Pentagon Declines to Answer If It Shot Down $12 Balloon with $400k Missile | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon Declines to Answer If It Shot Down $12 Balloon with $400k Missile

zerohedge.com

46 pointssahin46 comments

The F-22 costs more than $50,000 per flying hour to operate. The USAF flew the F-22 for approximately 28,000 hours in FY2021; but that $1.4bn expense is less than 1% of their annual budget.

We're talking about a $400K missile so much, why?

Coz it's either that, Seymour Hersh or exploding trains and the last two are kind of awkward.

Well, rather than poring over armed forces budgets, most of us are checking our W-2s around this time of year, and I tell you what: I can hardly afford the Secret Service bullets.

Would you rather pay 5-10% less in taxes by cutting military spending?

two missiles apparently

They need to fly to ensure that new pilots learn and older pilots remain polished. They don't need to blow up a pico balloon if that is what it was.

OK - but flying an actual intercept mission and firing a warshot at an atypical target is a pretty good way to improve or maintain readiness.

Because the republicans want a red herring for the next election to use against Biden.

They didn't recover the object...so they wouldn't be able to answer either way. I'm surprised they couldn't do a visual inspection and say yep...it's a pico balloon. And if it was, I'm pretty impressed a missile can hone in on something like that.

The Cuban Missile Crisis had backdoor communication to resolve the urgent problem of the day. That object in a spy thriller movie could be a backdoor object.

Why did they blow up the balloons instead of trying to capture them in one piece and perhaps study them? What if they had something dangerous on board that could spread everywhere in the air upon getting blown to pieces?!

I don't think there's a way to capture a balloon at 80 000 ft of elevation. Also, balloons would be just about the worst way to reliably deliver a payload without risk of it coming back to you. And there's also the fact that it's a scenario that has never happened, and there's nothing that would lead us to believe it has any chance of happening.

Send up a similar balloon but with people.

You wouldn’t even need people, a drone would be fine

Easy, you use another balloon to grapple it, reduce lift, and therefore bring it down in a controlled manner. Of course this takes engineering and thought versus using a missile we can readily reorder.

Wonder how much time and money it would take to create a maneuverable balloon that could rise 80k feet and precisely make contact with another balloon (that may also have some maneuvering controls).

Ah yes, “easy”.

It's not about thought and engineering. If it was actually useful to do that, the military would've had no problem developing a solution like that. In fact, air to air missiles are infinitely more complex and engineered than any grappling balloon could ever be.

It's just that it makes no sense to build something that is completely useless, for a scenario that won't happen.

They wasted $500,000 on a missile when they could have spent billions on balloon force.

What makes you think it was at anywhere near 80 000 ft?

Maybe I'm confusing this one with the other balloon earlier this month? I could swear one of them was that high.

Theatrics.

Pentagon money well spent, bang for the buck, if those factored in.

And now next years budget is justified with more money dedicated to missile manufacturers.

just make it a magnitude cheaper, but order 10 times as many, same deal, better PR!

They better be ready, because next guy is definitely going to launch 10x balloons for a grand total of “next to nothing”!

Exactly but why the theatrics? To cover up the huge event from the week before: https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int/22973-us-and-norway-b...

The point isn't to trick you into thinking it's real. It doesn't matter if you know it's all a bunch of bullshit. The administration literally conducted an act of war the week before. The theatrics are done to cover everything up. To make this bullshit the forefront of your mind rather then the blowing up of nord streams 1 and 2.

They are not that competent. At best you could say they spend most of their time tricking themselves. But that's an American speciality not confined to the military.

I'd accept a few million from the DoD to begin a feasibility study of capturing them with a large butterfly net.

Blowing stuff up is just another means of communication

Looking at that train derailment incident with the chemical spill and fire that recently took place in Ohio, it seems to me that the established order is rather willing to take the exact type of risk you describe

If you find you're angry about a large government wasting half a million dollars, then you'll be really angry when you find out how much it actually wastes.

And then when you find out that government waste is a fraction of the waste in private enterprises, well, you probably won't be angry about that at all.

Because the personality that rages at public waste never seems to be all that concerned with the much greater level of private waste.

you're wrong about the private waste, I'm angry about it also but I can't do anything about that. But as a tax payer in the top 2% in the US I am justified in my anger towards the US govt wasting tax payer dollars shooting AIM-9x in F-22s to blow up balloons.

Was there a more cost effective way to shoot down the balloon? Is there any actual competition in the missile industry?

I read the story about the F-18 shooting down a balloon with its gun, but it's also expensive to fly and maintain such a jet.

…not shooting it down in the first place.

If a balloon really is operated by someone attempting to spy on sensitive military installations, it makes financial sense to shoot it down. It's cheaper to spend 400k on a missile than to have your adversary learn something they shouldn't.

If the federal budget is $2T and if you paid $100K of that in taxes, your contribution to a $400k wasted missile is two cents. I might suggest that two cents does not justify very much anger.

The assumption here is that there’s a symmetry between private parties wasting their own money and the government wasting the public’s.

I think the assumption is that both private and government try to minimize waste as much as possible, and the government is just better at it.

why can’t an enterprise be more efficient if profit is their motive?

probably because in many enterprises people are incentivized to optimize for personal profit (pay grade, promotion, increasing team size, launching new (often unnecessary) features/products etc) which leads to waste and bureaucracies... iow optimizing in the small which leads to the opposite in the large.

Two $400K missile a shot were needed to bring down one balloon at the target price range $12 to $180. The first sidewinder missile missed.

Zero Hedge is an even less reliable source of information than the narrator in the blog’s favorite book (or, more likely, movie).

This is how American military was defeated with absolute humiliation by Talebans and Vietnamese. The opponents simply overwhelm your expensive toys with cheap counter measures. Even American soldiers like Deltas and Rangers couldnt afford to get slaughtered by untrained enemy combatants in the hundreds of thousands. Imagine China flood American skys with a million balloons with fentanyl powders. How effective is American patriots and THAAD and F35 going to defend against that? No wonder American was defeated in Afghanistan after spending 10T ISD and 20 years there. This obsessions with wonder weapon is one of the reason how Hitler loss to Stalin Russia. Guess Americans have to relearn that lesson.

Both zerohedge and Snowden are sources that you should basically never be listening to. They are intensely unreliable and Snowden’s essentially a state mouthpiece for the Russian government at this point.

using a laser would be a much more practical weapon against a balloon. Anyway, Bing better stop sending up those balloons.

Where's Frank Luke when you need him?

It was only $400K?

Must have been one of those old icky missiles that desperately needed replacement anyway.

U.S. defense spending will OBVIOUSLY have to go up:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/16/ukraine-w...

Military spending as percentage of GDP:

  World total  2,113  2.2  100%

1 United States 801.0 3.2 38%

2 China 293.0 1.7 14%

3 India 76.6 2.4 3.6%

4 United Kingdom 68.4 2.1 3.2%

5 Russia Russia 65.9 3.1 3.1%

I mean, we're only spending 1/3 of all the money spent on military in the world!! How lame is that?

We need to shoot down those weather baloons with $1M missiles!!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com