.. just like we never cared about the 3 during the previous administration.
Edit: bobbyjo pointed out this link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-balloon-carried-antenna...
Since that likely settles the balloons intent… we can add 4) now that we know it’s a spy balloon, we’re going to shoot down all the balloons. Before the large balloon was shot down, no one would have bothered to check. No one is stopping weather balloons at the border. Big mistake on chinas part.
The degree of de facto stabilization will dictate whether e.g. the US may be able to transform this opportunity into an effective new policy framework aimed at leverage in rather obvious blind spots. That could be pretty huge.
I have a hunch that we'll also see an increasing number of opportunities for the US or other nations to effectively call out China's future tendency toward expeditionary blunders in South America, Africa, etc.
Right now Chinese leadership does not want to be seen "bending" in this way or that, by their internal audience. But not doing so is a huge risk factor for them in international diplomacy.
Whether the US or any other country really takes advantage of the opportunity and resulting partial leadership vacuum in the international space will be interesting to see.
There are indications that even in Russia Putin got that and tried to introduce harsher punishments than assigning the failed official to less prestigious positions. But it seems they did too little too late.
Yeah, that’s OUR racket!
As evidence to this claim, you'll see that many articles are actively discussing the fact that these balloons are relatively common. The big difference here, American citizens could see this object with just their eyes (uncommon for a balloon). I do buy the argument that China overplayed their hand.
I surmise you need large balloon to carry required instruments on one platform. Going forward IMO PRC just going to fly them higher, US can keep shooting them down... possible until they can't, both will reveal US capabilities. At minimum, finding out f22 + missile ceiling is worth the cost. PRC isn't going to stop program just because US domestic politics goes full retard, if anything, that's strategically exploitable especially if PRC can make current WH admin look weak by flying a balloon at height that can't be shot down. Medium/long term, PRC building/exposing CONUS vunerability is net benefitial for PRC posture - it's their version of, in DoD parlance, integrated deterence. IMO US analysis missing strategic calculus on PRC side.
E:over post limit but Streak Eagle was high performance preproduction airframe specifially designed to hit 100k for a few minutes. Hard to say if current blocks can do the same or reliable prosecute mission at 100k, finding out is value itself.
> knowing the US would use it to undersell capabilities
Simultaneously capabilities can be prodded, i.e. PRC start testing counter measures on balloons, and if successful reveal gaps / cause more drama - US domestic politics may constrain how much US can undersell. Ultimately getting US to change ROE and consistenly enagage with live weapons is opportunity for both sides.
And then the Chinese, knowing the US would use it to undersell capabilities…
The F-22 and other "stealth" jets can carry radar reflectors to intentionally make themselves EXTREMELY visible on radar.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/82798/how-does-...
Why would they carry such a thing? For one, it helps reduce the risk of accidents during training and other situations where they are flying in friendly skies. Two, helps prevent nosy enemies from learning about the true radar cross section of these planes.
It's hard to find concrete information on the USAF's practices here, for the obvious reasons.
The following is speculation, but: one imagines that the F-22/F-35/etc carry these as standard practice when not flying combat missions/patrols. One also imagines that they can be jettisoned midflight (like drop fuel tanks) in case e.g. a patrol turns into a spicy situation. That's a guess, I don't know if that's true.
The rationale being that you may be able to hear a cat's claws on floorboards in the middle of the dead night, but you'd never hear it in the middle of a rave party. So pairing F-22s with eg F-15s becomes a valid strategy.
Obviously simplifying, but that's the essence of what ECM is.
But also, don't assume that the US was naive here. The USAF is pretty good at electronic warfare. It's very possible they were jamming the object's sensors in various ways.
E: Lunar ranging = ground stations. Not feasible to cover CONUS with network of ground based laser for forseeable future. If anything, balloons will try to bait responses from SHiELD/air based laser ABL interception (YAL1) that can be extrapolated to IndoPac theatre.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experime...
It is also not feasible to keep using million dollar missiles to shoot down thousand dollar balloons.
I kind of doubt that the planes are cheaper than ground based lasers. Even so, a mobile ground station could avoid giving away the US position and allow them to cover more area. Not sure how feasible that is.
And going by the size isn't conclusive. The ICESat-2 weather satellite is over 3000lbs, for example. So instruments larger than found on a typical weather balloon clearly do have their place in weather/climate science.
Not true: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-balloon-carried-antenna...
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? There's no hard rule about when life begins but killing a 5 year old isn't a 22nd trimester abortion, it's murder. 18-60'000 feet is class A, controlled airspace in the US and Canada.
When the US sent U2s over the USSR, the rationale wasn't that 70,000 feet was "space", it was that it was that 70,000 feet was too high for soviet radars detect and and soviet planes to intercept.
What does this mean? I don’t see a reference to tea in the comment you are replying to.
I recently met someone who uses the expression "country mile" all the time. Hadn't heard it before but it's cool. "That's more popular by a country mile" Country miles are obviously better than city miles. So now I'll probably end up using it.
Interfering with F-22 sensors? If they sent an airborne jamming platform over US space it's serious.
On a more positive note, now that private observers report the skies over the Artic, Northern Canada and Alaska border, have a constant presence of AWACS and other multiple airplane sorties, the Aliens everybody was talking about here days ago, seem to have vanished...
[1] - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/11/politics/unidentified-obj...
"How do you become an F-22 pilot?" - https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/e76db/how_do_you_...
Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet."
This article and any other that mentions these two things has absolutely no source for the statement. There is a 0.0% chance F22 pilots are talking to the press, so I really believe this is a complete fabrication.
https://www.icao.int/APAC/Documents/edocs/International%20Ai...
One plausible (though entirely speculative) explanation could be they wanted the US to react this way. Now we will waste our military resources responding to these balloons and they in turn will learn about our military readiness. They could be intentionally probing and start sending smaller and smaller balloons to figure out where our detection limit is. They could want to understand how information flows and decisions are made by our government and have already tapped into other intelligence signals that this pen test is helping them monitor.
Again all speculation. But my fundamental point is you don't know their intention to know if they erred.
We don't even know if it was the PRC's object. The PRC has taken responsibility for the first balloon, but denies involvement with this one. This isn't a big-budget project. A startup company or a university could launch some balloon-borne instrument package.
It's going to be embarrassing if it turns out to be somebody's solar telescope or high altitude pollution instrument package, both of which have been launched on balloons of that size.
Yeah they are not worried about our 'detection limits' and definitely not 'wasting our resources'.
They might possibly be hoping to pick up some F22 signatures or something like that but even then very unlikely. They have ships that can do that.
And given the 'free publicity' the China Hawks are going to get (not quite 'Sputnik Moment' but a bit like that) I suggest it can't bode well for them, unless are playing real 3D chess and some internal guy is trying to get America to 'wake up' so as to prevent a war!
It's definitely a wierd one.
I suspect they won’t learn much other than how the US responds to balloons. It’s not like the US is revealing anything novel or secret. They’ve used already unclassified and publicly available aircraft and ordinance.
An appropriate quote to the situation
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1927
But we certainly _should_ have cared. People want to turn this in a purely objective moral game. "Well we've spied on China, so therefore this is fine." If you think of it more in terms of war, you'd never draw such an equivalence: "Well, we've shot down their planes so it's fine that they shoot down ours." The advantages that China can take against us matter, and it's important not to be reflexively passive.
People make these equivalencies constantly. Fortunately I don't think either side has been dumb enough to kill an soldier from the other yet, but once we get that pot cooking, WWIII here we come!
Would like to point out something relevant: China and India kill each others soldiers fairly frequently. I find it rather remarkable their issues haven't escalated.
1. Where can one find evidence of this mass demand?
2. How does the US government gauge this mass demand without formal voting/polling?
Were people phoning their senators, "SHOOT IT DOWN!"? I'm sure crazies phone in all kinds of things from time to time - what's the threshold for acting on demands/mass demand?
You mean saw with their eyes or on the news? If it was with their eyes then it wouldn't lead to public demand since as you say "weather balloons fly through our airspace all the time." and there's no way to attribute it to another country. If it's on the news then physical size is not relevant but detectability and newsworthiness are. People would have cared.
Trying to stir up an impeachment case over the response to the first balloon is just projection as usual from the GOP.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/border-free-biden-republica...
To me, that implies that it was drifting in the wind at that altitude since it had no visible means of propulsion.
I took a look at Ventusky (ventusky.com) to try to get an idea of the wind speed at that altitude so that I could know whether 40 mph (64 kph) made any sense.
Ventusky gives wind information at various altitudes though I have no idea how accurate the information may be. I checked the available altitudes for one close to 40000 feet and found a listing for 12000 m (39370 feet). That's close enough for the girls we go with as the old-timers always said.
For several days before the reported shoot-down (use the day selector at the bottom of the screen to see data for each day and the slider for time of day) the reported wind speeds were in the range of 20-35 mph (32-56 kph). As they say, close enough for the girls we go with especially when you consider the likely observational error associated with estimations made from a moving jet.
The first reported sighting of that object was over Nome, Alaska and it was tracked across Alaska until the shoot-down just off the north coast in the Prudhoe Bay area or just east of it.
Backtracking along the jet stream into China, the most likely source for the object, I decided that there was probably a balloon launch facility in north-eastern China, possibly near Harbin since a launch in that city will carry an object along that general route. It was just a guess and someone in one of those twitter threads actually found a balloon launch facility to the southwest of Harbin, near Hohhot that is a much better candidate for the origination point of these objects.
Anyway. It was fun looking at all this stuff but to me, these last two cylindrical things are balloons. The question about whether the balloons serve some intelligence gathering function for the Chinese will likely be answered in the coming days.
That’s why China wants to triple their Nuclear stockpile in less than 10 years. They know they don’t stand a chance otherwise.
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2022/11/29/pentagon-china-...
There will be no time for the "free world" to meet and decide how to respond since it will be every man for himself at that point. There will be no true winners.
When the dust settles, most of the world's population, including everyone north of the equator, will be dealing with the fallout of something that did not have to happen.
If anything of American society remains then they will find themselves needing to manage their own affairs with no central government or services to fall back on. Other adversaries may try to land forces here to sweep across the nation while we are down. It will be up to us to stop them and to restore some local semblance of law and order so that we can all organize a strong defense.
China doesn't have the industrial ability to build a navy strong enough to counter the US Navy so they have to carry out these intelligence operations in order to identify any exploitable weaknesses in communications infrastructure, military capabilities, etc. They have the manpower that they can call on to conduct a large scale invasion of Taiwan but they have no way at the moment to transport them to the island in large enough numbers to hold a beachhead. They are rapidly expanding their landing craft fleet though and their "civilian" navy is large. We need to arm Taiwan to the point where it is obvious that any attempt to float an invasion fleet across the straights will be a disaster. We also need to maintain regular patrols through the South China Sea including past all of the recently fortified islands claimed and manned by China so that we have the assets in position to mount a credible defense and to deny China the opportunity to prevent reinforcements or to blockade the island.
We have gamed this many times over the years but all things considered, we wasted the opportunity to prevent it entirely. Had we taken economic steps to prevent the growth of China's economy and the strong dependence of the west on cheap Chinese products by bringing industries back onshore in the US and Europe then we could have moderated their growth in a more controlled fashion instead of dumping cash into their economy that effectively set us up as the financiers of our own destruction. Today, we are looking at the near certainty, unless Xinping is replaced, of a war with China after several decades of allowing them to make up a huge technological deficit by stealing intellectual property on a huge scale so they could turn it against us. We can always strike first. That would make us the asshole though so it is better that we exhaust every other option before pushing those other buttons while we scramble to produce things we developed years ago but put on the back burner since there was no pressing need for them against less capable adversaries.
Like the Russians, China can throw millions of men at any adversary and many of those men know, because of the One Child policy, that there is a demographic situation where they will never marry or have families. The next 10 years will be quite interesting.
and, yet, . . .
As China Expands Its Fleets, US Analysts Call for Catch-up Efforts
The disparity has prompted U.S. maritime experts to call for a "Ships Act" comparable to the recently enacted "Chips Act" that supports the return of chip manufacturing to the United States.
Bryan McGrath, managing director at The FerryBridge Group, told VOA Mandarin that the shipbuilding bases of the U.S. and China are simply not comparable.
"The Chinese industrial base is a behemoth, and the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base is freakishly undersized as a function of the size of America's economy and its influence in the world," McGrath said.
As of 2020, the U.S. Navy had 297 battle force ships, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. China surpassed the U.S. as the world's largest navy with an inventory of about 355 vessels, according to a U.S. Defense Department report released in 2021. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) projects that China will have 400 battle force ships by 2025 and 425 by 2030.
The one thing that is not covered well there is the type of ships in the Chinese versus US Navy. Even with fewer ships we have more tonnage. A large part of the Chinese Navy consists of coastal defense assets which are smaller vessels. With that said they do have excellent anti-ship defenses and are gaming to be able to manage a conflict where we bring our carriers and air assets to bear.
https://www.defenceprocurementinternational.com/features/mar...
This is the reason that we have inked defense agreements in the region. Spreading the costs of defending the free passage of goods through the South China Sea with other nations allows us an opportunity to build a larger, more modern navy and buys time.
We should be investing in naval assets too since some of the most recent programs ended up with us buying fewer vessels than originally contracted and with those vessels being ill suited for the original task they were designed to handle.
As the VOA article mentions, we will likely run into problems mobilizing for a ship-building effort since it already is hard enough to find skilled workers (welders, etc) for industries that employ most of them today like the pipeline and oil and gas industry. A return to teaching trades in high school would be a great start that would pay dividends nearly immediately as the first class graduates into the work force.
Feel free to double check everything I posted. I could be totally wrong about any or all of it. Thanks.
I'm Australian and aware that China buys from our state alone (Western Australia) 16x more iron ore per annum than the US has ever managed to produce in a year .. this figure alone undercuts many arguments about China's perceived industrial capacity.
They are easily capable (for example) of producing 14x more shit steel than the max US steel capacity .. while at the same time producing 2x the max US quality steel capacity.
Any China-US naval engagement could very well see a new strategic inflection in any case.
Theres's been ironclad supremacy, an age of battleships, and a time of carriers as king.
China has put up (and taken down) several videos of highly coordinated unmanned drone swarms, in the air, on water, under water.
Very large swarms of drones that are nothing but sensors, engines and explosives that can react and maneuver are very asymmetric in cost.
How could a balloon break into pieces? Doesn’t it need to be made of flexible material?
Edit: WSJ is now reporting unnamed sources confirmed Alaska was a metallic balloon w suspended payload.
Ability to generate simultaneous bandwith of 100,000s of fires is also significant, most conventional long range strike / projection platforms are severely limited in how much fire they can deliver / unit of time. It's not feasible to sortie past limit of carriers or air bases, but the amount of balloons (or land based missiles) that can be delivered is much easier to scale, which means it's easier to satuate defenses. At the end of the day PLA is going to have very limited traditional methods of projecting power to CONUS (lack of carriers, or local basing), so they're going to latch onto any asymmetric platforms that can reliably bring war to CONUS. TBH I was not really anticipating mass balloons, and PLA planners probably weren't either. But the idea of hitting strategic targets with expensive long range missiles (i.e. prompt global strike) is something PLA is pursuing, now I imagine PLA planners are likely going to explore the virtues of cheap balloons that can scale more economically than missiles.
Basically, I think this is a strategy that's effective at scaring the US citizenry, but it is such a bad idea in practice no good adversary would choose this instead of the usual nuclear deterrent.
Of course on all things relate to fire it seems like the US has been about dumb as possible. 99% Invisible podcast episode 'built to burn' goes over this rather well.
If it's for reasons of secrecy, why announce it at all? The second one was in the middle of nowhere, it could easily have been ignored, or dismissed as a military exercise if anyone had made a fuss about it.
But now I am playing the guessing game a bit too much for my own liking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-altitude_long-endurance...
Also there is the Arctic you can take off and land on ice and use either an icebreaker or a sub for deployment and recovery.
China does have some advanced drones with a substantial range e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WZ-7_Soaring_Dragon
Ofc how they perform in reality vs their published specs no one knows.
In the past at least likes of China and Russia tended to inflate the specs that they made public whilst the west tended to keep the real figures hidden and release far more conservative figures especially when it came to things like maximum speed, range and operational ceiling.
Source?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/alaska-myste...
> It was described as "cylindrical and silver-ish gray" and seemed to be floating, a U.S. official said.
https://news.sky.com/story/us-shoots-down-unknown-object-fly...
> The object, shot down on the order of President Joe Biden, was flying at a high altitude of about 40,000ft and was the size of a small car, the White House said.
"It did not appear to have maneuverability capability, he said. "It was virtually at the whim of the wind."Maybe Blue Beam is in effect.
Apparently the Alaska object shattered upon impact against the ice. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/pentagon-shoots-down...
But more importantly, it sends a message - don't fuck with our airspace, we won't even send body bags
https://www.space.com/281-sky-capture-nasa-bring-genesis-ear...
However, that was a known harmless object on a known trajectory versus an unknown and possibly hostile object.
Additionally, helicopters can't fly nearly high enough for these. 25,000 feet vs 40,000+ feet.
It's too high for helicopters or rotor drones so there's no kind of aircraft that can get their quickly and just hover next to it and retrieve it. (And sending an airship would be so slow and hard to control I'm not sure you could ever get it to reliably intercept in a reasonable amount of time.)
So since you've necessary got to launch something at speed, the only conceivable capture device would seem to necessarily involve 1) a missile to puncture and deflate the balloon/buoyant part, 2) a giant net to wrap the entire thing, and 3) a parachute attached to the net to let it down gently.
But I can't even begin to imagine how you'd get all three elements working together reliably, rather than interfering with each other.
they said the second object was freely drifting and not self-propelled or guided, so whether it's technically a balloon or just something that behaves like a balloon is kind of irrelevant to anybody who isn't working for whatever government department is tasked with analyzing it.
Source: https://twitter.com/ZaidSabah/status/1624527081026486274
I can't imagine what sort of lens you were using to view the last thirty years, such that those were the peaceful, propaganda-free times and all this shit with balloons is troubling.
If it weren't for propaganda, we would have found the will to exit those wars well over a decade ago.
As it is, we arguably owe it more.
You can see what the result of leaving Afghanistan has been. We should have devoted more resources to nation building there.
Even Afghanistan wasn't a matter of propaganda so much as other flaws/isaues, such as overreactivity and hubris.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
Winning under MAD is moot. There undoubtedly will be losers at scale.
Historians differ if forcing the soviets to bankruptcy was necessarily better than a rapprochement. It worked, sure but like the end of ww1 gave birth to stab in the back rightist views of history, the FSU is now a kleptocracy and minor fights in Africa and the Middle east are now entrenched social cancers.
Afghanistan and the role of US funds to Pakistan on the region. Not a net benefit all told.
US Military to Use High-Altitude Balloons Against China, Russia: Report
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/07/06/us-military-balloo...
Compare the balloons with this technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#Opera...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-28#Operational_hist...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Genetrix
[2] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-soviets-built-besp...
It’s a stretch to present these as equivalent.
go on... why is that?
They can be, but they can also be weapons.
The interesting thing here is the social phenomenon of suddenly shooting them all down.
Coincidentally, I was just reading about MH17.
I think what changed is that the US decided to stop ignoring the "UFO"s. The Ukraine war has shown how important drones are and it's obvious that drones and balloons will play a huge role in any Taiwanese war.
Adversary drones are spying on the U.S. and the Pentagon is acting like they are UFOs. This gross inaction and the stigma surrounding unexplained aerial phenomena has led to a massive failure in U.S. military intelligence. It is likely that a wide array of explanations exist for the UFO mystery, and America's prevailing cultural issues and the general stigma surrounding UFOs was successfully targeted and leveraged by our adversaries. The U.S. Navy has a program of record for a Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors, or NEMESIS, which is a quantum leap in electronic warfare. There have been reports of large drone swarms spotted over the U.S. and its outlying territories, especially near strategic installations. The U.S. Navy's top uniformed officer says the craft involved in the 2019 incidents off of Southern California remain unidentified. It is possible that the Pentagon's investigations into these matters is a lack of real expertise to properly evaluate the evidence. Step one is to admit that we have a major drone problem and fund a real intelligence fusion center to work these cases.
Courtesy of this bookmarklet:
javascript:location.href='https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=%27+encodeURIComponent(location.href)Edit: Found an address that works and reported this.
- Size
- Shape (considering that mission profile)
- Movement characteristics
- General capabilities
- Access to nearby air traffic
- Tech being exposed _to_ pilots, e.g. flight envelope capabilities; inter-media transitional capabilities
This is the hand-wave problem with UFOs/UAPs.
Once you start into details, they're really not a single _thing_ anymore by any rational definition.
And this more flexible POV also takes into account the possibility that some _are_ spy drones.
Cite your source.
If anything both sides of the political spectrum doesn't want to get into showing China as the demon because unlike the previous cold war, they are not sure if they can win it or even force a draw. China is too powerful as it stands and getting more powerful as years pass while the current superpower is busy fighting it self with culture wars.
China is indeed extremely powerful but it has peaked.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/02/04/china-h...
https://www.ft.com/content/3146a413-9aba-4fd4-86a7-671bce0e6...
Possibly. I wouldn't use that information to be overly dismissive of the importance of the news. "Well shit, let's just start shooting them down" is a newsworthy change in a government's policy regardless of what it applies to.
If a couple of (supposedly bad and kinda not working) chinese spy baloons were suffient to suddenly make the US go nuts, and spend a lot of defense budget scrambling fighters around and shooting down UFOs, that was a lot of bang for the buck.
Or, if the USA just shots down everything once it enters its territory, future dirt cheap, "don't even have to be smart" bio/chemical weapons platform.
I doubt if the expenditure has been significant. The US has a lot of air to air missiles, pilots who need flight time, etc., and a lot of that stuff is a sunk cost.
There could potentially be a big increase in cost in the days that follow, for the US and for Canada. It's valuable, fragile human beings who need to do dangerous things like dive for surveillance balloon parts, or go out onto the ice to collect them, but the cost of scrambling some fighters and firing some Sidewinders by itself can't be that high. If scrambling fighters was all there was to it, the costs could probably be rationalized as a valuable training exercise.
I would venture to guess that if you tried to reduce everything to a dollar cost, the cost to the civilian economy of closing a portion of the airspace on the East Coast a few days ago to facilitate the interception of the balloon was higher than the cost of all these military operations to date.
> make the US go nuts
Yes, measured by the whole "make the Americans act crazy" metric, they're doing great. It's like Judo or something: we Americans just need a little push...
Whoever country is sending whatever these artificial objects are, what can they possibly gain from this?
Ironic if people are being spied upon by TikTok whilst watching a spy balloon video.
That's a good point though - people seem more worked up about the data collection balloon than they are about the little data collector in their pockets.
Woah! Even on iOS?
Other apps had the same issue (I think Telegram comes to mind?)
we're not far :D
it has happened before.
Russia did, and I guess still does, this a lot. Flying their planes constantly in European airspace to see if what the response is and also make it more normal occurrence. If they one day attack it’s harder to tell if this again one of those random times or an actual attack
Poetic.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-soviets-built-besp...
As to why use balloons instead of satellites, the most reasonable speculation I’ve seen is that they’re collecting signals intelligence (radio traffic, etc.) which is not accessible from orbital distances.
Seems to me like the military-propaganda apparatus is spinning up to prepare the populace for a war. But it's more of a gut feeling at this point.
Whether these intrusions by unknown objects were commonplace and previously had been ignored, is something I've wondered about myself.
"an official revealed during a briefing on Saturday that the U.S. was aware of three other instances during the prior administration and one instance earlier in the Biden administration that such an apparatus “transited” the country."
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3844511-chinese-balloons-...
U.S. fighter jet shoots down unidentified cylindrical object over Canada
The article places this firmly in the context of the recent shenanigans with China and makes no suggestion that we are being invaded by Martians.
reuters.com/world/us/us-still-gives-no-details-about-alaska-ufo-new-object-seen-over-canada-2023-02-11/
I didn't know that was a thing, Canadian PM having the power to command US jets.
Can anyone who knows more about NORAD weigh in with an ELI5?
The US was monitoring it on Friday:
> A statement from Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the object shot down on Saturday was first noticed over Alaska on Friday evening. Two F-22 fighter jets “monitored the object” with the help of the Alaska Air National Guard, Ryder’s statement said, “tracking it closely and taking time to characterize the nature of the object.”
* https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/politics/norad-additional-obj...
However:
> Defence Minister Anita Anand said in a news conference the "small, cylindrical object" was about 40,000 feet above ground and downed — due to possible risks to civilian aviation — at around 3:40 p.m. ET about 100 miles from the U.S. border in central Yukon.
> A senior government source with direct knowledge of the situation told CBC News that the Canadian government was first alerted to the object Friday night when it was still travelling through Alaska.
> The source added the object crossed into Yukon on Saturday morning and Trudeau ordered the shoot down by whichever country arrived at it first.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/norad-monitoring-airborne-o...
So it looks like the US 'took too long' to decide to shoot it down, and once it crossed the border Canada had final authorization. The US jets just happened to be closer (CA jets were scrambled as well).
The US and Canada have gameplanned for all sorts of scenarios similar to this, and up to and including full nuclear war. They have established playbooks for alllllll kinds of scenarios. Because when shit goes down, you there is NO TIME to gameplan. No, you pull binder #568 off of the shelf and get to work executing gameplan #568, "US jets pursue craft into Canada" or whatever.
There is a playbook for this kind of thing, and they are following it. The playbook possibly does include some kind of explicit authorization from the Canadian PM for the final shootdown.
So in reality this is certainly more "Trudeau authorized it" than "ordered it", because the US and Canada definitely can't order each other do things. However, for obvious optics purposes, they phrased it as "Trudeau ordered the shootdown." Because it looks sort of weak to the untrained eye if Trudeau just sort of allowed it.
However, the actual wording is sort of irrelevant. The reality is that it was a fairly seamless bit of cooperation between two close allies.
1. The US is just amplifying this to justify a war
2. The balloons are totally civilian
3. Aliens
Strike me as a relatively coarse influence campaign, notable mainly for its volume. Not sure if the ramp up is to save face, or part of a larger effort. Similar efforts were notable before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
I suspect a lot of "disinformation" by hostile parties just serves to provide the idiots with material that appeals to them, and they run with it.
China getting serious over Taiwan would be them creating deeper ties with Taiwan's economy and ruling body, and just waiting a few decades.
The government is apparently not saying what these objects were, so people are assuming they're balloons.
A CNN correspondent [0] just claimed that there were conflicting statements from the pilots that it interfered with their sensors as they approached it. And that they couldn't figure out how it was staying in the air. I have no idea where she got those updates, but it certainly adds mystery to the situation.
Now a hypersonic missile, or a stealth plane -- that would be a test. But losing one of those would be pretty expensive.
My understanding is that these UAFs are much smaller than that first Chinese balloon last week.
It probably also costs a lot more money to shoot down a balloon than it costs China to put a balloon in the air.
They can detect an incoming missile, so I don't see the problem. Maybe the one today IS a lot smaller; I don't think we're getting a whole lot of details on that.
As for the money: definitely. The same would be true of drones.
Active duty pilots must fly X number of hours per month to maintain their fight status. Essentially, they practice like athletes (because they are literally athletes, among other things)
So intercepts like these, and even silly stuff like sports event flyovers, come out of their existing budgets.
To actually cost us money in some meaningful way they'd have to send over extremely large quantities of drones that absolutely blow out the existing budgets for our bases.
The missiles are expensive, of course: $400K a pop for those AIM-9X. But the budget for the USAF is ~$160B/year, so again, drop in the bucket.
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/12/07/us-army-laser-stry...
So far they're offering good sport for the USAF. I'm glad they decided to take action and shoot'em down instead of letting them pass undisturbed through US airspace. This should send a clear message to uncle Xi to keep his lantern festival at home.
lasers or regular ammunition.
Ordinance has a best used by if not a shelf life. Use it or lose it probably matters to someone.
Missiles can detonate near a painted target, instead of needing direct contact. If the thing being exploded is hazardous (when exploded), you don't want to be flying nearby.
This is not an exercise. Combat time is valuable, even if shooting down drones/balloons.
Politically popular optics. Everyone likes a boom, just to be sure. What happens if it falls to the ground and on to someone or someone grabs the wreckage or worse, it's never found? Bad optics.
The common tactic of dismissing high stakes situations as idiotic, is intellectually lazy.
That is a lot of bang for the buck.
Don't they have radar signatures only rivaling that of a lawnmower?
Another plausible theory is the Trump administration covered it up because of their deference to Xi in early 2020 (see: comments on COVID being under control).
The immediate assumption that the Americans are being snookered comes off like reflexive anti-Americanism.
"Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet."
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/politics/unidentified-object-...
"It was described as "cylindrical and silver-ish gray" and seemed to be floating, a U.S. official said."
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-shoots-high-altitude-obje...
"Defense Department official said it broke into pieces"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/politics/unidentified-...
That sounds vaguely similar to the one purportedly shot down over Russia last month:
"Vasily Golubev, the governor of Rostov oblast, wrote on Telegram that a "small-size object in the shape of a ball" had been discovered flying "in the wind" at an altitude of around one and a half miles on January 3."
Any connection to the spherical metallic ball UFO caught over Iraq by U.S. reconnaissance aircraft in 2016?
https://nypost.com/2023/01/24/possible-ufo-caught-on-camera-...
2014 Chilean Navy UFO looks pretty similar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEK3YC_BKTI&ab_channel=FoxNe...
As does the U.S. Navy footage of a UFO caught off the coast of San Diego in 2019:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz-6jRrbtuI&ab_channel=TODAY
Another similar looking metallic sphere UFO caught by the U.S. Navy in 2021:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/K5ohaoh2ayfECjmuxtczQJ-970...
If we take one question mark from each event, we can construct a very spooky narrative. But none of the question marks, on their own, seem all that peculiar.
2. We've got a bunch of balloons in the air. Balloons are a technology dating back to before they started keeping records [0]. If it turns out people aren't registering every single balloon flight with every government then that isn't really a surprise. Drones are in the mix now too.
2b. People are going to use balloons to spy on each other. That isn't new. Governments spy on everything all the time. These comments are probably being logged in a super-database somewhere in the NSA, in the GRU and the Chinese Ministry of State Security. While it makes a good story it is not evidence of change unless someone does the legwork to show that it wasn't just a slow news week.
Anyway your point is invalid. The situation I described is exactly the HN vibe you see. Hypocritical, lacking in self awareness, desperate to be seen as smart...well, hey...whaddayouknow...exactly like what you've displayed here. Hmmm, not a caricature at all (tho I admit it was satirical) and also not intended at everyone! Totes makes sense now that the person most wounded by that satire and thus prompted to reply would be the person most likely to demonstrate the very same! Thank you for revealing yourself! :) ;P xx ;p
All your other points are valid but uninteresting, they don't disprove anything. But yeah...this whole thing seems like a distraction for the current tumult. There's 1000s of other cases if you're interested in something real...but you're probably not, but second I'm guessing maybe you are into this (maybe you're just too scared to admit it in public?)...anyway whatevs...this thing's probably a distraction. Well except for your comments, they just revealed you. But, yeah, the balloon thing: probably a distraction.
Just because we found metallic balls doesn't mean it must be alien. It's far more likely an SCO state that's spying on the US.
Additionally, the last fictious alien event series around Roswell turned out to be the A12 prototype (aka SR-71 Blackbird) that was being tested for its radar stealth capabilities.
Yet none of those tinfoil hats ever realized that...so...here we are, with "aliens" supposedly using a crappy technology like a balloon instead of warp-drive capable space ships. Because you know, space can be travelled in a balloon and there must be oxygen of identical density on every single habitable planet /s
Me looking at your first 3 lines:
...Uhuh...
...Good...
...WTF!?! Roswell was A12?!
Come on man, you can't believe that hype. Even the "tinfoil hat space weather balloon" bs cover story, has a guy holding a telegraph memo. You can zoom in on that memo and clearly make out a communique that details the coverup.
Also, read Corso's Day After Roswell (available in 1 click probably). It details an extensive chronology for the events of the crash, initial unsanctioned info release, and subsequent coverup and reverse engineering efforts.
It's just nuts to wave it away with a magical swoosh of your hands and say, "It was A12, nuff said." Some disinfo agent probably fed that story to the press, just like with the balloon. Please, please, please read more before you speak more about this. Actually read it for yourself, not just the "internet crib" notes and then make up your mind to confirm your existing bias because some 12-year-old commenter said "Contains many logical fallacies" on Goodreads or whatever. I don't know if there's a goodreads, don't go lookin' for it--just read more please!!! :P :) xx ;p
I'm not even saying these latest things are legit (probably just disinfo distraction)--but there's so many others--so, you know, look into it!
Not wanting to disclose what it was isn't the same as being fine with any interpretation of what was done.
Nonresident alien.
We're rolling into an election season, and the minority party loves conspiracies. I have a good feeling that information will be shared shortly about what they shot down.
civilization that travel how many light year to get here possess technology human identify to be magic or God.
terrifying to think at least to me :)
"The latest object appeared to be a small metallic balloon with a tethered payload, according to U.S. officials familiar with the situation."
This could also indicate China's surveillance capabilities. Need to use balloons to get high resolution rather than relying on satellite imagery (kinda why we don't really use U2s anymore and why that Trump tweet was seen as a big deal). It could also be trolling. It could also be testing (including of cameras that would be put on satellites). It is hard to say anything with certainty tbh. Militaries work in secrecy and that's why information is so valuable (despite what many think). But the objects will be recovered and you'd be surprised what can be reverse engineered from an exploded pile of scrap.
It “feels” to me like there’s something more than US/China brinksmanship going on.
Really? You can't think of any reason the US government would be happy to stir up disinfo and bullshit? I mean...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-using-...
> Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”
Emphasis mine.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/politics/pentagon-ufo-videos/...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/ufo-report-go...
https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-team-study-ufos-release...
Motherfucker when we all get shipped off to the cobalt mines on Rigel you're getting a blaster bolt up the ass.
Certainly we could have a kid wave a high powered laser out of a window of a Cessna 172 for 1/10 of the price
So like what, a similar but bigger balloon?
The flip side of this is adversarial observer(s) can learn all sorts of things about readiness, detection networks, response times, and tactical doctrine if well-prepared in advance to acquire and integrate that information.
Kinda wish I had a way to bet on the popularity of search terms because I can practically hear the rattle of doctrinal articles being furiously drafted at military institutions of higher learning right now.
There may be cheaper ways to shoot down balloons. Unguided rockets might work. There are guided rockets that would work better and still be cheap.
Now, when asked specifically if it was a balloon, the govt is like "Welllll...I can say it used no method of propulsion known to science, so if that's balloon-like..."
Might as well say it’s wizards showing up… because wizards don’t have a reason not to.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/alaska- mystery-flying-object-us-chinese-balloon https://news.sky.com/story/us-shoots-down-unknown-object-fly...
Any idea why they refuse to confirm that its a balloon if it is? The pilots confirmed its "unmanned" but why wont they confirm if its a balloon or not? strange dont you think.
"Some pilots said the object “interfered with their sensors” on the planes"
"Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet."
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/politics/unidentified-object-...
"It was described as "cylindrical and silver-ish gray" and seemed to be floating, a U.S. official said."
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-shoots-high-altitude-obje...
"Defense Department official said it broke into pieces"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/politics/unidentified-...
That sounds vaguely similar to the one purportedly shot down over Russia last month:
"Vasily Golubev, the governor of Rostov oblast, wrote on Telegram that a "small-size object in the shape of a ball" had been discovered flying "in the wind" at an altitude of around one and a half miles on January 3."
Any connection to the spherical metallic ball UFO caught over Iraq by U.S. reconnaissance aircraft in 2016?
https://nypost.com/2023/01/24/possible-ufo-caught-on-camera-...
2014 Chilean Navy UFO looks pretty similar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEK3YC_BKTI&ab_channel=FoxNe...
As does the U.S. Navy footage of a UFO caught off the coast of San Diego in 2019:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz-6jRrbtuI&ab_channel=TODAY
Another similar looking metallic sphere UFO caught by the U.S. Navy in 2021:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/K5ohaoh2ayfECjmuxtczQJ-970...
Edit: ffs, Do the downvotes mean "obviously there is" or "obviously there isn't"?
Downvotes on HN are handed out like candy to mean anything. Some people think obviously there is, and so downvote, others will think there isn't and downvote. Others think this is a stupid idea and will downvote. Others might think it's a good idea but disagree with the way you framed to the question
I wouldn't really worry too much about the votes here. They mean nothing.
I predict I will get downvoted on this comment, I don't know what it's meant to signify.
> The Pentagon said the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) detected the object over Alaska late Friday evening. U.S. fighter jets from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, monitored the object as it crossed over into Canadian airspace, where Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joined the formation.
for the last one: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/spy-balloon-canada-norad-ques...
> Should Canada have acted when it flew into Canadian airspace?
> The short answer, according to military experts, is no.
> "To say that, oh, Canada should have shot this balloon down on its own — that's just silly," said University of Calgary history professor and military historian David Bercuson.
> "That just completely ignores the fact that NORAD exists that we're part of it and have been part of it for almost 80 years now."
And yes, it also says this:
> The operating altitude of Canada's CF-18 Hornet fighter jets is 50,000 feet (15,000 metres), while Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the balloon had been flying at about 60,000 feet (18,000 metres) — potentially out of range for those jets.
However that ignores the fact that the F22 that shot down the balloon did so from 40,000 feet. Using a similar missile, a CF-18 certainly could have done the same.
We don't need to own those jets for them to be useful for us. Why would we buy jets for this purpose if the US is already guarding our skies with jets having this capability ?
Why does it matter ?
Also, the articles you linked aren't saying that "the RCAF can't defend their territory". They are stating capabilities. You are twisting facts or you really don't understand what is going on. Canadian medias are not making that mistake you make.
If for some reason Canada felt it could no longer rely on the US for shared air defense, then I would agree with you that it would be important to build up domestic capability to do so independently—but as far as I can tell, that isn't currently a concern.
And anyway, isn't the F-22 due to be retired before the end of the decade, so wouldn't debating its merits be beating a dead horse?
How much does 2000 balloons cost?
North Korea wants to agitate world, just release thousands of balloons with sand.
This is just stirring the pot, intentionally so.
I guess the US air forces received order to shoot earlier?
> Both Canadian and US aircraft were scrambled to track down the object which Trudeau says was taken out by a US F-22.
So clearly not.
NORAD is NORAD. They collaborate very closely and it becomes kind of moot who specifically does what.
Clickbait!