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Comment by POiNTx | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the cost is of sending such a balloon vs shooting it down. If I was China I would be sending thousands of these. It's not going to cause an all out war, but it does impose some security threat which should be dealt with and can't be ignored.

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This is the wrong question. Large militaries spend a fortune anyway on firing ordnance anyway for training purposes. Doing so in actually uncertain conditions is in many ways more valuable than pre-planned exercises. There's also a political attention focusing effect that allows rapid realignment of priorities away from status0quo maintenance towards novel readiness postures. So in strategic terms, it can be a net benefit rather than a net cost.

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.

It might not be the best thing to do our training with complex adversarial information gathering devices rather than more inert target dummies under our control.

Wait until you get to paragraph 2, it's a real banger

I've not looked into it - but it's possible there is zero or negative cost to shooting down a small number of balloons. Imagine each pilot needs X hours of training or to fire Y missiles in training. A couple balloon missions could just replace training exercises, on net saving money because we wouldn't need to setup the target.

Also, the US has a ton of Sidewinder missiles. I thought I saw 20,000 of AIM-9X; it is at least 5,000. The US may have a ton of older variants but it sounded like they need the imaging sensor in the new variant for balloons.

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.

Foreign countries providing our training targets free of charge!

I don't see how China would willfully continue send these balloons without expecting a symmetrical escalation. Sure, they managed to send a few relatively undetected until the past recent weeks, but continued attempts would surely produce a physical response from NATO states, whether that's sending balloons of their own or overflying Chinese territory with other aircraft, or increased signals intelligence operations.

>symmetrical escalation

So like what, a similar but bigger balloon?

"Mr. President, we must not allow a balloon gap!"

I love that movie so so so much that an "Yes minister" really captures it all.

No, more like X-37B, but perhaps one that can skim the atmosphere, i.e. with scramjet propulsion.

More colors, unlike the boring monochrome available under Communism

I've heard rumors of an advanced stealth coating called 14-4318-TCX.

That's just a blue sky theory.

The last two objects shot down were not balloons.

Source for that?

The press conference yesterday, the WH spokesman explicitly corrected someone who called the second object a balloon. They're being a bit cagey about whatever it actually is

They didn’t say they weren’t balloons, just that they were calling them “objects” and not balloons. Sure, that could be because they definitely want to emphasize the “we don’t know who owned them” aspect and calling it a balloon would immediately evoke China associations, or maybe they already know they’re not balloons. Either way, they also didn’t say “it wasn’t a balloon”

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