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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if you launch a balloon for say $10k so that your adversary has to spend $400k on a missile plus $70k x number of planes x hours in flight. And now do it multiple times per week. Seems like a decent strategy.

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It's a decent strategy until you realize you're just providing target practice on sorties the enemy would fly anyway. Shooting one missile a day is not affecting that budget. And pilots need constant training.

That depends on the cost difference between training and the missiles. May they have to use more fuel maybe the person on duty didn't need training.

I'm being picky but still

Flight hours are flight hours is my understanding: all the pilots involved are in the air a certain minimum number of hours per month just to keep their qualifications up.

PLA use USN activities in SCS and recon off her shores for training as well but US activities persist because there's mutual intelligence gathering going on, usually favouring the gatherer since the trade is info on one ISR platform vs said ISR platform gathering from host of sources. PLA probably knows alot about US P8s but those P8s learn about PLA navy, air bases, coastal defenses, radars etc. PRC can't simply shut down their hardware to deny info if collection occurs frequently. The benefit and burden is disproportionate. Hence it's favourable strategy to prod at US capabilites currently limited to CONUS that could be deployed in IndoPac. Imagine PRC sending ballons with iterative hardware to break through US EW, or counter measures to test against US missiles. These are activities US limits elsewhere but pressured to "reveal" because CONUS politics demand shoot downs. US alleged they jammed 1st balloon but likely only PRC on recieving end knows how successful. Learning more about US EW capabilities alone makes such missions useful and in return US... gets to shoot down balloons and get hand on carrying hardware PRC wants to reveal. Which might be huge, or nothing like PRC doing their 1000th P8 interdiction. Economics favouring the balloon is likely secondary consideration.

Not enough acronyms in your comment.

EDIT: judging from your post history, I wonder if you're a ChatGPT bot trained on US military documents. You do love the lingo and unnecessary acronyms.

Im a bot trained on us and chinese military documents, i contain multitudes. But TBH my grammar to lax to be bot. Anyway they're entry level acronyms for anyone following defense.

pla peoples liberation army

usn us navy

scs south china sea

isr intelligence surveillance reconnaissance

p8 recon plane

conus continental united states

ew electronic warfare

tldr you learn more rummaging through someones house than going through their mailbox. You can limit how much the house owner knows about you by limitting what you carry. Previously US mostly rummaged through PRC house and mailbox using very expensive tools. PRC limited to US mailbox but broke into the house using a paperclip. The price of tools matter less than the kind of new info that can be gathered. US also not happy PRC is finally in her house. US family more opinionated and may compel US to reveal she would otherwise not want to reveal to kick chinese home invader out. Chinese s family locked in the basement and don't know any better.

It’s just typical pretentiousness common in government related things, by people who use it as cover for mediocrity, especially when talking to laypeople.

It’s intentional in order to create a mysticism about government and military matters to impress the commoners.

There’s even legislation and policy directives to require the government to use and require common language instead of jargon. In typical government action fashion it is of course only effective in a very limited, below threshold manner, but it also cannot affect the people in the private sector so use it to feel important to commoners and project their mediocrity to those in the know.

It’s very much the same kind of behavior as is common in the financial sector to cover and obscure and obfuscated the scheme.

It’s not favorable because the strategy is flawed by assuming the US hasn’t already or can’t respond. Assuming China continues to engage in activities the US will further escalate to stop the activities and force a war with a favorable hand.

Which assumes US has a favourable hand to escalate since non of the posture improvements for US are due until after 2030s assuming PRC doesn't keep closing gap. Meanwhile these reciprical activities will likely continue because I surmise PRC leadership thinks it's not flawed and proportional to US ISR activities on PRC that has exploded in past few years. I don't see PRC backing down unless US does as well.

> Which assumes US has a favourable hand to escalate

US has the favorable hand

The hours in flight probably should not count. Those planes and pilots fly a lot of training hours. They could just use some hours that would otherwise be training to go deal with a balloon.

As far as missiles go, I wonder if you even need any weapons to down a balloon? A supersonic pass in its general vicinity would hit it with a shock wave and a lot of turbulence. Would that be enough to damage it sufficiently to down it?

Does that 70k per plane per hour actually cost an additional 70k? If it becomes frequent enough I imagine they could start shooting down balloons in lieu of their regular training missions. Same for the missiles.

I believe that $70k is actual operating cost - fuel, maintenance, salaries, etc.

Until the frequency of it escalates into a damaging economic conflict.

The damaging economic conflict already started in 2018.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonytellez/2023/02/08/here-a...

A lot of other comments have covered other aspects, and here's another one. If balloons become commonplace, I'd bet that they don't scramble the latest and greatest to shoot them down. It could probably be done with a turboprop.

The F-22 was probably used in the most popular case as a show of force.

Turboprops have a max ceiling of around 30,000 ft, while these types of balloons can easily be more than twice as high. Really not the right mission profile

The f-22 was used because it was the on-call aircraft and the balloon was at 60+ thousand feet. the f-15 perhaps could have done the job, but the f-16 would have trouble. Apologies for the meme format but it explains it so well.

https://youtube.com/v/koEQp8ImlnI?t=649

A balloon that requires a missile to be brought down has to be really big, like soccer field big. In which case it won’t cost just $10k.

My understanding is that basically all of these balloons require missiles due to their altitude, not because of their structure.

Edit: looks like I was wrong. The balloons were only 40-60k feet, which is within the range of military aircraft. reply

Do we the modern jets have guns still?

Yes, some do.

What would they cost? $10k seems reasonably close given the price below.

https://weatherscientific.com/collections/weather-balloons/p...

That’s just the fabric. What about all the equipment you’ll put inside? And for the US to bother to shoot them down my guess is that they’re doing something really funky with what they’re carrying.

If you fly dummies for the purpose of having them shot down, they wouldn't have to carry much. It's probably nothing too expensive or they'd put it on a satellite.

If they're flying really expensive stuff at commercial flight levels, that's pretty dumb since it will be shot down.

> If they're flying really expensive stuff at commercial flight levels, that's pretty dumb since it will be shot down.

Seemed like a good strategy until about a week ago!

The prior ones weren't at the commercial level.

IF they’re dummies why bother shooting them down?

We won't know that until the debris is recovered. There's no way to know what payload the next one will be carrying either.

And what if it's just "upcycled" electronics. We could spend a boat load trying to recover bogus data from seawater logged flash drives for nothing.

Did it require it, or was that just what they used?

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