Airspace over Lake Michigan restricted due to national defense
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The follow-up to my wild conspiracy is wondering what American spy program will be unwound in response.
I have no evidence for this. It’s a long-shot silly theory that I think is at least plausible.
The American spy/military program involving Low Earth Orbit satellites is a potential target. SpaceX is launching tons of these satellites over China as part of the Space Development Agency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm
I know amateur's are involved in meteorology, aircraft tracking, even spotting asteroids and meteors. It would be awesome to have something pointing up all day with software on the back end — pinging you if a small object traverses its CCD.
The counter position is the idea that these have negligible benefit over satellites, so it is irrelevant. However, why send them if they don’t add new capabilities beyond satellites?
Can't balloons be punctured by something less expensive than a stinger? Maybe a drone with a machine gun?
And that leads to the conspiracy that there's someone already has a balloon defense system ready for the inevitable bid.
Using guns against high-altitude balloons is also challenging just from an aerodynamics standpoint. Stall speeds get pretty high up around FL600 even with large wings, so the airplane would have to fly straight at the target with a high closure rate in order to get within effective gun range. This creates some risk of a mid-air collision. Using a guided missile is much safer.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/weather-balloon-canada-chin...
Who knows how many of the thousand rounds actually hit the thing.
I wonder if someone might start filling them with much cheaper hydrogen... what's the cost of all that helium anyway?
Goodyear blimp costs about $100k in helium.
Modern incendiary and explosive rounds fired by fighter jets aren't effective against them becayse they are only triggered by their impact against a hard target, but I'm sure the DoD could come up with a more effective version pretty quickly if it came down to that.
Occam's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)
> when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires fewest assumptions
Occam's razor would say that this is the first time we've noticed a balloon over the US, so we shot it down. Believing that there is an unspoken agreement between the US and China to allow a certain amount of spying and we're only taking a hard stance because the Chinese fucked up and got their balloon noticed by civilians has far more assumptions baked into it.
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To be clear, I'm not saying the theory presented by OP is wrong, I'm just saying that it's not backed by Occam's Razor.
You must you believe spy balloons are [always, sometimes, never] reported to the press, and the press [always, sometimes, never] reports them to the public, and the public [always, sometimes, never] reads the reports.
These pieces are already in position.
Do you really think “you ought not to position pieces without necessity” really favors “always” over sometimes?
Likewise, there is evidence the air balloons fly over America more than the authorities recognize.
What explanation has the fewest unnecessary parts: we have perfect tranferreance of knowledge from Air Force Intelligence to consumers of the press, or the phenomena are witnessing are normal and expected?
Edit: I removed some parts I placed without necessity.
Another theory I heard is that they're poking the US to see what responses would be employed, how quickly detection happens, the radio signal / signals intelligence environment, etc.
Space is regarded similarly to international waters. Spy satellites are free to overfly countries.
He's claiming they're all balloons, and that recovering them has been an intelligence windfall for the US - and Schumer would be in a position to know that. Then again, Schumer has seemed to have an obvious anti-China bias in recent years.
These balloons are significantly cheaper to manufacture and operate than the stealth warplanes that are being used to shoot them down. Instead of manning AWACS and defending them, China could flood the airspace with thousands of these balloons and it would be too expensive to take them all down with our current technology.
By publicizing the F22 mission to shoot that balloon down, we kind of showed our hand and it's a really bad hand. Hence the obfuscating language now being used by officials on the matter.
Besides, no one's going to run out of missiles, balloons, or money before this escalates in another fashion. This is a rather short stage, not an indefinite future.
Eg, retaliation in kind.
There's zero difference, as said balloons could have any manner of nefarious purpose. Chemical/bacterial/viral, or just plain spying, airspace is airspace, protecting it is a thing, and China has the bad hand now.
What they were/are doing is well thought out, and technically a good way to spy. But the political aspect shows (again) just how poorly China understands the West.
To burn so much political capital, over so little gain, is immensely stupid, a diplomat's nightmare, and completely incompetent.
I feel for China, I do. A huge chip exists on its shoulder, it spent centuries bowing to the West. The betrayal during WWII likely still stings.
So it wants to flex, to be the big man, to strut its feathers, but wings made of wax only take you so far...
Not convinced this is true for the large balloon. The helium alone will have cost 6 figures, which is comparable to the cost of the flight time of the F-22.
Also, it's not like the US has a shortage of F-22s and air to air missiles.
The US can retaliate in other ways, sanctions, actually bombing China or perhaps the factory making these, going to war, etc.
The US can also easily develop a weapons platform to destroy these balloons.
The US can't bomb anything that has air defense.
Aerial warfare (which is the US doctrine) is hard to conduct when there is a proper air defense. I'll be happy to be proven wrong by a specific example.
Now it's:
> Has the US ever bombed a country with GOOD air defense, give a specific example
You should probably provide a timeline because I would just give examples from World War II or something and that would effectively "prove you wrong".
But my response was to your initial statement that the US can't bomb anything that has air defense, which is incorrect, as you know. Secondly you are probably thinking about bombing strictly in terms of aircraft bombing things, but you're neglecting that the US can launch missiles and take out air defense elements and so wondering whether the US can bomb a country with good air defense probably isn't the right question to ask because the US would destroy the air defense elements and then bomb the country.
But even so, yes the US can bomb a country with good air defense because the US has developed weapons platforms that can do so.
Oh, don't get snarky. "Functional" air defence, whatever. It's just worth to filter out anything with the kind of air defence that's just dude with a machine-gun shooting in the air or something that wasn't operational or whatever.
Providing an example is always good for a substantial discussion.
> You should probably provide a timeline because I would just give examples from World War II or something and that would effectively "prove you wrong".
I don't suppose it's worth discussing anything that cannot be relatively safely considered as "modern warfare".
> which is incorrect, as you know
I don't, that's why I am asking.
> the US can launch missiles and take out air defence elements
Air defence is kinda also supposed to protect from missiles.
> the US has developed weapons platforms that can do so
Are you implying hypersonic missiles? They are relatively new and poorly tested, not even in serial production AFAIK.
Did you mean “agenda” or “strategy” or “vision”? It is possible to see the CCP as an opponent that should be mitigated without distorting one’s thinking.
Many US politicians have a bias against China due to racial animus and/or populism. Many US politicians have a well-reasoned belief that China poses security and economic threats to the U.S. and should be contained and managed. Some US politicians are in both groups.
Another group at my school did actually end up picking the weather balloon project and it landed in a tree in Amish country in Pennsylvania after having been launched from northern VA (somewhat ironically, it was the only tree in a wide open farm of dozens of acres). I wonder how many hobby weather balloons there are up there every day?
https://www.flightradar24.com/BLOCKED/2f2cec50
Edit, Nope, just a guy flying to Sault St. Marie with his transponder misconfigured ;)
Which is correct?
* The balloons/objects are well known by intelligence agencies and generally tolerated for strategic reasons, but then one becomes visible to the naked eye by the general public, and the agencies must suddenly respond and pretend it's a brand new threat, because the news cycle operates on simplistic headlines. OR
* This is an entirely new and surprising development, and now intelligence agencies are aggressively scanning airspace for more of these objects and taking them down.
* These balloons/objects can't actually provide useful intelligence for China, but by sending them as sacrificial lambs and eliciting a military response, it sets the precedent for China to do the same for any US intrusion on their airspace. (This one could be combined with either of the above two)
* The timing of these balloons corresponds to other intelligence happenings that the general public doesn't know about - i.e., there is something happening in the intelligence space between the US and China, and these balloons signal some message that the intelligence agencies of the US understand, but which the public does not know about. But, again, the news cycle and the voting public demands a response to what they understand, and they do not accept "Trust us, we're handling it behind the scenes" as an answer. End result, you get an F-22 shooting down a balloon, in a highly visible operation. It's unclear if this demonstration was directed more at China or for the voting public.
One final note - we're talking about intelligence warfare between massively powerful nation states, which makes it tempting to theorize and hypothesis like I just did above. But possibly there is nothing much to think about, and the truth is exactly as it seems: China sent some balloons in a spy program of unknown scope, possibly to elicit this response or possibly not, and it became a political mishap for the current administration so it was forced to respond in a public display. And now the event has more implications for US political pundits and news cycles than it ever did for intelligence warfare between these two countries.
There was one for MT yesterday evening as well.
Looks like it's over Lake Huron now?
>At 2:45 p.m., a U.S. Air Force F-16 fired a sidewinder missile at the objects, the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday.
>The Lake Huron object was an octagonal structure with strings hanging off but no discernable payload. The official also said that there is no indication of surveillance capabilities but they cannot rule it out.
…
https://abc7chicago.com/lake-michigan-flight-restrictions-ai...
I suspect both Russia and China were operating different model balloons for different mission types.
What are your guesses on their purpose?
If I had to guess, I wonder if they are data relay nodes to collect information from Chinese/Russian bugged equipment that cannot transmit over the internet (eg. compromised equipment in secure military facilities).
An interesting theory, although I would be at least a little worried if secure facilities did not already have some form detection of signals they do not expect.
OTOH, you could instead have something gathering data, and the passing balloon could send a signal to the listening device(s), and then quickly dump+relay the data collected over time.
A lot of the comments focus on "Why would they use balloons when they have satellites?" But the reality is they are cheaper, can be oriented inexpensively and can loiter. Not to mention the lower radar signal and other detection issues (made clear by the revelation that this has been going on for a while).
Now that launching/steering balloons is down to the hobbyist level...it seems a larger corp or state actor could easily use them in a way that seemed impossible 30 years ago.
Either that or china’s genuinely trying to test our response times and protocols in preperation for something down the line
It's possible this balloon traffic has been relatively routine but we are only recently noticing them and responding to them.
Key thing is to let it play out and not get freaked out by theatrical political people.
I recall the reported costs of "junk rockets" vs those surface-to-air defenses, which I believe are a similar case of the attack being orders of magnitude cheaper than the defense
E.g., when there was a new bunker-buster bomb in the initial Iraq war, one was developed in 28 days. Similarly, the MOAB was developed in about a year. There are plenty of teams of highly skilled and well-equipped engineers who will happily undertake to solve that problem.
Also, weapons systems with higher expected rates of use can benefit from economies of scale-ed up production.
Unless they're sending a million balloons this week, it won't be that kind of problem.
The recovery might be something else, but then again, those groups are constantly training anyway, so I'd venture to guess the difference is negligible.
This may be related to why we’re seeing more of these incidents being reported with interventions.
please explain why they shutting down airspace without a statement. If they think its a balloon, why not just say 'radar detected a probable balloon and we are shutting down airspace while it is being investigated.'
Why was the incident over Alaska described as a metal cylinder or whatever if its another probably balloon? This doesn't make much sense.
"It is a feature of the present invention to provide a craft, using an inertial mass reduction device, that can travel at extreme speeds."
Amateur radio operators monitor these frequencies https://tracker.sondehub.org/