US jet shoots down unknown object flying off Alaska coast
apnews.comWe merged all the threads into this one, since it seems to have been first.
We changed the url from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/politics/unidentified-... to what appears to be the article with most recent updates (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34745940 - thanks yabones!).
I feel sorry for the pool soul who decided to send up their DIY weather balloon with gopro to get that space shot. Who knows he might even have a video of a F-22 sending a missile over.
How much does a weather baloon cost? ...compared to a F22 flight, a missle + all the logistics?
If it's cheap enough, there will probably be youtubers and tiktokers buying them en-masse just "for the lulz".
I heard rumors that during the bosnian war they were making fake SAM sites using microwave ovens with the door taken off. Get them to fire an air-to-ground missile at a device you got from the junkyard and an extension cord.
This was supposedly done during the US bombing of yugoslavia... open microwaves transmit pulsed radiation, automatic systems think it's a radar and bomb the site.
Can confirm this and that it happen in both Bosnia and the Serbia campaigns. I had family members who were involved [0].
The deception methods that were applied were truly remarkable, they used decoy tanks and sent people out to imprint fake tank tracks into fields.
They also understood IR and would shield real troops while leaving coal to burn in empty pillboxes and bunkers
There was also the shoot down of the F-117A by what was effectively a rag-tag group of AA who planned the operation and pulled it off
A lot of what was learned in the earlier Bosnia campaign was applied later in '99 - not just the use of decoys and microwaves, but using spotters to track the regular flight paths of incoming fighters and intermittently switching radar off and on (this is how Scott O'Grady was shot down in his F16)
Gen. Wesley Clark was a huge advocate of the doctrine that you could win wars with air power alone and never have to sacrifice ground troops - that thinking changed after '99
[0] note that I in no way condone the overall goal of what took place there and those same family members would be the first to tell you it was horrific
> Gen. Wesley Clark was a huge advocate of the doctrine that you could win wars with air power alone and never have to sacrifice ground troops - that thinking changed after '99
Delusions about winning wars with only air power are very close to a century old now. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia ) But they seem hugely appealing to parts of human psychology - so "proved horribly wrong, yet again" doesn't do much to cure them.
That said - Gen. Clark was a career Army officer, not Air Force. And "we don't need an army to win" ideas have, ah, limited appeal to career Army folks. My read is that he was a good officer, stuck under a political leader (Pres. Bill Clinton) extremely reluctant to commit ground forces. Clark knew not to contradict his boss, and did what he could within the imposed constraints.
Gen Clark had to be reined in by the common sense and prudence of a British general.
"I'm not going to start Third World War for you," - https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/aug/02/balkans3
"...One of Clark's most debated decisions during his SACEUR command was his attempted operation to attack Russian troops at Pristina International Airport, immediately after the end of the Kosovo War in June 1999..." "https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/6hjuss/kos..."
"Incident at Pristina Airport" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Pristina_airport
I heard the downing of the f-117 was due in large part to them flying the same patterns at the same time every night. Was this true? Or was there more involved in the AA hit?
Yes, the same flight plans, routes and timetables, were re-used, so when spotters saw the aircraft take off they had a very good idea of where it would come from.
The shoot down also involved the SAM radar operator violating his own SOP by leaving his radar on longer than they normally do, and firing at a non-PID contact, because they _knew_ the aircraft was going to be there.
Complacency kills.
> saw the aircraft take off they had a very good idea of where it would come from.
Wait, what? If they saw the aircraft take off, they definitely knew where it came from, no?
> non-PID contact
What is that, exactly?
Positively Identified. Western forces have many safeguards in place to only shoot at PID targets because the cost of 'blue-on-blue' is so destructive for morale
Not having a positive ID, I reckon.
Since it was supposedly "invisible", there was a lot of joking that it was hit by accident saying: "sorry, we didn't see it".
I believe so, but also because they decided to still fly missions on a day where the Prowler EW platform was inoperable. Due to the extreme predictability of the route, along with no countermeasures, and intelligence on the matter, they were able to burn through.
This is the article I read about this some time ago; good detail here! They quote complacency as a factor, arrogance would be another good word - in grossly underestimating the sheer determination on the other side.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/an-in-depth-analysis-of-how-...
IIRC it involved sacrificing one AA tank and using another to kill the plane.
Where can one read more about this+
Operations room did a great video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Is3R4ie21Mc
Winning wars with air power alone is a very dangerous thing to do.
It puts success entirely in the hands of the best funded. You can simply simulate the war and arrive at the outcome.
So as a member of the “losing” side, how do you respond? You only have one choice to win: escalate. Escalate to terrorism, NBC weapons, etc.
Both sides have to bleed in a fair-ish fight to keep wars roughly conventional.
I don't get what you're getting at.
If you wanna bomb someone you don't get to complain when they turn around and engage with whatever means they have.
I’m not sure you “don’t get to complain”, but essentially you’re reiterating my point, that I believe General Clark is wrong on this point (obviously with the caveat that I’m a guy with a keyboard and a monitor, but never seen a battlefield).
I’m from a country where we would be able to launch massive manned and unmanned aerial attacks at an enemy country. And yet I still think that we should be careful to avoid such an asymmetrical use of force.
Using aerial attacks as part of a wider strategy, fine. But if the enemy sees absolutely no possibility of winning a war conventionally, as you say “you don’t get to complain”.
This is a legend that is created by propaganda.
Microwave ovens frequency is 2.45GHz with a narrow spectrum because microwave ovens are under strict RF regulation, like anything that is an intentional or unintentional radiator.
Microwave oven magnetron's power is miserable compared with any AAD radar. Plus, microwave oven is not designed to emit RF energy when it's opened. So, emitted power will be even less.
https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/1254/2017/01/tang264.pdf
If you’re in wartime, microwave oven door safety interlocks are out the window.
The mesh of the door can be simply cut out, or the interlock microswitches pressed down with dowels or tape.
The article you linked shows that there’s frequency drift over time with a microwave, and that different magnetrons have different spectrum profiles.
What automatic systems are out there bombing such things?
Presumably, GP is referring to a HARM[0] or similar anti-radiation missile[1]. I believe the targeting automatically, but presumably the pilot still had to pull the trigger.
AGM-88 HARM (High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile)
AGM-88 HARM (High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile)
Microwaves transmit on a frequency nowhere near missile systems and are not modulated in any way resembling a missile fire control system, but cool story.
ECM gear in US warplanes can classify a system based off its emissions and people think they're fooled by a microwave oven?
Not to be too provocative, but hugely expensive precision equipment being fooled by a microwave oven with the door cut off is exactly what I’d expect from the US military.
I mean, we had a SETI false alarm from the break room microwave door being opened without pressing the ‘stop’ button first…
Doesn't mean it worked. One can _attempt_ to create a decoy, especially if they have little knowledge of how radiation is transmitted into the environment. On South Park, Randy Marsh, a geologist with a Ph.D., puts his nuts in the microwave to get just enough cancer that he can qualify for medical marijuana. [0]
People often say "nuke" when referring to using a microwave.
I tried growing marijuana with CFL lights in my dorm room. When the cops showed up, I ate the biggest of the 3 plants, a few inches tall, right in front of them.
> Microwaves transmit on a frequency nowhere near missile systems
S band is used for target acquisition a whole lot.
> and are not modulated in any way resembling a missile fire control system
Yup, but when you're deciding whether or not to launch a HARM it's better safe than sorry. In turn, asymmetries accrue.
Indeed, you can't really afford to ignore the microwave oven S-band emitter, because you could use even a literal microwave oven for illumination with passive radar techniques for target acquisition pretty well.
So the obvious solution for any AAA designer would be to emulate the radiation pattern of a microwave as closely as possible?
Point being - even if the emissions doesn't match anything you have on record (except possibly a microwave) - would you risk a $100M airplane on it being a decoy?
Isn't it the control circuits surrounding the magnetron that do a lot of this work? If you clip off some transistors and wire on a new one, how much can you change the frequency?
Yes, ELINT systems have been able to distinguish and classify emission signatures in high resolution for ages.
> How much does a weather baloon cost? ...compared to a F22 flight, a missle + all the logistics?
If this is an actual spy object you also need to factor in the cost of the surveillance. How much money does the military lose due to the sensitive information being lost. Or how much does the military need to spend to regain strategic advantage? That probably costs more than a F22 flight and a missile.
Obviously this depends on the number of objects that one needs to respond to. Cheap surveillance devices can obviously overwhelm this and then you have a war of attrition.
In the example of the article we need to consider the cost of flights being downed (which they down when considering the cost of hitting an object and downing an aircraft. Quite expensive). Flights being canceled and/or delayed is expensive.
> How much money does the military lose due to the sensitive information being lost.
...probably around zero dollars. It would be different if it was above say active war zone but in this case it is almost as far from potential warzone as possible so probably absolutely nothing.
I don't think it would be a stretch to say that we're in a cold war with China. Many modern battlefields aren't on the ground and fought with bullets. They are economic, political, and proxies. In cold wars you often have technological and economic races too (see cold war with Russia). Militaries believe that if you don't want a hot war to break out you wave the biggest {st,d}ick.
It would be naive to believe that military information is only important when bullets are being fired. This would be like saying that your class textbook is only useful when you're taking a test. (A cold war is like you have an upcoming test)
I’d hesitate to call this psychological warfare, but it now seems like the American people are paranoid about spy balloons and having their airspace violated. America is the one who brazenly flies and spies over other countries, that doesn’t happen to us.
So now our leaders are trigger happy about shooting down any potential new balloons in order to try and save face while looking tough. Meanwhile, I’m sure plenty of Chinese officials are feeling pretty smug at the reaction they were able to cause and pride that they can present themselves as a capable challenger to American hegemony.
We're trigger happy because the right used this to attack Biden in an effort to show that he is weak. This is also why many papers also mention that many balloons floated over during the previous administration. Though of course, why wouldn't China take advantage of that? Troll your enemies in any way you can.
> it now seems like the American people are paranoid about spy balloons and having their airspace violated
Only naive people would think so. 9/11 was 21 years ago. Where have you been?
> America is the one who brazenly flies and spies over other countries, that doesn’t happen to us.
Satellites have been used by all major powers since pretty much forever. As for other means, do you have insights of those brazen efforts by the US?
> So now our leaders are trigger happy about shooting down any potential new balloons in order to try and save face while looking tough
Lazy thinking. You don’t know if this latest incident was in response to the event last week or there was something specific that prompted them to shoot it down. They didn’t even say it was Chinese. Strange unknown flying objects are not new of course. They following article discussed something happened in 2019, and was disclosed a year ago:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/video-of-mysterious-dr...
> Satellites have been used by all major powers since pretty much forever. As for other means, do you have insights of those brazen efforts by the US?
Syria comes to mind. Russia was invited by Syrian government [0]. US was not, but still invading country and airspace [1].
———
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_interventio...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in...
So the US flew all those U2 spy planes over the Soviet Union for fun, and the Soviet Union shot one down in 1960 just to prove that they could?
I agree that a ballon over Alaska is unlikely to gain much intelligence, but with the right equipment at the right place you can get a lot of useful insights into your enemy's capabilities even at peacetime.
I'd say the Soviets absolutely shot down that U2 in large part to prove that they could, and that to some degree at least, the US was flying those planes over to prove that they could.
There's a school of thought that says the US won the cold war by convincing the Soviets to bankrupt themselves trying to keep up with the arms race. Now I don't necessarily think that fully explains things, but I do think there's a lot more politics to a "spy" device than the actual photographs, especially outside the context of a hot war.
It’s interesting because there’s no real evidence that the US was intentionally using that strategy.
It only works if you have more money than the other side, anyway.
Higher industrial capacity and a stronger economy but… same-ish thing.
There is a lot you can learn by floating a slow moving object rigged with antennas over your adversary and then noting which types of radar light you up and from which direction. Especially when you float them over military sites.
I’m sure the US military is smart enough to put their toys away before the balloon they’ve been watching for a week floats overhead.
Hopefully.
But my dad, who worked on (British) military IFF stuff, did have a story about an ICBM early warning system (I think American) that determined an attack was inbound because someone forgot about the Moon.
See the October 5 1960 entry in this list:
Julian Assange's argument is that the loss is negative. Revealing secrets obviates the need to pay for secrecy.
That didn't work out very well for him.
More to the point, if one side keeps secrets and another doesn't, the secret keepers have an advantage. Its a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, where secrecy is defection.
As low as $30 and as high as $3000.
Early on in the whole balloon situation, there was discussion about how - having seen the US response - the most logical course of action would be to launch 10 balloons.
Then 100. Then 1000.
By all means, let the US military shoot as many as they want.
Let the propagandists call it "a great military display".
Then, just like the West is doing with Ukraine when it comes to artillery rounds, watch the Western arsenal of A2A missiles drop to critical levels that they won't be able to rebuild with any sort of expediency.
It should be a lesson the US learned a thousand times over, but we just saw them do it again: the aeronautical equivalent of bombing a farmer with an AK-47 and calling it a "victory".
Depends on your payload weight. Some random searching found a 300g payload baloon for USD$30[1]. That excludes filling costs and other bits.
Anyone stupid enough to do it without following FAA rules (assuming launched in the US) is going to find themselves in some serious trouble.
The helium is generally the biggest cost for a launch. You generally need welding grade helium instead of the party balloon variety which costs more. The price fluctuates a lot because of some complicated economics related to natural gas production, but getting that high can easily set you back $400.
Why not hydrogen instead of helium? It's much cheaper and lighter.
If I recall rightly, hydrogen leaks out of the balloon so fast because of the change in pressure at high altitudes. Not a problem at lower ones, but way up I seem to recall that it is.
Funny because helium leaks out faster than hydrogen under regular conditions, being smaller in practice.
Methane has a decent amount of lift, it's relatively cheap, and it stays in the envelope.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster
In all seriousness, I have no idea.
This is an unmanned device so it doesn't have the same safety concern. Also at the cruising altitude there is so little oxygen it's probably as safe as helium at that altitude.
Sorry, maybe it wasn't obvious enough the first part of my comment was intended as a joke?
In Australia we use hydrogen in our weather balloons. It’s essentially a safety/cost trade-off.
> getting that high can easily set you back $400
Thank heavens pot is legal in so many states now
The national weather service already launches > 180 weather balloons PER DAY.
That sounded way too high to me. Turned out… That number is way too low.
https://www.weather.gov/bmx/kidscorner_weatherballoons#:~:te....
From your source it’s pretty’s exact, for the US.
> Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide! This includes 92 released by the National Weather Service in the US and its territories.
Apparently the real number is 184?
This guy launches lots of balloons with homemade taking beacons.
The cost doesn't matter much. It's a great drill for the military.
Marginal cost? Zero. We fire more than two missiles in a week in training.
Technically whoever launched this thing saved us money on the target. So the cost was negative.
Each one of those sidewinder rockets is half a million dollars.
Think about how much healthcare, food, housing, we are burning up with this nonsense.
These rockets have to be tested regularly, and this is a great opportunity.
Weird that they used a sidewinder actually.
I mean, those are IR missiles and such a balloon wouldn't have a great signature.
It was flying at an altitude and in an area where it might have hit a commercial airliner.
You’re missing the big picture. The wonderful, open, democratic society that we live in exists only because we secure it against adversaries. China has $1.4B striving, hungry citizens who would love to get a crack at that prosperity. If we let them, they will take it.
You don’t think it already took over? I have nothing here at home that wouldn’t be “made in China” expect couple of old engineering equipment and bigger furniture pieces. I am not sure about car, it was apparently assembled in Munich.
> China has $1.4B striving, hungry citizens
I assume that “$” is a oops?
Add cost of SWAT team raiding your home, getting on the terrorist watch and few other fun things.
If not equipped with anything cheap ones cost less then 100$
A $400k missile and an F-22 sortie costing probably a similar amount. I really hope for their sake the government doesn't try to charge them that cost.
It does indeed sound like something like that. The size of a small car would mean a tiny payload as those balloons get huge in the stratosphere. One thing I wonder is why it didn't burst. Weather balloons are meant to burst as soon as they get that high.
If you're actually responsible you get appropriate approval for time and place for balloon launches. It's not hard and not doing so can get you just enormous fines.
Or they now have recordings of the targeting radar/whatever from an F-22 and a missile.
I think anyone sending stuff into the sky with a go-pro has to be reconciled that the chance of loss is pretty high. And if they got footage of the F-22, it's probably worth a lot more than their go-pro.
The footage would be cool, but isn't one of the selling points of the F-22 that it can fire missiles from very far away?
It's possible that a gopro isn't even detected.
The chinese balloon, and I quote the article: "was like two or three buses". That thing was big.
That’s funny, because this was my exact thought. How can they distinguish the difference when they say ‘unknown’ object…
They flew a F35 next to the object. "Unknown" is an overloaded term and it isn't binary (known vs unknown). Plus, they said it was the size of a small car (remember the other balloon's payload was the size of a bus). So while you don't know what exactly that payload is and is doing, you do know it isn't just a go pro. You also know it isn't a velociraptor or Felix Baumgartner.
The ballon in this youtube video is about the size of a (very) small car, and likely reached the size of a large car as it gained altitude (same gas in ballon, but less air pressure around it equals larger ballon). Granted, that ballon had not just a gopro but also a tray of garlic bread, and went higher up. But using a ballon the size of a small car to launch just a gopro seems incredibly reasonable.
For posterity, I'm pretty confident Anamanguchi were the first men to send Italian food to space, for the Endless Fantasy music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fdr-Fiv92c
The raw space pizza footage even has the Gopro's audio from the little speaker looping the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfGvVjEN1u8
After it fell back to earth, the local police in New Jersey were nonplussed and thought it might have been a terrorist device. The interview with Anamanaguchi on the topic is well done, but didn't surface after some quick DuckDuckGoing.
I assumed they were talking about the payload. FWIW the Chinese balloon's "van size" was specifically the payload size.
I think the vast majority of people on this site understand that balloons get "bigger" when rising in altitude. (quotes because the balloon is the same size but looks deflated closer to the ground)
He would be in trouble but if it turns out that he had notified the FAA and some wires got crossed then that would be pretty wild.
I like how the measurement unit seems to be either small cars or school busses.
Americans will measure with anything except the metric system.
Funny story: I was in Spain several years ago and was talking to a guy I met about sailboats. I mentioned I had a boat, and he asked how big. I thought for a second and said "7 meters" so as not to be an ignorant American. He thought for a second and said "huh, 21 feet".
I'm not sure what the situation is in other European countries, but in the UK we use different units depending on the use so most people are use to working with both imperial and metric.
Perhaps with the exception of fahrenheit most people here will know what you mean if you use units like feet and will often even prefer thinking in feet over metres for certain things. Personally I default to feet for something like height or a floorplan, although I can think in metres quite easily too.
No, not many people in continental Europe are comfortable with miles, feet and inches.
But sailboat length is traditionally measured in feet. Same for aircraft altitude.
So sailors and aviators are more likely to use feet (and nautical miles) as measurement.
Nautical miles have nothing to do with imperial units.
It's now defined in reference to SI meter, but it originates as 1/60th of a degree of latitude.
> it originates as 1/60th of a degree of latitude.
So ... not even a fixed length but one that varies by latitude
(given the Earth is an oblate spheroid | rotated ellipsoid | flattened sphere)
that's something on the order of 20 metres of sloppiness by my reckoning.
Yep, 18m between the poles and the equator.
…which is why the French Navy (who originally defined the unit) switched it to be SI derived in 1906 and the international standard was updated in 1929.
And knots. Speed limits at sea in Norway (in harbours and other places with much traffic and little room for maneuvering) are always in knots. But we measure water depth in meters, not fathoms.
In Germany, the only things I can think of off the top of my head is bicycles(wheels) and screens, which we measure in inches instead of cm.
But I couldn't even tell you how many cm to an inch. I just know how big a 40" TV or a 28" bike is.
In Japan if you buy, say, a 65" TV, it will be labeled a "65 style" with a note that it's about 160 cm diagonal (panel inch sizes are never exact).
The main exception? MacBooks. Those will be labeled e.g. "14 inch" (14インチ).
Here in Czechia, TV screens are in cm, but computer monitors are in inches.
Funnily enough, about ~15 years ago TVs were still in cm, but somehow when flat screens came along (and people generally bought much bigger TVs) we switched to using inches. Computer screens have always been inches afaict.
Same thing in Canada.
It is sailing lingo to use feet and (nautical) mile.
Measuring boats in feet is a tradition. Also, these numbers are bigger. 50 feet is a big boat. Compare with mere 15 meters. BTW, docking price lists are still in meters.
Except it’s closer to 23 feet right?
The only time anyone wants to know the exact length of a sailboat is if there’s a concern about it fitting in some space.
At all other times, your incentive is to make the biggest lie you can get away with.
If you carry a calculator in your pocket, but if you're just casually converting, 3 feet per meter is pretty good. 100 square meters is about 1000 square feet as well. Not legal for tax purposes, but good enough to understand how big a place is.
40 inches per meter is easy to remember and pretty accurate
Or ten feet per three meters, since longer distances are rarely measured in inches anyhow.. The proverbial ten foot pole is 3048 mm long.
how many inches per feet ?
12 inches per foot 3 feet per yard 1760 yards per mile
12
1/40,000,000 of the Earth’s circumference does not make sense to me, but the foot does. (As does the school bus.)
The foot is just a light nanosecond, it makes perfect sense.
it isn't precisely a light nanosecond either, it's about 5mm off. today the standard foot as used in the USA is ironically just defined as 0.3048 meters
And the surveyors’ foot is 500000/499999 times that. Not sure how that came to be.
Sure, the definition of a meter may be a little bit arbitrary. But the advantage of metric for measuring distances is that the units are all factors of 10.
10 mm = 1 cm
10 cm = 1 dm
10 dm = 1 m
1000 m = 1 km
Makes math and scaling up and down a lot easier than having to remember that
12 in = 1 ft
3 ft = 1 yd
5280 ft = 1 mi
1760 yd = 1 mi
Agreed. There’s this weird idea we should have the same UX for everything. In practicality we need different scales. I don’t describe the distance between myself and my neighbor in light years.
Exactly! In fact, it would be wonderful if you had some standard way of producing different units at different scales for a given magnitude, upwards or downwards, so you could use the best in a given context. Perhaps you could even randomly chose a fixed easy multiplier to automatically produce these derived units from the fundamental unit, and then use the same factor for every magnitude. You only need to chose some base unit for every magnitude and then, boom, you get a full family of units at different scales to chose from depending on your context.
How cool would that be? I'd suggest to use a factor that is the easiest to multiply by, in order to simplify operations. I guess the optimal factor would be 10. What is easier to multiply or divide by than 10, right?
I think I need to patent this bright idea. It's amazing nobody has thought about it before.
it's ironic because as a little kid in the US in the late 1970s we all learned the metric system, but we see the "imperial" system everywhere still....like the conversion just never got around to happening. it's confusing.
look at the stupidest congressman of your choice (party doens't matter) that who you have to convince to convert the US over to the metric system. that is why we still use imperial
I think it just comes down to preference since the government never mandated it.
Science and engineering all use metric in the US. Automative all moved to metric voluntarily. I know construction is still imperial.
Its mostly consumer facing things that still imperial. And if you go to Canada its pretty common to see $/lb printed along side $/kg. People often talk about height in feet and inches, weight in pounds.
Its really not that different.
Science and engineering all use metric in the US
Machinists still do a lot of work in inches.
Yes but in base 10.
Machines last for decades and can’t practically support multiple standards. There’s an enormous amount of inertia in such a system.
Similarly aviation uses feet for altitude in most countries.
I read somewhere that it was traveling at about three football fields per Abraham Lincoln fart.
As a European I still don't know how their football fields compare to our football fields. I mentally assume they are the same to have a frame of comparison.
They are pretty much similar, though an actual football (soccer pitch) field is not fixed measures, 90-120 m in length and 45-90 m in width.
In this the american football field seems more "reliable" as a unit of measure, seemingly fixed to 91.44 x 48.8 m or 100 yards x 160 feet + the borders that may vary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football_field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch
Personally I "convert" a "football field" to half an hectare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare
or 100 x 50 m.
baked beans or cauliflower?
broccoli cheddar, it was a fast balloon
This is such a tired cliche. The actual history is far more interesting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_St...
The US was an original signatory of the Meter Convention. Our customary units have been based on metric units since 1893. Our food packaging features metric units. Our scientists use metric units. Our school children learn the metric system. Our military uses the metric system. Our cars are built with metric fasteners.
Changing informal habits takes decades and has questionable benefit. Canada tried it in the 70s and is going to take another generation at least to fully convert for informal use.
Speaking as a Canadian, I’d be surprised if we ever fully culturally metrify, specifically when it comes to height and weight. We just consume too much American media which uses convenient imperial bars like 6’ or 200lbs to ever change, I think.
I actually think we’re somewhat lucky in that most of us can immediately grok a measurement in either system when we see one online.
I don't think you can blame American media. Canada can trace its usage of Imperial units to the British Empire. The United States of America as an independent nation has never at any point in its history used Imperial units. US Customary units share some of the names but it is a different system. This refinement of units continued globally and with international collaboration became the metric (si) system. The US historically had closer ties to France than Britain so the systems diverged literally centuries ago.
Canadian metrication follows the rest of the British empire which was centuries behind the rest of the world (including the US) in metrication.
the legalized cannabis industry is doing all it can, man.
Won't touch the metric system with a 10ft pole.
"The US announced today that it destroyed a balloon the size of a traditional Islamic wedding feast."
Something they should be very familiar with the size of, at this point.
Dark but rather brilliant.
"Japan announced today that it sighted a UFO five Tokyo Domes large."
*Gulf feast, there isn't really a fixed feast in islam
"The US announced today that it destroyed a balloon the size of Putin's oval meeting table"
/s
If that unit causes you any pain, @throwaway4good, here is a translator perhaps to more native units:
https://www.converttobananas.com/
1 car == about 26 bananas.
Improvement?
If that were a volume conversion, bananas must've grown a whole lot bigger in the US since I was last there.
Which car? Or you mean a ISO Standard Reference Car?
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103
It incorporates error bars. A mini is a small car, but maybe a mustang is a small car, too.
How many Olympic-sized swimming pools is that?
For better picture, Olympic-sized swimming pool is 50 meters long.
Thanks. It's also half as wide as it is long and 2 meters deep. That still is not a useful comparison if the audience has never seen one. It's a comparison without a useful reference. I always thought it funny and nearly worthless for an author or announcer to describe the volume of something in terms of Olympic swimming pools as if everyone listening or reading had a useful frame of reference in that comparison.
People who’ve never seen one still understand that an Olympic-sized swimming pool is “quite big”. Which is the general impression people are trying to get across when they use that phrase.
People in the Olympics are the best athletes in the world. And I bet world class athletes need a big pool to compete in.
That gives you a pretty decent sense of the scale of an Olympic sized swimming pool without ever having seen one.
I agree that most people will decide that Olympic sized pools must be big but it doesn't give a layman any clue to just how large a volume they contain in some contexts where you find the comparison used.
For example, I made a comment about a similar comparison in a post here on HN a while ago because their example was simply ridiculous [0]. The author in that article referenced the volume of a large body of water as being "about 240 billion Olympic sized pools". I believe that they could've used almost anything else that most people would identify as being very large as a reference but instead they chose a large swimming pool. If an item is used as a reference the scale of the reference and the object should be chosen such that the reader could quickly understand that while one may be big, the other is bigger by some easily pictured amount.
The funny thing about Olympic-sized swimming pools is that they are so big that they are nearly useless except for the relatively rare elite swimming competition. So they are actually far more uncommon than you might expect, and are usually built with configurable “walls” so that they can be made smaller for everyday use!
That seems like hyperbole. They are certainly not a place where you can (easily) have fun playing around in the water, nor a place for beginners to learn to swim. However, they are still exactly right for anyone who can swim and wants to do some plain swimming.
The local 50 meter pool here is always filled with people young and old (and on no way elite) that just swim. You don’t need to be very fit to be able to swim 50 meters without a break.
It‘s a different kind of swimming compared to just hanging around and having fun, sure, but it always seems to be quite in demand when I see pools like that.
(The swimming complex close to me has two Olympic size swimming pools and one of those is open to the public, the other is used by actual elite athletes but also kids who are learning to swim. There is also a small 12.5 meter pool with adjustable depth to learn swimming and for aqua fitness courses.)
If you are in the US, you are lucky to live near such a complex. They are not common.
The NCAA only started to “recommend” that universities, when building new facilities, to make their competition pools Olympic sized in 1996.
Remember that Olympic pools are deep - usually a minimum of 2.15 meters - and don’t usually have ledges for assisting with egress. They are really dangerous. A person that gets into distress, especially near the middle, will find it nearly impossible to self-rescue. Without attentive guards/coaches/onlookers they are nearly certain to drown.
Olympic pools are amazing for casual swimming! The water has quite different dynamics, compared to a regular pool. Unfortunately they are expensive to build and operate, due to their size, so they are quite rare.
I treat myself to an Olympic swim every now and then, even though it means driving to the next city and expensive parking. Highly recommend it!
Can you convert this to libraries of congress for me please?
So about 11 carometers long (which is roughly 5 busometers).
These are perfectly good measurement units. (Also, football field.)
Also, fruit
Downvoted because someone doesn't think that fruit is commonly used as a definition of size? We often say things are the size of a grape, or an apple, or a grapefruit.
Weird thing to downvote folks
American no abstract good
I could tell you the Curiosity rover is 2.9m × 2.7m × 2.2m and 899kg, but it's far more immediately evocative to say it's about the size and mass of a typical sedan.
Apparently, America is the only country on earth where mass media describes things in familiar terms to make them readily intelligible to a wide audience.
Even if typical sedan is something that is quite common I still prefer actual measurements so I can reference it to something that I am personally more familiar with. I know that one can fit typical sedan inside 2.5m x 5m parallel parking spot but so does SUV and Fiat Punto.
To you, perhaps. I really like getting the dimensional information; my dig was at the way news media preemptively goes for the lowest common denominator every time, and frequently omits the accurate information altogether. I think this contributes to innumeracy.
I mean maybe I'm just not up to date on recent history, but when was the last time we shot down anything in our our airspace prior to last week?
Maybe Japanese fire balloons during WWII?
"One of the most unusual military actions of World War II came in the form of Japanese balloon bombs, or “Fugos,” directed at the mainland United States. Starting in 1944, the Japanese military constructed and launched over 9,000 high-altitude balloons, each loaded with nearly 50 pounds of anti-personnel and incendiary explosives. Amazingly, these unmanned balloons originated from over 5,000 miles away in the Japanese home islands. After being launched, the specially designed hydrogen balloons would ascend to an altitude of 30,000 feet and ride the jet stream across the Pacific Ocean to the mainland United States. Their bombs were triggered to drop after the three-day journey was complete—hopefully over a city or wooded region that would catch fire.
Nearly 350 of the bombs actually made it across the Pacific, and several were intercepted or shot down by the U.S. military. From 1944 to 1945, balloon bombs were spotted in more than 15 states—some as far east as Michigan and Iowa. The only fatalities came from a single incident in Oregon, where a pregnant woman and five children were killed in an explosion after coming across one of the downed balloons. Their deaths are considered the only combat casualties to occur on U.S. soil during World War II."
https://www.history.com/news/5-attacks-on-u-s-soil-during-wo...
Geologists were able to reduce the search area for the origin of these balloons using the mineral composition of sand in the sand bags.
The airforce then bombed hydrogen generating facilities nearby the suspected launch sites.
Section offense and defense
Wow that's really fascinating. I wonder what sorts of properties allow geologists to characterize sand to that level
Also wonder how effective it is. Especially nowadays in such an interconnected world where products, and especially sand, could be coming from the opposite side of the globe
"mineral and diatom composition."
Sand with a variety of both of those can look much more varied, under a microscope, than you might imagine.
It being varied doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that it doesn't vary that much within a sample. That you can parse out specific patterns or characteristics enough to figure out exactly where this sample of sand is from
Did we have operatives taking sand samples or was that some over-exuberant librarian who got to say "I told you so" to their bosses?
That's what's so surprising to me nowadays I'd just assume they'd have googled and found a paper by some Japanese scientists, but back then someone from the US must have taken those probes across Japan.
That's an interesting aspect to this story to me. Maybe it was truly based on intel and the geological survey was a farce to justify the facilities targeting. That wouldn't surprise me, there's a ton of lore around WWII and military activity in general.
Or maybe the US government chooses to fund all areas of research, like mineral surveys, in the hopes they can call on a field of knowledge repository to use in a war machine.
I'd like to believe there is a soil library that staff were doing microscope slide searches late into the night.
There was also a lot of deliberate misdirection to cover intelligence sources, many of which would probably persist in history to this day.
They ran it through a database at Sandia Labs. ;)
More than 500 Americans and more than 2000 Japanese died fighting in the Aleutian islands during WW2.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/battle-of-attu-60-years.htm
Now compare that to the 800+ indigenous Aleutians that were interned during WW2, many of which died in the American concentration -- err, I mean internment -- camps. The Aleutian people were also legal citizens of the US.
Edit: some more info. 881 Aleuts were gathered up, endured slave labor, and 118 died from lack of food, warmth or medical care. All extremely preventable as is evidenced by the camp just 30 miles away of around 700 Nazi POWs. All 700 returned home alive and in good health. Historian Stan Cohen even wrote, "All in all, the German imprisonment in Alaska was quite pleasant."
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/21/516277507...
To be clear, this is the US interning its own citizens not POW captured by Japan
Thanks for that link, I knew some Americans were relocated in Alaska but I didn't realize there were internment/concentration camps. I also didn't know about the Nazi POWs kept there during the war.
The last two paragraphs are a pathetic conclusion from the governement.
Asking why Japan invaded the Aleutians is a fun question for flat earthers. On most map projections it's way out of the way but on a globe if you draw a geodesic from Tokyo to Seattle (or Sapporo to San Diego and Los Angeles) it's basically halfway.
Maybe it's like pacman where going off one edge teleports you to the opposite edge. A finite land that goes on infinitely
And to better visualize it we could just map it to a sphere...
I think you're on to something here...
It probably meant the continental USA.
Yes, probably that because Alaska and Hawaii were not admitted as states until 1959. Otherwise there would be Pearl Harbor counts as well.
Oh wow I completely forgot about that detail. Of course Pearl Harbor would have been counted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estevan_Point_lighthouse
Much like this story, many Japanese planners did not appreciate the vast size of the American west. A hundred random firebombs were basically irrelevant compared to the many thousands of yearly lighting strikes that also regularly cause fires. Who knows how many Japanese balloons are out there hanging from some tree undiscovered.
The other good story about remoteness
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Station_Kurt
German sub drops off a team in 1943 to install a weather station on Newfoundland.
Wasnt discovered until 35 years later only because some scholar found reference to it in the German archives.
> Newfoundland
Labrador, where’s the station was located, is a lot less densely populated than Newfoundland.
Hawaii was still an "incorporated territory" of the US though, surely it would have qualified as "US soil"? I gather at least some deaths did occur in Honolulu itself too.
Can't find anything remotely recent on a list of shoot-down incidents on Wikipedia (aside from these balloons), but I'd not be surprised if a few smuggling-related drones have been shot down in the last couple decades, depending on what we're counting.
Shoot down a smuggling drone? Better to track it and arrest all involved than possibly drop drugs/guns onto some random neighborhood.
On the contrary there was the infamous Battle of Palmdale in 1956 wherein the USAF failed to shoot-down a rogue drone
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-sep-11-me-then1...
Thank you, didm't know about this episode.
The site of the people that found the remains of the plane is online and has a nice old-times look (with frames):
Why did you think it would be publicized if we had?
Because blowing shit up is awesome, and gets votes.
Well this one was publicized, I imagine if the same thing happened in the 90s it would have made the news.
But who knows really, maybe the US govt is better at hiding its secrets than I give it credit for.
WW2, I think
> Officials said the object was far smaller than the previous balloon, did not appear to be maneuverable and was traveling at a much lower altitude.
"Not maneuverable" and "previous balloon" so is it fair to assume that it's a balloon as well?
John Kirby called it an object today during the White House press briefing. He also said it was the size of a small car, unlike the balloon from China that was the size of 2-3 buses. Finally, Kirby said that the object could not direct its own propulsion or direction and was at the whim of the wind.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/rHGWmyyb9nI?feature=share
No propulsion, wind-controlled, motor vehicle-equivalents... Yeah it's a balloon.
Maybe a weather balloon? No wonder they took it down. Those things are just looking for trouble!
Weather balloons are disposable, they rise and expand in the process until they burst - the maximum size is somewhere between 5 and 10 meters, between a large car and a white van. The payload tends to have a parachute and a phone number (the ones from the Weather Service do).
There was something about fear being the mind-killer. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam to the Red Telephone please - paging the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam!
The man does not misspeak.
No, it is just as likely to be a reporter's garbled understanding of an explanation. In mysterious matters wait until you have 2 or 3 datapoints before using a heuristic.
I’d love to use that heuristic but I need 1-2 more data points.
Agreed, but the "previous balloon" part may be unnecessary.
User dTal is on the same train of thought as I was regarding the "not maneuverable" part.
What other type of object exists which can fly and yet does not have the ability to maneuver?
Alien aircraft with functioning anti gravity system but inoperable propulsion system? :)
"This is some bullshit!"
(Resident Alien)
ICBM
Airplane on autopilot with dead/sleeping pilot
Control surface problem (e.g. 737 elevator jackscrew excursion scenario)
(Just thinking out loud/adding ideas, not contradicting).
Jeez imagine if a country decided to launch the first nuclear strikes using their national carriers passenger air planes masquerading as civilian aircraft.
Multiple cities all at once.
"From Russia with Love"
Hell, don't even tell airline about it and send it at cargo, it is only checked at departure port (AFAIK).
Same really with cargo containers by ship.
I’m not sure how widespread it is, but some ports have radiological detectors.
Except they fly 2-3 hundred miles an hour and leak radiation we can detect from space…
If they are detectable yes the speed is an issue.
I haven’t seen info regarding detecting tracking unused nuclear weapons using sensors. Do you have a source?
Hypersonic craft aren’t terribly maneuverable, to add an idea.
parachute garbage hangs for some time at high altitude
Better question: why do we allow our government to answer our questions with riddles?
My favorite of those is a former press secretary Jen Psaki tried to retort a perfectly good question from a reporter asking if the White House will send much needed coronavirus tests to American households:
"Should we just send one to every American?" Psaki shot back, her voice dripping with sarcasm. [0]
Twitter dragged her so hard it was/wasn't even funny, and the next day the White House did just that. Thanks lady!
[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/12/21/anger-jen-psaki-helped-a...
That's an interesting catch. Still, it's known that the previous object was a balloon, so I'd say it makes more sense to expect those words are shorthand for "previous object (which was a balloon)". This new object may still be a balloon, but those words aren't admission of that.
Not many other types of non-maneuverable flying craft.
Fair point; I doubt it's anything like a bottle rocket or whatever else. I guess it doesn't really matter either way since it's likely to be revealed what it was.
I wondered about this too. But even balloons are maneuverable in some sense, by changing their altitude. So maybe the meaning is more like "didn't maneuver in response to our presence".
> But even balloons are maneuverable in some sense, by changing their altitude.
Most balloons are not equipped to actively change their bouyancy.
Especially because the high altitude stuff are generally zero pressure balloons
You can use propellers to move up and down too. The buoyancy of a fixed amount of helium doesn't drop/rise much with altitude changes. It isnt like submarines. The needed vertical thrust to move a few thousand feet is minimal.
Would a smaller balloon fly lower? Seems likely.
I think the main issue of an object being really high up in the air is the lack of air density which, to achieve equilibrium, will get pulled apart (think: the opposite of being smashed). It's also extremely cold.
I assume a weather balloon can handle those issues though. [0]
Pot calling kettle black. The US has been sending armed drones into several countries without coordination with local ATC or consent of the local government. Soleimani and a number of Iraqi military officers were taken out by a US drone.
And it works because almost no one else on earth can gang radar to missile systems. So they can't shoot ours down. And we can shoot theirs down.
In case anyone else was unfamiliar, the usage of "gang" here appears to be the following: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gang#Verb_2
> Soleimani and a number of Iraqi military officers were taken out by a US drone.
Good. Right?
Sure, but that was still a violation of sovreign airspace. It would be like having a foreign drone targeting George W.Bush. Both are war criminals, but I'm not sure it suddenly makes violating foreign countries ok.
Not, in fact is bad, because what is good for the geese is good for the gander.
This increases the risk of being killed by a drone for everybody, even if is as collateral damage. If international laws can be so easily violated for free, why do we need them? Do we really want a world without rules?
Wasn’t Soleimani Iranian? Are you at war with Iran? Did he receive a fair trial?
It needs to be said; the list of Iranian terrorist attacks against America is very short. The list of Iranian terrorist attacks in America is even shorter. Most of the antagonism against Iran in America is motivated by Iran's relationship with other countries (Israel), not things they've done to America. I can't say that I feel any personal animosity towards Iran, I wish America would let Israelis handle Israeli affairs and stop getting into grudge matches with other countries on their behalf.
> There were seven attacks in May, as many attacks that month as February, March and April combined, and there have been a total of 29 since October without a kinetic U.S. response.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/attacks-i...
We interdict Iranian missiles to terrorist groups about once a week.
Iran's stated goal is to forcibly convert the world to their preferred brand of theocratic rule - the "women are very literally property" kind of theocratic rule.
Why are they calling it an object. It seems like a huge deal what kind of "object" this was. Was it another balloon? Missile? Private plane? How could they not know, and if they do know, why would they not say?
Edit - this video isn't loading for me, but I've just watched what I assume is the same briefing on Twitter. They have a pilot assessment that the object was unmanned - but they can't tell us balloon, missile, drone? I'm not understanding how a pilot could see the thing, communicate ("I'm looking at an unmanned object, should I shoot?") and somehow not convey what the object was. I appreciate the speed of this briefing, but I would prefer they wait at least until they know what they are saying. In the briefing below the guy says NORAD has been tracking it for a day - and they still don't know what it is? I guess that rules out missile, at least.
"Object was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight" and "Object the size of a small car" [1] according to General Ryder
No details beyond this yet due to classification restrictions.
John Kirby of the National Security Council said he would not call it a balloon, according to NBC News. What was it then?
We will not know until the DoD provide the public report on this information. Everyone is speculating so I would wait for the official report.
A drone of some sort, something with an engine if they used a heat seeking missile.
"Heat seeking" is a bit of a misnomer. It uses thermal imaging to determine contrast against the background and then heads to the center of the detected object. No engine required. This is the same missile they used last week.
The US doesn't have any heat-seeking missiles. They use multi-spectral imagers that can see in the infrared spectrum among others.
Didn't they use a heat seeking missile on the balloon in Carolina?
Maybe it was a balloon but Kirby is being curmudgeonly and thinks it should be called an "Unmanned Buoyant Aircraft (UBA)" or something like that. These national security types love wordy terms and acronyms. Maybe he thinks calling a balloon a balloon makes it sound too trivial or something.
Medium Altitude Long Endurance UAV drone.
(based on further reporting it sounds a lot more balloon-like)
My first thought: wow is that an X-COM operation? Make sure you have some brave souls, and don't overload them...
Research med kit and laser too.
Damn, I guess everyone's job from here on out will be down at the laser cannon factory from here on out, but at least it will mean the government will finally pay off the national debt with the proceeds.
Briefing happening now: https://www.c-span.org/video/?525994-1/pentagon-briefs-downi...
F-22 entered service 2005
Air to air kills since entered service:
2005-2022: 0
2023: 2
By late next month F-22s will have shot down over four dozen balloons!
It's like when a lawyer tells the client not to do a 2 billion dollar deal after a 5 minute conversation and charges $1 million for his time. It's not the effort, it's what was avoided. They call it the Department of Defense for a reason.
It used to be the Department of War, but Defense sounds nicer. Lots of countries did the shift in name.
Reminds me of George Carlin's joke: shellshock becomes battle fatigue becomes PTSD. Don't make it better, change the name!
What was avoided in this case? A balloon isn't much more than a low flying satellite.
What was avoided are incursions by armed enemies. You don't have a military for a war you want to fight, but for the one you don't want to fight.
Having 0 air to air kills for an interceptor is a good thing in the way that it's doing its job as a deterrent and enemies don't even try.
Do you become an ace after 5 ballons or do the ballons need to shoot back?
I was also wondering if those jets now have stencil paintings of balloons on them with big X's marked across them as kill markers
In WWI, shooting down an observation balloon was considerably more difficult (and prestigious) than another plane.
In this case, though, I imagine the difficulty (and associated prestige) is considerable less... :)
Wonder how they picked who the lucky pilot is to get the first F-22 air to air kill. Draw straws?
Throw darts at a balloon.
2 balloons
We need a cheaper way to down these spy balloons. The sidewinder missile + F-22 flight time costs are an order of magnitude greater than the total cost of launching one balloon. Send over the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler (HELIOS) to protect the west coast.
A "sidewinder missile + F-22 flight time costs" are a rounding error in the national security budget. The experience and lessons learnt from using it are valuable to all layers of the military and administration, significantly more so than the financial cost.
(I'm British and so not a US tax payer, just a spectator, but would argue the same here)
Absolutely. The value of F-22s actually launching some $400k AIM-9Xs not at training targets with a 100% success rate would be far, far greater than those unit costs.
It's a crying shame the F-22 production line was shut down, so it's great to see it performing well.
(Speaking as a DCS sim pilot with a long time interest in military aviation).
Oh yes the useful and oh so important lesson that F-22 is indeed capable of disposing of not only maneuverable airborne crafts but also non-maneuverable ones!
Clearly a baloon is so hard to dispose target that making sure the aircraft indeed can be up to this task is worth any money!
In some scenarios, balloons are more difficult to shoot down than aircraft.
Can you expand on this? What scenarios are you thinking of?
The IR signature/target profile of a balloon contraption is very different to that of a jet exhaust, for one. Far less friction heat of movement etc + no engine.
Although the X is an all aspect missile, the parameters would still be quite different.
I think this is would all be firmly in the "not public domain" bucket of details though, as I haven't seen much of this modelled in DCS.
(I suppose they could also have used eg a radar guided AIM-120, but they are primarily for BVR, more expensive at ~$1.1, and far, far more scope for erroneous target locking, so why risk it when the 9X obviously gets the job done. Again, from the point of view of an armchair - or a rig to be precise - sim pilot. I claim no credentials beyond this interest).
What is DCS?
DCS World is a multi and single player combat simulator platform for the PC made by Eagle Dynamics, which features modules such as the A-10C, F-16, F/A-18 and the F-14. The platform is free, the modules' pricing is reflective of the development work gone in to them - and requires a lot of time to learn. Great fun.
What lessons might shooting some balloon from an F-22 might give you that you don't already know?
Do you really want to discuss this?
Yes, because some people apparently think there is a lesson here. The "it can be spy, shoot it down" is sound reasoning but "we need to test whether F-22 can shoot down balloons" does sound like clown speak.
the problem is as long as the target you send up are cheaper for you to produce than the countermeasure used against them you can spam your opponent and bleed them financially while having a minimal impact on your own budget.
Air to air missiles cost on the order of $300,000.00 weather balloons cost and order of magnitude less.
If someone starts sending thousands or tens of thousands of balloons into American airspace to make the cost of shooting them down "significant", won't your congress consider that an act of war? It's quite a leap from the odd stray weather balloon to send them en masse.
We'll all have bigger problems if that day comes than the pesky billion or two it will cost from the US $773B DoD budget.
What about the autocannon using A10s?
The first balloon flew at FL600+: no A10 is touching it with a ground attack cannon from a 20,000 foot spread in altitude.
We need to base the number of occurances against our average training flight time/ammo expenditure. Currently we train a hell of a lot more than we actively shoot down targets so the expenditure is practically nothing. Now if a lot more show up that's a different equation.
If shooting the balloons replaces the traing it is cheaper overall. No more expenditure for artificial targets.
The balloon shot down last week was likely order of magnitude more expensive than the Sidewinder that shot it down. Someone posted link to similar sized NASA balloon that cost $1 million for just the balloon and maybe platform but not the payload.
It might be possible to shoot down balloons with unguided rockets. It depends on how close the fighter can get and how accurate the rockets are. Rockets are super cheap.
Yeah, but that’s a NASA balloon which adds one or more “0” to the price tag just so it can source components from, and support jobs in, all 50 states. (Ok, being sarcastic, but I’m curious on the actual cost.)
The big balloon from earlier this month was more like a satellite hanging from a balloon. Not sure it was that cheap.
The problem is what can you fly that has a cannon and can reach those altitudes. Apparently only the F22 and F15 could, and that was their very limit.
The shootdowns did not involve using airplane guns/cannons. Those are less accurate, especially at the engagement range (the aircraft were at 40,000 ft., IIRC, and shooting at 60,000 ft. balloons), and would have likely damaged the payload.
The shoot-downs used AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles (per TFA). We also don’t know the ceiling altitude of the F-22 since it’s classified.
However, the F-22 can carry the AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile (AMRAAM) which has a disclosed engagement altitude of 70,000 feet - capable of engaging even higher altitude balloons than these. As I understand it, the Extended Range AMRAAM-ER is believed to have an engagement ceiling of 85,000 feet.
Meanwhile, the US also has the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system, an air defense system capable of engaging targets at very high altitude. While its capabilities are classified, its max engagement altitude is at least 490,000 ft. or 93 miles … though using it to attack a balloon is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. THAAD is mobile and could be deployed in response to a high altitude balloon threat (some of which can fly 120,000 ft.)
I'm going to ask what might seem like a naive question - but how do you get a sidewinder to lock onto the balloon part of the balloon and not hit the payload?
yes
Yeah but none of those things are cheap. A cannon is.
True, but the max effective range of the F-22’s 20mm M61A2 Vulcan cannon is about 2000 feet (600m), which isn’t nearly enough to engage these balloons — assuming an F-22 is flying at 40,000 ft. vs. a balloon at 60,000 ft.
Even if the ceiling of the F-22 is substantially higher than 40,000 ft. (which I think is plausible), and is close enough to effectively engage these balloons, then I doubt that the Air Force would choose to make the tradeoff of disclosing the F-22’s performance capabilities to adversaries in order to save the cost of an AIM-9; the F-22’s performance is a secret and classified.
If we were faced with defending against a large number of high-flying objects then the reasoning might be different.
The USAF "fact sheet" page on the F-22[1] states "above 50,000 ft" flight ceiling. Wikipedia lists 65,000 ft but provides no easily verifiable citation (none of the citations for the section that I could retrieve online list that figure).
[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
You may what to change up your definition of a 20mm round against a balloon. The statistics you reference is about accuracy and penetration. Take a look at distance until subsonic.
There are regular competitions at sea level with .30 cal rounds at ranges of 1000 yards.
600m is likely the default battle-zero, but it is nowhere near the maximum range of a 30mm round.
Who says it needs to be cheap? If your budget for X is $Y, there is no benefit to spending less than $Y when you need to do X.
That’s definitely not their limit since they can shoot down satellites at the altitude of the International Space Station. And that’s the stuff we’re allowed to know about.
Could they shoot down the ISS, if they wanted? Isn't that thing moving insanely fast? haha. Not a space guy but always found it interesting.
The SM-3, which is launched from ships for ballistic missile defense, can be used as anti-satellite missile. Its ceiling is supposed to be 1000 km. Which means could reach ISS.
It was tested in 2008 to destroy failed recon satellite.
The ISS orbits at ~420 KM.
Epotential = mgh = 420,000m * 9.8 m/s^2 * mass ~= 4,200,000 m^2/s^2 * mass
To reach that altitude, ignoring air resistance, you'd need kinetic energy, provided by the formula:
Ekinetic = (mv^2)/2
Solving for v, we get v = sqrt(8,400,000 m^2/s^2) ~= 2.900 m/s ~= Mach 9
That's the minimum muzzle velocity you need to send a projectile up into the ISS's path (Add a few more mach numbers due to air resistance).
It's certainly easier than getting into orbit, a single-stage missile could do it without any trouble.
This calculation is for a ballistic projectile without air resistance. For a missile with a rocket engine, there is no minimum velocity, but you can compute the fuel energy required for the change of altitude. Delta-v isn’t important for a sub-orbital intersection trajectory, although you’ll obviously want your interceptor missile to get there fairly quickly (which will end up being more fuel efficient than a slow climb).
ASAT weapons already exist, so most countries could kill the ISS if they wanted.
Yeah but not with cannons. We are talking about a cheap way to shoot it down, ie not with a missile.
Earlier this month? It was last Saturday!
> The sidewinder missile + F-22 flight time costs are an order of magnitude greater than the total cost of launching one balloon.
This seems like conjecture. Is there any reliable data on how much said balloon cost?
The balloon last week could have easily been an order of magnitude more expensive than the AIM-9X. It was hundreds of feet in diameter with a suspended gantry with a multi-kw solar array. You don't put that much solar on to power nothing, so presumably there was a ton of military grade comms equipment on it.
>This seems like conjecture.
It's conjecture for me to presume the sky is blue without looking out of my window, but it's a safe bet on days with good weather.
Unless this balloon -- or whatever it was -- was diamond-bedazzled and platinum-plated and filled with alien technology it's a safe bet that it was a fair amount cheaper to produce/launch/maintain than sortieing one of the most expensive and exclusive modern aircraft in the world and shooting off a missile that costs 600k/ea -- and that's not even considering collateral costs associated to the action.
Right, but presumably F-22s need to fly and pilots need to shoot down things with live ammo occasionally anyways to stay in shape? And logistics needs to know how to supply, and intelligence needs to know how to scramble them etc.
This seems like what amounts to a training program to me, unless a lot more start coming.
I don’t think that’s really such a good bet. The first one was supposedly the size of multiple buses. That is a bunch of computer hardware held up by a balloon rather than “just a balloon”. The price of such a thing could easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware, let alone any associated R&D costs.
That’s all before bringing up that the person I quoted claimed off-hand that it’s an order of magnitude difference. They’re probably rather similar in cost.
Big complex one-off things are expensive.
Anything needing bus-sized solar array gonna have some fancy equipment on board. All of that needs engineering to not fail at the temperature range up above and code to make it do what is needed
For some number of balloons N, the operational experience our fighter pilots get is priceless.
What would be ideal would be some kind of anti-balloon weaponry/recovery system. Some kind of balloon-based counter-balloon technology that could take control of the balloon and bring it to the ground intact. Would be a fun project to say the least.
What keeps a cannon from working? That would already reduce the costs by a lot, and from the visual identification it seems that 40,000 feet is well within the flight ceiling of fighter jets
Why Shooting Down China’s Spy Balloon Over The U.S. Is More Complicated Than It Seems https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/why-shooting-down-chin...
See also:
F-22 Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon Off Carolinas With Missile (Updated) https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-22-shoots-down-chine...
U-2 Spy Planes Snooped On Chinese Surveillance Balloon https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/u-2-spy-planes-snooped...
F-22 Shoots Down “Object” Flying High Over Alaskan Waters https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-22-shoots-down-new-o...
The Soviets Built Bespoke Balloon-Killer Planes During The Cold War https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-soviets-built-besp...
Cannons are very short range. The fighter would have to approach the balloon at a high closure rate, creating some risk of a mid-air collision.
With a missile, the pilot can shoot from several miles out and never has to fly directly at the target. So, it's much safer.
The closure rate thing reminds me of a great scene in The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob steals the Wright Flyer and they scramble jets to get him. After blowing by the Flyer too fast, the pilots get out and walk after it.
Balloons and airships aren't easily downed by gunfire- the holes create slow leaks that can take days or weeks to deflate the balloon. Fighter jets' guns are mostly an air-to-ground weapon these days.
> the holes create slow leaks that can take days or weeks to deflate the balloon
I've seen this claim often, but I'm still finding it hard to picture. I realize it's not going to "pop like a balloon", but days or weeks seems incredibly long. The weight of the payload causes at least some pressure on at least the top of the balloon, right?
Is the issue just the size of the hole versus total volume? Or maybe it's that the bouyancy increases as it starts to descend? Do you have a link that would make this clearer? I searched a little, but what I found were just assertions of fact.
I did find the 1998 story of the failed Canadian attempt to shoot down a balloon with fighter jets firing bullets (https://apnews.com/article/268893fddde785d029d5a51b136951eb). This makes me inclined to believe the conclusion, but it's still not intuitive to me.
If this became a frequent occurrence. Infrequently does it cost much more?
The airforce would have thousands of missiles. Assuming they have some FIFO system they would use missiles heading for expiry.
Not sure how pilot training goes but would assume they have training hours requirement. If a mission covers those hours all the better for more real experience on what they would be flying anyway.
Anyway I don't know this as an expert, but logically seems costs are largely sunk regardless of an infrequent balloon incident.
You must be an eve online player.
The laser is real. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34373672
I've read about those but I'm more referring to the cost comment. In eve it is common to hedge a loss as "ISK Positive" if the value of the ammo that blew you up costed more than your ship, as tallied up on the killmail.
I can't not shake my head reading comments like this.
Seriously, the concept of weighing the cost of an action vs the cost of inaction was not... exactly invented by Eve Online players. The entire point of warfare is to make waging war more expensive to your opponent than to yourself, whether in terms of men, materiel, dollars, or popular support. And the concept of a Pyrrhic victory is likely as old as war itself – even our very term for it derives from a battle fought 2300 years ago!
Nice, you spent 479 characters to say literally nothing. I'm +80 characters positive now in this thread where I also have said literally nothing.
HN happens to be one of the rare places on the modern internet where just flapping your figurative mouth pieces for the sake of flapping your figurative mouth pieces is not looked upon favorably. The attitude of "have something to say or shut the fuck up" is very refreshing.
And if you think that I didn't say anything… I suggest re-reading my comment.
I mean your entire comment could be just "...also known for centuries as Pyrrhic victory" and lose nothing but some words
The rest was important context, IMO. It was less “this already has a name” and more “this is the very essence of warfare”. And has been for tens of thousands of years.
Don’t necessarily disagree and I don’t know sufficient details to form a responsible opinion, but I imagine there’s expenditure for training, whether they hit actual stuff or not?
Then it's a good thing the US spends an order of magnitude more on weapons than anyone else.
The world will run out of helium before the US runs out of missiles.
> We need a cheaper way to down these spy balloons.
Probably fits nicely in the training budget.
Given the Chinese have been complaining to the UN for the last year about American Low Earth Orbit satellites spying on them (Starshield, Space Development Agency, etc..) this balloon thing is pretty clever.
Also maybe gives China cover/justification to start shooting down these low satellites.
That’s an escalator that China can’t afford to ride.
The US would deorbit everything China ever put into space if they started shooting at satellites. Those satellites are part of the strategic triad and would be a direct threat to the US nuclear umbrella. The AEGIS systems off the Chinese coast would take care of any attempts to add satellites back into space.
Low-Earth orbit satellites are not currently part of triad (but may be part of a future nuclear defense shield / interceptor system). They are also much easier to shoot down.
See Space Development Agency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
That's what China has been most upset about at United Nations.
There are some rumors that the ICON was shot down by the Chinese (No facts are found supporting those rumors): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_Connection_Explore...
That happened last month in November 2022. It mysteriously destroyed itself.
Curious, are all satellites known? I’m sure there are hundreds of unknown, untracked, secret satellites floating around?
No. Shooting down satellites is a very different thing.
China hasn’t indicated it cares a great deal about international law.
(One could make the same argument for the U.S., but that’s not the open question at the moment.)
If China didn't care about international law it would've said it sent the balloon on purpose. Instead it found a cover story of some civilian balloon gone awry. They cared enough about international law to lie.
International law’s got nothing to do with it. Basically Every spacefaring has made it their policy that an attack on one of their satellites would be treated as an act of war and everything would be on the table in terms of retaliation
Because they fly a bit higher?
Yes. Sovereign airspace versus not.
Also Kessler syndrome.
I wouldn’t put it past the Chinese to deploy islands of atmosphere and release air in low earth orbit, and then declare that it is now part of the Chinese atmosphere before they start shooting down satellites.
I don't see an equivalency. Low Earth Orbit satellites are above the ionosphere, balloons below. I suspect if it is radio traffic that you are interested in listening in on then one of those is much more effective.
LEO satellites are great for RF reconnaissance for frequencies between 100MHz and 100GHz which easily penetrate the ionosphere. They can even geolocate the source on the ground by measuring the observed Doppler shift (caused by the spy satellites own fast motion)
So we finally have our explanation for all the strange attempts to resurrect UFO interest in the last years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942463
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970609
You could fly a flashing cow in this times and nobody would stop looking down at their phones.
The director of national intelligence explicitly said in a Congressional hearing last may that they want to destigmatize UAP sightings so that pilots will actually report them when they happen. It hasn't really been a big mystery why some people in the government have been trying to change the attitude around UFOs recently - that's why they use the term UAP instead, less cultural baggage
I'm sorry this just isn't an honest description of what's happened. Destigmatizing reporting UFOs is good. What factually happened is a handful of wackos from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(company) funded by the front man of Blink 182. They befriended billionaire Robert Bigelow that pulled influence for them in congress and hence they got their little scam project a veneer of legitimacy it frankly does not deserve.
These are the same clowns that have claimed to have extant physical samples of extraterrestrial materials, but only offered them to independent examination once, which didn't go well supporting their claims, and have paraded an endless number of excuses since while doubling down on claims it offers incontrovertible proof.
There's no big mystery here, these are relatively unsophisticated conspiracy nuts that got above average traction. That's it.
That's not "it". These two things are not mutually exclusive. TtSA and Tom Delonge have definitely done a lot, especially/particularly in the general public's interest, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm hearing with my own ears from the DNI telling Congress he wants to increase effort to collect UAP data for national defense
So either they have info about an imminent alien arrival, or will have to admit that this is happening since several years ago, in at least three waves (probably), and that they knew about it.
You are making the very error that lead to UFO sightings being stigmatized in the first place.
The trick is to remember that it is like the sql NULL. No unidentified object matches any other unidentified object. It is only once you identify the object can you claim that it is of extra terrestrial origin not before. And once you identify the object it is no longer a UFO.
Or maybe the real trick is having a lot of fans hunting UFOs like "is 1980 again", while you keep the secret for yourself and build a plausible denial way out. Who knows?
Could you spell out the "explanation"? I'm not quite picking up whatever subtext you're putting down.
Perhaps that pilots were not reporting balloons sightings because of stigma associated with reporting an unidentified flying object?
My first thought was maybe it was something like an unmanned survey drone owned by an oil company or some resident's experimental aircraft. But... The Air Force chases off manned Russian aircraft with some regularity. Maybe Russia decided to go unmanned to see how far they could push into our airspace instead of flying something like a Tupolev Tu-95 like they normally do.
A Tu-95 Bear coming anywhere close to a U.S. ADIZ is very likely to get an introduction to Mr. Sidewinder or Mr. AMRAAM, considering their primary role is to deliver nuclear ordnance.
Happens all the time. Here was one last October: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-f-16s-intercept-two-russian-...
I feel like I’m reading a very upsetting children’s book.
"My First F-22 Air Attack Pattern"
"The raptor and the bear"
Suddenly discovering new subtext to—-
i am sam. i am sam. sam i am. that sam-i-am! that sam-i-am! i do not like that sam-i-am!
I saw a joke that the CCP has trolled us into shooting down an alien space craft.
Having shot down the Centaurian ambassador, the humans had inadvertently started the first of the great galactic wars. Sadly, they would not be around long enough to take part.
At least it wasn't the Minbari.
That would be a boneheaded maneuver for sure.
Only excessive pride would make someone do something like that
I wonder if it's a drone from an HK cargo ship like the ones that flew onto / around US Navy ships in the past.
- Drones can be the size of small cars
- 40K feet is not a problem for a drone
In such a case it'd be more about the class / properties of the drone...
40,000 feet is within class A airspace and flying into Alaska means crossing the ADIZ so it has no business being there whatever it is.
As your President, I promise to be tough on crime and UFOs, unlike my opponent over there.
Spying happens all the time, even between allies. From what I read/understood about past spying incidents, it's only when someone starts mentioning it to the press that they want the rest of the population to be up an arms about it. Why that might be true: there are probably tons of Chinese spy events (and American spy events on China) that never made it. Was the balloon the first? Come on.
If the above hypothesis is true, it means the U.S. is trying to rile up / ready / etc. the population to view China as a threat.
Kind of ironic given the intense scrutiny and fears prior to Trump getting elected that he would trigger a depression or war because of his isolationist attitude about China specifically.
But more importantly what does that mean now? Will it justify laws passed to further isolate China?
The thing was visible to the naked eye, and so was its demise. I don’t see any reason to believe there was some agenda at play on the US side. They couldn’t have covered it up if they wanted to.
Really? It's all over the press. I didn't happen to notice the balloon floating in the sky. We don't all have one collective eye. The press and politicians platformed the story.
In the US the government doesn't control what the press reports.
The government makes statements to the press, leaks to the press and when politicians throw barbs at each other over an issue, the press reports their statements about the issue and the issue.
No one said the press was being controlled.
My point is, even if you didn't personally see the balloon, some people did, and so it was reported in the press (as is their job). The government didn't have any control over that, but once it happened, they had to address it.
I dunno, AFAICT the previous 3 or 4 balloons over the US weren't noticed by the general public
According to CNN that’s because they weren’t noticed by anyone at the time. The US discovered them by examining retrospective satellite data for signals we found emanating from a recent (2021) balloon. Presumably that one didn’t travel over populated areas or it would have been noticed by the public as well. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/politics/us-balloon-tracking-...
> If the above hypothesis is true, it means ...
In your comment, you say "it means the US is trying to rile up / ready /etc" the population. That's not the only plausible (or even most likely) scenario though.
The publishing of this info could indeed be for that purpose. Or it could be for something else, such as to influence the currently-ongoing negotiations with other players (eg European) at a critical time.
Or it could be for some other purpose again, that's neither of those. :)
You mean influence the population of European allies or their leaders?
The hypothesis above is roughly connected to this wider idea about international relations that the 'big ideas' happen behind closed doors, and there is a second 'public' face. Here the balloon type incidents leak to the public strategically while other incidents go unmentioned except in private or in some esoteric place.
If true, why would the US press and mainstream media be headlining it when of course it'll enrage the population. It was a choice to publicize it and a choice for our political parties to point fingers at each other over it, as part of the typical spin cycle.
> You mean influence the population of European allies or their leaders?
Their leaders, and the people representing them during negotiations.
> If true, why would the US press and mainstream media be headlining it when of course it'll enrage the population.
No idea. Possibly a side effect, maybe wanted, maybe not.
Potentially so "the population" gets onboard with whatever the outcome of the EU negotiations are.
> If the above hypothesis is true, it means the U.S. is trying to rile up / ready / etc. the population to view China as a threat.
If so, the previous balloon was a pretty fuckin' stupid way to do that, since letting it wander all over the US was obviously going to be used by political adversaries to attack the administration (justly or unjustly, doesn't matter).
Political adversaries will always attack the administration, that's par for the course.
But regardless of what the actual facts on the ground (er, in the sky) might be, or what party A says about party B, the media and online commentariat are framing them within a narrative of aggressive threats from China, and of war being imminent, possibly even necessary. Our consent is clearly being manufactured for something.
Is there a reason F-22s are being used to take these balloons down?
Is it to take advantage of a training opportunity? I would think less advanced aircraft may be more cost effective to operate.
The F-22s are the most capable and are thus what are actually on-station as a reaction force, plus they have the highest flight ceiling which is relevant for taking out some of these balloons.
The f-22 is also the US fighter with the highest combat ceiling. I believe the actual number is still classified. The f22 took the shot on the balloon last week at 58 thousand feet, which is higher than many fighters can fly.
This one was considerably lower. But IIRC Alaska is a common station location for f-22s so may have just been coincidence.
Probably to send a message to China more than anything.
Yes, there is a reason. The F-22 is an integral part of the US Integrated Air Defense System for the homeland. Any foreign engagement by air of the US homeland will first be met with F-22s.
homeland
Two kills in two weeks? What an amazing 334 million USD aircraft. We should have more!
Consider that having already spent the money, they’d be paying for training flights anyway. You’re only hearing about this because they used a live missile.
First rule of government spending: why have one when you can have two for twice the price!
Actual weather balloon?
Fingers crossed it's not a Korean airliner
There's a weird set of specifications with this one since they seem to be making a distinction between the balloon last week and whatever this is;
* Flying at 40k feet altitude
* Size of a small car
* Not manned
* Didn't appear to be maneuverable
* Shot down with an AIM-9X heatseaking missile
What could that be? Also, seems premature to assume China again when Russia is far closer to the Alaskan coast and just as antagonistic.
the equivalent of a satellite being hung from a balloon. "Non maneuverable" is still sort of ambiguous because these types of vehicles navigate by selecting the altitude with the most favorable winds and using controls to attain that altitude, either with a more advanced gas fill/release system or dropping ballast. It sounds like the previous balloon had a good amount of these systems so it could be aimed and this one likely had a more rudimentary version?
Yes. The whole “non-maneuverable” line is kind of a blurry one with modern algorithms/comms and the altitude adjustments possible
I dread to think of all the state-funded technology companies with backdoor-ed firmware/software coming out of China
While RSA isn't a state-funded technology company, they did accept a $10M payment from the NSA to make their BSafe security product default to use the DUAL_EC_DRBG cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. Which the NSA had designed and backdoored...
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-mill...
Are the primary sources on this story from the Snowden leaks available somewhere? Even the article here points to another Reuters article which isn't available any more, and I've never been able to find out which documents people were referencing about this?
https://hyperelliptic.org/tanja/vortraege/20140506.pdf contains excerpts from the original article. Also searching for “Project Bullrun” brings up various articles on the Dual EC DRBG attacks.
Check the torrents?
I still remember an article on here of a person trying to get access to their Huawei router with a JTAG or something, and once inside after looking around they said en passant "weird, there is a user here with a preconfigured ssh authorized_keys file. LOL must be a backdoor, am I right?" and just moved on with no further mention of this, as did the HN comments. I still think about it.
EDIT: found my astonished comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22694150
I don't see much difference between Chinese routers having back-doors and what Cisco has peddled to its customers all these years either willfully or just incompetence.
Yeah... I would say a large part of why I'm skeptical of Chinese made computing devices is because I understand what the US has been doing with ours over the last 50 years.
That said... from a national security perspective - it is still the right call to be wary of devices that are likely compromised by another nation. You should just be assuming that if you didn't make them locally (as in under your own territorial control) they are compromised during production. For everyone. Everyone should be acting with that as the default.
The difference is US companies and the government isnt actively hostile towards in the way China is.
Same way if i found out the UK was spying on me as an American. I wouldnt be happy, but its not the threat China is.
The difference is huawei routers in the west are gathering intelligence on and setting up network to disable, western infrastructure.
But Cisco in China is gathering intelligence on and setting up network to disable, chinese infrastructure.
I live in the west and happen to like our infrastructure. So while I don't think Cisco should be doing what its doing, I would completely ban Chinese gear from the infrastructure be it backbone or consumer level.
I'd rather my own government spy on me than China. I'd rather Hannibal fucking Lecter be able to see me through my webcam than China.
Your own government has a much higher ability to affect your life than China does, so what you're saying is completely irrational. Not that it's OK for the Chinese to spy on us, mind you, or to claim that they don't have nefarious purposes.
Moral relativism between US and China is unfathomable. They are not remotely comparable on the whole.
China has a Dictator, a total absence of a Justice System, total surveillance and censorship, and large swaths of the population of some regions in concentration camps, a large number of individual dedicated to holding in place that apparatus.
Meanwhile you're free to walk down the street and tell the US President he's an idiot and you're not going anywhere without the entire US media knowing about it if they want to put public eyes on it for the sake of your own rights. There are laws, all sorts of controls, Judicial oversight, yada yada.
As if that even needs to be said.
No such comparison was being made. The issue is whether or not the US or Chinese government affect our lives more, and since there's no danger of China trying to invade the US anytime soon, it's obviously the former. The Chinese don't care about watching the average person.
> The Chinese don't care about watching the average person.
Citation needed. How much value does intimate knowledge of individual preference and habit have for psyops? How much of an advantage does China gain when they convince a democratic electorate that their actions are no big deal?
The CCP monitors everyone (including you and I), and we live in an interconnected world, this idea of 'they're not about to invade' is not really the point.
If China had it's way, they would not 'invade' Taiwan either, we would wake up one day and realize the process happened over 20 years and that Taiwan is under CCP control.
And that Vietnam, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, Korea are also subject to arbitrary power of the CCP a little bit like Lukashenko in Belarus is a stooge of Putin.
That's what the surveillance is for.
I had no such intention, I had hoped I made that clear. China is a terrible dictatorship, and the US, for all its faults, is a democracy with a mostly working justice system.
However, in whatever state you live in, your local government is far and away the most likely to care about your habits, to want to convince you to vote against your interests, to accuse you based on flimsy evidence etc. A foreign country poses nowhere near the same risk, even if it's the worse regime in history and you live in the best.
I'd rather be spied on by a western democracy than China. Our intelligence agencies are out of control but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them in than China.
What mechanisms do you recommend for reining in, say, the NSA or GHCQ? Were either reined in at all after the Snowden leaks, or was it business as usual after things calmed down a bit?
I think we have to accept that these intelligence agencies are effectively untouchable and here to stay. With that in mind I think it boils down to: who can do the most harm by spying on you:
- a country thousands of miles away which you probably have no connection to and don't visit
- the country you live in
I said in another comment but it bears repeating - I don't want anyone spying on me, but I am losing no sleep over Chinese intelligence, I am an extremely uninteresting target for them. If a Chinese agent is watching me die repeatedly in Elden Ring, looking at webcam footage of me gawping at my monitor while I scroll HN, or checking the stupid FB messages I send to my friends they'll realise pretty quickly I'm not worth the bandwidth or the storage space. A local agency might be interested in those FB messages, especially if I was politically active, vocally against the government and I was trying to organize protests or strike action.
> What mechanisms do you recommend for reining in, say, the NSA or GHCQ?
Democracy. Vote. Free expression. Tell the people what is happening and why privacy is important.
> Were either reined in at all after the Snowden leaks,
Yes.
> or was it business as usual after things calmed down a bit?
No.
> I think we have to accept that these intelligence agencies are effectively untouchable and here to stay.
We do not. They are not. Apathy is toxic. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good to do nothing.
> With that in mind I think it boils down to: who can do the most harm by spying on you: - a country thousands of miles away which you probably have no connection to and don't visit - the country you live in
China is our single greatest geopolitical adversary. Psyops are real. The ability to influence the public opinion of a geopolitical adversary supports the Chinese salami slicer strategy. It’s reinforced by understanding their adversaries electorate.
> I said in another comment but it bears repeating - I don't want anyone spying on me,
Same.
> but I am losing no sleep over Chinese intelligence,
You probably should be.
> I am an extremely uninteresting target for them.
We are all interesting targets. They may not assassinate, extort, or disappear you in the middle of the night but they can change your opinions without you even noticing.
> If a Chinese agent is watching me die repeatedly in Elden Ring, looking at webcam footage of me gawping at my monitor while I scroll HN, or checking the stupid FB messages I send to my friends they'll realise pretty quickly I'm not worth the bandwidth or the storage space.
Why would an individual agent need to look at anything? People aren’t interesting. We’re all basically the same. But if they know you play Elden Ring and browse HN they can tailor an effective message to you and everyone like you.
> A local agency might be interested in those FB messages, especially if I was politically active, vocally against the government and I was trying to organize protests or strike action.
Yes and that’s an illegal abuse of power. One that can be remedied in a court of law.
Hey I'm not saying "give up, hand over your passwords and keys to the NSA, don't ever vote or write to your representatives" but we're in a discussion over who you should be worried about spying on you more - non-specific "China" or some domestic intelligence services (or an alliance of a few "friendly" countries). I think your comment is rooted in a sort of common belief that America is, for all its faults, just plain more decent and just than those scary foreign places - along the lines of American Exceptionalism. You even mention they can "change your opinions without you even noticing" - this is basically the Korean War propaganda about communist "brainwashing" techniques. The sad reality is both USA and China are willing spy on people, if you're based in the USA you should really care more about the USA's attempts at surveillance than China's.
edit: you deleted your reply before I could post mine. It seemed like I pissed you off a bit so I was trying to clarify and apologise a bit. Here's what I wrote:
> You did though
Well I said that they're untouchable and was then trying to clarify that we should still be pretty pissed off about it. I wrote the original at half-past midnight, it was a little clumsily worded. But you do have to accept that they are currently nearly untouchable and effectively operate outside the law and that right now you can do very little at all about what data is being collected on you.
> I don’t think that is a favorable interpretation
I don't think it is unfavourable at all, the only thing you've really stated there about why you'd be worried about any Chinese intelligence is that they can manipulate your beliefs without your knowing. You have to admit that there's at least a bit of a similarity with the hysteria around communist brainwashing.
I'm sorry for causing any offence, I know it's not nice to feel like someone's accusing you of being a fervent nationalist (not my intent) but as an outsider your last couple of comments do have that air of "America is just ... better" and contained a slightly naive belief that you'd have any kind of hope taking on NSA or any other big TLA. I'll grant that what China would do with the data it collects on its citizens is likely far more severe than what the USA would (e.g. I don't think you're gonna be locked up for posting a an anti-Biden meme in USA, but sharing Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh in China will get you in a lot of hot water) so if that's what you meant then fair enough. I still don't think Chinese spying should be higher up on your list of worries than NSA spying - and in the grand scheme of things there are things you can worry about that you can actually change.
They are 'touchable', there is oversight, and their powers are very limited.
Give me an example of Americans who have been materially harmed by those agencies? And what was the damage?
Have Americans been oppressed, slandered for political gain, wrongly imprisoned, illegally targeted by police because of NSA activity?
I think it's doubtful for anything other than a few incidents; the proportionality of these tradeoffs does matter as these agencies do actually go after bad people. Like people selling sanctioned gear to Russia, money laundering, sex trafficking, etc. you know - 'bad things'.
I don't see professors disappearing because they said something on campus Biden didn't like.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
Naively, one might say "ah but that ended in 1971!" - but let me put it this way: if you spotted a cockroach in your house, you'd be a fool to think that was the only one.
Also: the oversight/limits you're protected by could disappear some day, they're imaginary and socially constructed. Sure, you trust our current government to handle these powers responsibly, (though you really shouldn't, see above), but why are you so confident you can trust _tomorrow's_ government?
"the oversight/limits you're protected by could disappear some day, they're imaginary and socially constructed."
This is the straw man of all straw mans.
You could have a Totalitarian Overlord someday, after all it's all 'socially constructed'. You'd have a million other, worse problems on your hands.
That your making that argument and can't provide examples of specific harm despite widespread powers of the state is problematic.
Creeping authoritarianism is a general problem, not an NSA problem.
Hey look I'm really trying to engage earnestly here. I did provide specific examples, but they were in the wiki article I linked and you didn't look at them (which is fair, no one likes being tossed a link like that). Let me summarize COINTELPRO:
# Covert & 'illegal' projects by FBI aimed at infiltrating, influencing, disrupting, and discrediting various political organizations
# Existence of the program was discovered after activists stole documents from an FBI office and leaked them to media
# Targets included: antiwar activists, feminist organizations, civil rights activists (ie MLK), environmentalists, animal rights activists, communist party, KKK, American Indian activists, far right groups
# Methods included:
* Breaking into homes, violent beatings, vandalism
* Assassination
* Smear campaigns
* Fabricating evidence, false testimony (leading to wrongful imprisonment and activist intimidation)
* Fabricating letters to discredit/humiliate people or erode their relationships, or cause conflict (leading to death in many cases)
I don't actually need to talk about hypotheticals, the US government has already abused these things to squish people or ideas it didn't like. The point about creeping authoritarianism is a secondary argument. My point is that sometimes it's better for certain tools/institutions not to exist at all.
I think we ought to treat surveillance technologies with the same type of reverence we treat nuclear tech (though maybe not to the same magnitude). Nuclear technology isn't intrinsically a bad thing: the problem is that, combined with human tendencies (tribalism, territorialism, etc), a conflict that previously would've resulted in a mere x deaths could now result in x^y deaths, or even total annihilation.
You agree that creeping authoritarianism is a general problem. Do you think it might just be in the nature of human societies? If so, wouldn't it be prudent to carefully consider what tools and institutions we leave lying around, in case the worst happens? We all accept this with nukes - there was some kind of effort at nuclear disarmament (though not enough). We should do the same for surveillance.
I'm only trying to convince you that we need to be very cautious, skeptical, and distrustful of things like the NSA, because the US govt cannot be trusted with it now, and it might get even worse in the future. What hypothetical evidence would someone have to show you, to change your mind?
While I might have been in some ways sympathetic, the Panthers were a violent, armed, (Marxist-Lenninist) Communist radical group that had ambitions to overthrow some parts of governance, they got into shootouts with and killed police officers, voter indimidation etc..
You do understand it'd be very appropriate for the FBI to infiltrate such groups, as they indicating they are currently doing now with 'far right' and other radical groups, especially those with wepaons.
Your characterization of 'assasination' is problematic. I wouldn't say Fred Hampton was so much assassinated. He and his buddies were involved in a shooting which killed police, very shortly thereafter the cops planned the raid to arrest them and two Panthers were killed. It seems that Fred was killed in cold blood. While this is obviously 'very illegal' - this is not the US Justice Department targetting someone, this is local Chicago/Oakland cops form of extra-judicial retribution for the gang killing of their colleagues. Again, not right, but something totally different what might be implied from 'assassination'. They killed cops, the cops got out of line and got revenge.
Very notably - these acts caused national attention and there was an enormous reaction. Information was made public, there was public and political furor, transparency etc..
All of this is some time ago, when central oversight was harder, when the violence was much higher, and where groups of various kinds (aka local cops, local Panther groups) would act independently from central control.
And in the grand scheme of 300 Million poeple, it's relatively small stuff.
Also, it's a good reason for not having a single power like J Edgar Hoover in charge of anything.
Finally, it should be noted that this was the start of the cold war, and the Soviets were absolutely funding totalitarian uprising around the world. Stalin direclty controlled 17% of the Bundestag during the Weimar. While obvoiusly not sufficient to cause 'The Big Bad Man' to rise, without it, 'The Big Bad Man' likely would have never existed. Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua ... so much of the world ... was perturbed by very real, direct intervention from Soviet backed 'Marxist-Lenninist' groups. The 'Red Scare' was not a fantasty. It might have been overstated on some level, but it was a material 'existential' problem.
The same, continued tactics by Russians have landed us in an 'almost war' for the West in Ukraine today. Russian spies are all over Germany, Putin has corrupted so many people in Europe including literally former German Chancellors, Austrian, Hungarian leaders - the FBI exists so that this does not happen so brazenly in the the US and allied nations.
The FBI will step out of line again, just like all groups do, and there should be constant vigilance, but given the total independence of other branches, I'm not worried at all. There will always be whistleblowers, eventual transparency etc..
> You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you
~ Senator Chuck Schumer on why publicly criticizing the intelligence community is a poor choice for a politician
Wait so you're not against Chinese spying, rather just really pro-US spying? That's ... certainly a position!
Something funny about the people who are less worried about US spying because there is “oversight” and they are ultimately “democratically controlled”: they seem to be the same people who have very high faith in them working correctly and not against them. So they are certainly not going to be the ones who keep them in check.
The 'problematic people' are those who do not have the capacity to realize the difference between authoritarian regimes and their internal apparatus, vs the need state security with oversight.
These people are usually naively driven by some kind of decontextualized political mindset, where the equate the arbitrary actions of some state far away, in same context as local governance, and a big dose of ultra liberal (classical) utopianism.
'The NSA is like Xi because they can spy on me'.
It's like saying 'Biden is as bad as Xi because ultimately the Police in the USA could arrest me and put me in prison for 70 years'.
It's barely theoretically true and it makes little sense to compare systems that have oversight and independent judiciary with those controlled by a Dictator.
It's good that the US has the ability to know which Russian stooges are giving money to would-be US presidents, or heading his presidential campaign. And good that the US can trace large sums of money floating out of FTX's Bahamian bank account into the hands of whoever, especially politicians.
If a student protester dissappears in the night because they made an online post critical of the governor - well, all of us will hear about it a few hours later.
You’re the one who brought up the strawman of good/bad and morality, buddy. People weren’t talking about which regime was better or worse. They were only talking about rational self-interest based on where they are located in the world.
(And also bringing up how no state actor only does bad things to bad people in order to dispute the typical “if you’ve got nothing to hide/have done no wrong then you have nothing to worry about”.)
ISIS is worse than a mall cop with a bully streak, but it makes more sense for me to worry about that mall cop while shopping at the mall than to worry about ISIS.
But there are very little chance that China cares about you, whereas your local intelligence agency may have a much more direct impact on you.
> but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them
If we learned anything from the last half-century, it's that this predicate is just comically wrong.
> I'd rather be spied on by a western democracy than China.
Why? What has china done that's worse? Did they nuke a country? Wipe out entire races of people? Did those nasty chinese invade dozens of countries? There is nothing inherent in a western democracy that makes it good.
> Our intelligence agencies are out of control but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them in than China.
There are no mechanisms for controlling any intelligence agencies. All intelligence agencies around the world are state actors. No law applies to them. Ask the people the intelligence agencies murdered, drugged, experimented on, etc.
Unless you are chinese, you are far better off being "spied on" by the chinese than a western democracy because the chinese don't have any jurisdiction over you. This is all common sense. China isn't going to arrest you and put you in jail. A western democracy will though.
> China isn't going to arrest you and put you in jail.
Unless you’re Chinese. Now that we know China has secret police stations all round the world.
You can bring your own government to account for what it does. You can do nothing about what what China does.
Assuming you ever find out. I don't doubt Western governments have the ability to spy on their citizens as needed, and it's likely at some point most of us have been spied on in some minor way, but unless we happened to be doing something particularly nefarious at the point it happened, very unlikely they'd bother acting on it*. Whereas I very much doubt China could see much advantage in trying to spy on an average citizen from another country at all.
* unless perhaps you were applying for military clearance
Blackmail (demanding favors rather than money) and industrial espionage come to mind.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/15/china_shenzhen_zhenhu...
> You can bring your own government to account for what it does
Our government is so powerful, you can't even make a dent.
We will see. Interesting things happening in congress this week. I'm too jaded to let myself get very hopeful about outcomes. But it does look like a dent was made with McCarthy's concessions to get confirmed as speaker.
By the same logic, the chinese government can't do anything to you, but your own government can arrest you, persecute you, execute you, etc. You'd have to be insane to prefer to be spied on by your own government rather than china.
I was going to agree with your comment ... then wondered why I would even entertain "which country would I rather be spied upon by."
Why, though? Your own government has far more power over you and far more reason to be interested in you than China ever would (unless you're a prominent critic of China, politically connected, or involved in military intelligence or something like that).
I mean I don't want anyone spying on me, but I'm less worried about China targetting me than the Czech government (where I live) or the UK one (where I'm from).
Because in a democracy I have the ability to control my government. Far more so than if I lived under a dictatorship.
> far more reason to be interested in you than China ever would
I think this is naive. Psyops are real and are made more effective with knowledge of personal preference and habits. It is likely that Chinese intelligence has targeted literally everyone on the Internet in some way.
Your own govt isn't going to sabotage its infrastructure in war with an adversary.
Ok please tell me how me personally worrying about that will protect said infrastructure in any way.
Well for one you'll be able to inform and request your local govt to avoid using Chinese equipment in infrastructure.
I would too but Europe sold all its companies to the US and China.
You know Nokia and Ericsson are still huge players in telecom technology right?
Nokia was sold to Microsoft, then they sold it to HMD Global Oy /FoxConn and now they make most of their goods in China, almost to the point of being white labelled. Ericsson is a small company compared to what it once was. Sure, technically European (again) but a shell of their former selves.
Nokia the phones are completely distinct from Nokia the telecoms infrastructure provider. HMD licenses the Nokia name from the telecoms equipment manufacturer.
3 big deals happened at Nokia. They sold the devices business to MS. They acquired the Siemens half of Nokia Siemens Networks. They acquired Alcatel Lucent (French Alcatel and American descendant of Bell Lucent) and merged it with what was NSN. They sell every component of the modern networking stack from 5g antennas to undersea cables.
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/ericssons-market-share-has-r...
Outside China, though, Ericsson now claims to serve more operators than just about any other vendor. Ekholm today put Ericsson's share of the market for radio access network (RAN) products at 39%, excluding China, telling analysts it has grown from just 33% when he took over in 2017. Fifty percent of 5G traffic outside China runs over Ericsson, he said, while 16 of the world's top 20 operators are using its 5G core.
I imagine this comment is relevant somehow.
It doesn't matter what the object was, it's that America's adversaries know they can do it without consequences, and what makes them believe this is what matters about this story. That is the irreversible change it signifies, imo.
> it's that America's adversaries know they can do it without consequences
There was a consequence -- we shot it down.
> That is the irreversible change it signifies, imo.
It's not irreversible. Additional consequences can be initiated at any time.
You don't need to convince me, convince the people who keep sending the ballons, invading allies, and using NATO countries as rocket flyover paths.
Having it shot down is not a consequence.
Diplomatic or economic retribution of some kind would be a consequence.
If other reports are to be believed this has been happening for a while, and isn't some sort of new irreversible change. This is just the first time the public has become aware of it. The difference here seems to be that it was shot down (possibly because it had become so infamous).
It’s been what - a week or two? Since the first balloon made the news.
Were you hoping the US would react without thinking through their options?
Personally, I want a considered, measured response. We can always add sanctions or start a nuclear war later. Right now it seems important to understand what happened, discuss with other leaders, and figure out a smart response.
But yeah a lot of people just want to escalate every situation.
Agreed. And perhaps given China claims it was an accident, for this incident shooting it down is response enough. Can always choose to escalate further (or not) if/when it happens again.
I've always wondered: Is your nick a reference to Moto Hagio[1], the shojo manga artist?
Sounds like you think someone sent a trial balloon
"unknown object flying" Pretty sure we have a well-known acronym for that...
Yeah: "UOF"
Other countries are trying to spy on the US’s super advanced “UAPs”. Pet theory of mine.
What are UAPs?
Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon
I've also seen Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena but Aerial makes more sense.
Historically known as UFOs
Rude. And ineffective. Most acronyms are ambiguous. How would I be sure the answer there is what OP was referring to?
> Most acronyms are ambiguous. How would I be sure the answer there is what OP was referring to?
Is that what happened in this case? Did you initially try Googling yourself, only to encounter multiple definitions of "UAP" which seemed irrelevant to the article? Given the search results that came up for me, as well as the extent to which UAPs have been in the news lately, that would be surprising.
> Rude. And ineffective.
My goal is not to be rude. But I put about as much effort into answering your question as you did into asking it. You would have gotten your answer faster, while creating less work for others, if you had simply typed your question into Google instead of the HN comments field.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can even answer your own question, and make that your comment. Something like "OP's comment was the first time I had encountered the acronym 'UAP'. After a Google search, I found it means 'unidentified aerial phenomena'. In case others were wondering."
Google search plus context of the thread?
So what’s the deal with these balloons? Provocation? Do they think nobody will notice?
It's boundary-pushing.
They're unmanned and ambient, yet are clearly a provocation and give China an information advantage over where it would be without the balloons, and in a geopolitical sense it asserts Chinese ascendency. At the same time, it's hard for the US or other powers to figure out an appropriate response. Very similar to Russian/NK/Chinese/Israeli/American state-sponsored hacking groups--it continually forces the adversary to ask "where do we draw a line, and what consequences do we give for crossing it?"
It sounds similar in goals to the Regan-era PSYOP described by Peter Schweizer
> "It really got to them," recalls Dr. William Schneider, [former] undersecretary of state for military assistance and technology, who saw classified "after-action reports" that indicated U.S. flight activity. "They didn't know what it all meant. A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace, and other radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and return home."[1]
Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union
Part of the provocation is that China has been seen testing balloons as a weapons delivery platform for high-speed gliding munitions
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23758/video-appears-to...
> it continually forces the adversary to ask "where do we draw a line, and what consequences do we give for crossing it?"
Sounds a lot like parenting a toddler.
If I were Russia (which is not far from Alaska) I would launch these at random intervals with junk COTS electronics just to confuse matters. The cost of each launch can probably be denominated in thousands.
Damn that’s cheaper than 10 mobiks
Surely the appropriate response is to release some "weather" balloons from Taiwan.
I'm pretty sure they'd head towards the US too, but I'm not exactly sure of the prevailing winds.
You can check wind conditions with https://www.windy.com to find out …
I checked, looks like they'd probably fly into China right now (maybe Hong Kong) if released from Taiwan
nah, SIGINT. great way to probe the air-defense capabilities of your opponent
It could be to gradually increase reaction expectations so it would not be surprising if China shot down one of the USA's drones. Or perhaps escalate by using their previously demonstrated ability to blow up satellites. The balloon was a very public microaggression that forced the USA to respond in a very public way. China tried the public "oops it was a weather balloon" to give the USA a chance to back off the public response (but know that China was still provoking them). But it was too brazen to accept.
The USA is already on their doorsteps by having bases in almost all the neighboring countries, and conducting operational freedom exercises by flying and sailing through disputed areas.
China is the only one disputing those areas because they decided to invent new landmass.
few oil tankers which go to China attacked by unidentified drones will shut them up for very long time.
> provocation
Quite possibly. Minor provocations that by themselves are too inconsequential to warrant a response, nothing to start a war over, but incrementally provokes the target into lashing out in some way that is advantageous for China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_salami_slicing_strateg...
(Other countries do it too, of course..)
Probe detection & response times for various approaches and altitudes, sigint for radio chatter that doesn't reach past the US, similar for active radar targeting high altitudes, wasting more US money than they cost China by a long shot, trial-run for a mass launch of these with potentially more interesting payloads than these sacrificial trial ones are carrying (even just as a kind of attention- and resource-wasting chaff during, say, an attack on Taiwan), radio-signal mapping for some crazy new passive guidance system. Lots of possibilities.
I'm pretty sure nobody here knows.
It's not like this is new. We know there were 3 during the T administration. Now for some reason we've decided we need to be paranoid about them.
> Now for some reason we've decided we need to be paranoid about them.
That last one getting noticed by the public probably had something to do with it.
From what I have read these 3 were just recently 'discovered' and weren't known prior to Biden coming into office. How this can be true, I have no clue. Either way, I don't remember people posting balloon pictures a few years ago. I have a feeling that if they had transited during the previous administration, and people knew, they would have nailed this criticism to Trump too.
> How this can be true, I have no clue.
Careful re-analysis of old radar data, perhaps.
Its definitely not true. They absolutely knew these were up in the air the entire time.
Laser mapping of military POIs before a war in a few years? See the recent laser rays on Mauna Kea.
Can you elaborate on this? My understanding of the Mauna Kea lasers is that they are used to adjust the mirrors for atmospheric conditions in real time.
Yes, those originating from (around) the telescopes. But just recently Subaru telescope captured laser beams originating from space scanning Mauna Kea in regular intervals that looked like satellite mapping.
https://www.newsweek.com/mysterious-green-lasers-hawaii-chin...
IMO, the balloons are an excuse to raise tensions with China.
America is forcing China to send balloons towards America so that America can raise tensions with China?
Unfortunately, tensions are already quite high in China, due to state media being the only source of propaganda. The state and most tv-watchers have therefore decided that America is the cause of all their problems.
Wouldn’t it be prudent in this situation for China to just not send these balloons over the US mainland if they didn’t want to offer the US an excuse to fear monger them?
It's a boogeyman, a harmless prop hyped up by the GOP in an effort to heighten tensions with China and criticize a tepid response by the administration.
The Biden White House seems happy to play along, justifying more equipment from top donors Raytheon and Boeing.
The balloon panic helpfully distracts from the massive freight derailment chemical disaster currently spewing vinyl chloride into the atmosphere over Ohio.
Who is 'they'?
This is a pretty cheap way for foreign adversary to test our detection capabilities.
How soon after identification are they shooting them down?
Like if they are watching the launch and then waiting 2 days, the adversary isn't learning the whole story.
Those are advertised as a "don't even bother" signal. There's a reason NORAD is a relatively vocal agency.
The full capabilities of satellite and sonar are hidden, but they're easily past the "good enough" line for any relevant military activities.
Best to assume the US also knows this and is revealing (or not revealing) its capabilities accordingly.
At what altitude does something stop being geographic territory and start being a plane in the atmosphere?
There is no agreed upon height where territory boundaries end.
Legal Eagle actually covers that detail a bit in their coverage of the prior balloon.
If it's a balloon why waste an AIM-9X when the F-22's cannon will get the job done?
US likely have stockpiles of aging 9x due to replacement.
Canada tried this like 20 something years ago. It, uh, didn’t work.
So the Raptor is all about shooting down balloons?
I'm trying to think of anything valuable you can learn from a balloon flyover that isn't already public domain, and I'm coming up blank. Anyone have any examples?
Balloons can linger over an area and gather a time series of events.
So can geosynchronous satellites, but they're much further away from earth.
I mean, I'd geolocate and sample comms traffic. Capture and send back what I can.
Nobody knows because it's a secret.
If you knew that secret you'd understand what to look for in order to unveil the next secret.
Imagine if this is how first contact is made.
Some think it happened in Roswell NM. in 1947.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident
I've got a fanciful notion that the "foo fighters" are living creatures. The Air Force supposedly gave someone some of the excretions to examine and they found "unearthly isotopes" or some such.
I figure something that lives, say, a couple hundred miles down inside a planet might only even notice the surface phenomenon that are the most dense, energetic, and anomalous (certainly at first), and pay more attention to those things. How might such beings interact with us and could we discern their efforts as such if we wanted?
> reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flights
Aren't civilian flights more a threat for the planet? Not suggesting to shoot them, just to stop them
> similar balloons passed over U.S. territory on four occasions during the Trump and Biden administrations
from linked article https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government...
Why was it faster this time?
because it was a danger to air traffic
My pull quotes:
> The Pentagon downed an unidentified object over Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden, according to U.S. officials.
> Mr. Kirby said the object was traveling at 40,000 feet. He said officials were describing it as an object because that was the best description they had of it.
> A recovery effort on the debris will be made, Mr. Kirby said. He said the object was “roughly the size of a small car” — much smaller than the spy balloon that had a payload the size of multiple buses.
I've wondered if these incursions are intentional on the part of the Chinese to provoke a precedent setting response to airborne (and beyond) surveillance.
"They shoot down our surveillance balloons, giving us precedent to shoot down their high altitude drone planes or satellites in the future."
That precedent already exists. Trespassing planes were shot down during the cold war, when they could be, and China knocked a US intelligence plane out of the sky over "contested" airspace (way south of China, near some of the islands they're claiming in a move to gain sovereignty over as much of the sea route via the Straight of Malacca, and sea routes to SE Asian states like Vietnam, as they can) in '01 (kinda by accident, probably, but that didn't stop them from claiming it was OK for them to do that and detaining the flight crew until an apology was issued)
Or more directly, maybe they intend to start shooting down our balloons. There were stories last year that the US military was planning to deploy surveillance balloons over Russian and China. Have we indeed been doing so? Here's one of the stories: https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/07/06/us-military-balloo....
This is a very reasonable explanation for the otherwise mysterious question of why even use an (obvious, provocative) balloon in the first place, when China has perfectly good satellites.
It may not be exactly what they have in mind, but I think it's the right way to think about the question - they are engineering scenarios which work to their advantage no matter how the US responds. US shoots them down? Play outraged. US leaves them alone? US looks weak.
> when China has perfectly good satellites.
We need to move past this whole "why use spy balloons when we have satellites" thing. Even Scott Manley repeated it.
The USA has what are likely the most capable surveillance satellites in the world yet the USA still employs spy planes.
For one thing, RF signals suffer from path loss over distance. The difference is >140km in distance. That's a lot of signal loss. Another factor is loiter time.
Presumably if not shooting them down looks weak, then shooting them down looks competent. And playing outraged confers no advantage to China.
Maybe not. But honestly, they're so massive and slow and visible, and visibly loitering over sensitive sites, that they practically scream "shoot me down". There must be some advantage gleaned from it, because they can't reasonably have expected anything else to have happened.
> why even use an (obvious, provocative) balloon in the first place, when China has perfectly good satellites.
The balloon floated about 100x closer to the surface than a satellite in low-Earth orbit and travelled much slower, making it potentially easier to collect signals/images.
Obvious, provocative.... and unsteerable.
The previous balloon was steerable, as it could control its altitude to catch different currents.
I don't think we know enough about this "unknown object" to definitively say what it could and couldn't do.
Not unsteerable if you have altitude control + a good model of wind patterns. This is what Project Loon[1] did and I think it's fair to assume the technology might be similar.
This is exactly what Larry Johnson (former CIA) at sonar21.com suggested.
> I've wondered if these incursions are intentional on the part of the Chinese to provoke a precedent setting response to airborne (and beyond) surveillance.
It's more likely a coordinated event to get people to talk about something other than covid and the last 3 disastrous years. Lets be honest here, neither china nor the US wants people asking uncomfortable questions about covid. Now that the covid era appears to be over, what better way to distract people than "war".
They did the same thing with 9/11. Uncomfortable questions about 9/11 was overshadowed by war and iraqi "wmds". Eventually people forget or move on.
Call me a cynic, but china ends covid lockdowns and all of a sudden we get "surveillance" balloons. And the entire media apparatus has us talking about silly balloons instead of wondering what the last 3 years of covid was about. My guess was a staged "terrorist" attack somewhere to transition us from the covid news cycle. Turns out we got balloons instead. Whatever works in the end.
>Lets be honest here, neither china nor the US wants people asking uncomfortable questions about covid
at least in the US, I don't think anyone is really interested in covid anymore enough to require any distraction. Maybe that argument makes sense in China.
What? Many want fauci, the pfizer ceo, etc arrested. People want answers to how covid started, the lockdowns, masks, etc. Everyone here is over covid as a pandemic, but that doesn't mean we don't have questions that we want answered.
No…you’ve been in a social media echo chamber and convinced yourself there are many others that think like that. The truth is that’s an illusion. Really, 99.99% of people don’t really care.
What? Who are these "many"? Who is "we"? Source?
People moved on from Covid long before these balloons.
As reminder, Pentagon has been testing mass surveillance balloons across the US for long time. Here’s story from back in 2019, but these have been flying around much longer and would not surprise me if China got the idea from the US.
There was a fun theory on UFOs I saw recently.
The general premise is this:
U.S. adversaries realized they couldn't compete with the U.S. on spending. So they got creative and loaded the equivalent of Pringles cans up with a bunch of sensors, hooked them up to either a balloons or relatively cheap unmanned aircraft, and sent them through U.S. airspace to collect intelligence. They'd occasionally get caught (perhaps on purpose) and cause a base to scramble to intercept. The proposed theory on why they'd get caught on purpose was to gather up intelligence on what a response would be flying through the airspace.
It's possible they've been doing this for more than a decade and the military has gotten caught with egg on it's face having ignored the reports for so long.
It’s not theory, it’s actually military practice.
Adversaries spend 100k for a military grade drone. What do shoot it down with? A 1M dollar Patriot? Whatever you choose will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone.
Israel’s Iron Dome has the same issue. It costs massively more for defense than attack.
Missiles have a finite lifespan. They use the older ones first. Firing one the day before it has to go back for refurbishment might save money. You won't have to ship it back. Fired missiles are also generally not replaced, under the assumption that a new stock of better missiles will likely be ordered in a few years anyway.
And the cost of the plane is also complex. This pilot/aircraft renewed some quals on this flight, reducing training needs. The aircraft was likely going flying that day anyway. So the net cost of the operation was likely minimal.
One of the oldest tricks in the (SIGINT) book is to trick the enemy into activating their radar and/or trigger a response to an incursion to collect all of the resulting signals intelligence.
Absolutely. This is the primary reason those “UFO’s” AKA balloons and drones are concerning: Signals intelligence (and/or radar jamming in the same vein which the DOD reported has occurred off the coast of Virginia).
It’s alarming many leaped to suggest LEO satellites obviate the need for balloons/drones/spy planes because it really isn’t true; there are some things for which a proper resolution and capture is simply only possibly with proximity, at least more than a satellite has. In fact that’s why we still use U-2 spy planes (upgraded) and did for the balloon.
Given the number of unidentified drone/balloon incursions reported by the Pentagon in the last few years near ships and air force bases I do wonder what’s been exposed about our radars and or datalinks. It also doesn’t necessarily matter that the data is encrypted (a weird refrain I saw) because the operating frequencies and behavior of the emitters on our aircraft, ships is in and of itself valuable information.
Kind of have to wonder if after the last shootdown the PLA sent out a more specialized collection platform in the hopes that the US would take the bait yet again.
I’m sure that NORAD doesn’t use their most advanced sensor platforms in such a circumstance, but there could be all kinds of interesting close range data to collect on the aircraft and weapons systems used to respond.
I wouldn't be so sure that NORAD doesn't use their "most advanced" sensor platforms. How would they be able to determine whether or not the threat was "real" before turning on their sensors? Are you suggesting that they have two tiers of sensor networks, and hold the "good" ones back for "real" threats?
It would be an air to air missile like a sidewinder which still costs $400k. Just scrambling a couple jets would cost tens of thousands on top of that I’m sure.
More than tens of thousands of dollars, military aircraft are incredibly expensive to operate and maintain. Beyond the obvious fuel costs, every hour of flight time is followed up by N hours of service.
If I remember correctly, the F-22 Raptor is the champ in terms of highest ratio of service required per hour of flight (40:1).
The F-35 clocks in at 4-8 hours of service per hour flown (6:1).
One example from the article linked below:
USMIL budgeted $39m dollars for the blue angels to fly 69 days in one year. It's up to 11 F/A-18 Hornets at once, but in my experience they only fly for a couple of minutes for a show.
Plus, who knows what kind of math games the military plays in terms of budget reporting. Operating commercial aircraft is already very expensive, and military craft are an order of magnitude moreso.
The planes are beautiful, though <3, and remain operationally effective.
https://www.inverse.com/article/33711-military-flyover-costs...
Edit: Good points @elif and sandworm101, thank you!
Military flying is way more complicated than man-hours per flight. For instance, ground servicing people also need to be trained. So double or triple the minimum man hours needed to accomidate those people being trained on the job. Military people also have a host of training/admin/command costs spread across the entire military complex. Then per-hour numbers dont accomidate the periodic maintenance not done at the home squadron but at a support facility elsewhere. Other costs are less a function of hours than duty cycles, paticularly engines. And aircraft like the f22 are irreplaceable, meaning their depretiation costs are more a matter of policy than simple math. Fighter squadrons are generally given a budget in dollars, but also airframe hours to accomidate fleet costs. Boiling everthing down to a per-hour budget is totally impractical.
Ya but surely responding to an alarm counts as credit for some training drill that would have otherwise been scheduled.
It's not like they leave their best toys in the toybox all year.
Does the flight time for these operations reduce the amount of time pilots would otherwise have to spend training and staying current?
Flight hours are flight hours, and it’s very rare to do any type of offensive air-to-air operation outside of an exercise, so I’m sure it was a great training opportunity.
Less thrilled about it as someone who happened to be on a flight transiting nearby airspace last night, and who is familiar with incidents like KAL 007.
Maybe not actually launching a missile, but 99% of the pilot job comes before the missile is launched. Going up to fight against other aircraft, doing everything up to actually launching a missile, is a daily thing at any fighter squadron. The great thing about not launching a missile is that you can practice dozens of engagements rather than the one or two oppertunities during a live fire event.
Ain’t like 100 of ballon’s were shot down. So it doesn’t apply here
Drones are constantly being shot down by ZPUs and other obsolete AA guns mounted on technicals. Costs even less than the drone you are shooting.
You cannot shoot down a drone at 40k feet with an anti aircraft gun.
Those UFOs were lens flares.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
Turns out we like to spend gobs of money even when we're just chasing our shadow.
That video helps explain one property one of the UFO videos (the rotation) but doesn't explain the rest. Doesn't explain the Tic Tac videos. It does not explain why these were observed on radar as well.
While some of the videos have explanation, I would kindly encourage you to look at this with more curiosity.
> Doesn't explain the Tic Tac videos
He covers the "Tic-Tac" and "Go Fast" videos too, just not in that specific video. Like in this one, where he explains how the "Go Fast" video isn't actually even a fast object zipping just above the water, but rather an object flying at roughly wind-speed at about 12000 feet.
The tic tac looks exactly like any number of inflight videos of other inflight objects. The apparent speed is a function of the unusual perspectives created when two objects fly at different altitudes. Watch tactical footage from fighters on a regular basis and it won't even look odd.
> It does not explain why these were observed on radar as well.
The lens flare was caused by the camera looking at the ass end of another jet. The radar saw the other jet.
For even one of these videos to have a mundane explanation that should have been obvious to the Navy upon investigation, I think that discredits the lot. Either the Navy couldn't figure it out themselves (which seems highly improbable), or for some reason the Navy is deliberately misleading the public, or at the very least allowing some of their personnel to mislead the public and playing coy about it. I think this is what's happening.
> or for some reason the Navy is deliberately misleading the public, or at the very least allowing some of their personnel to mislead the public and playing coy about it
But why?
Maybe they think it's funny. Maybe it's to confuse their adversaries, or a ploy for more funding from Congress. Maybe they're allowing some pranksters to have their fun because they want to encourage an environment of open reporting where pilots aren't afraid to report strange things.
The last one never came to my mind but is the most likely explanation I now have. I truly thank you for the insight.
The Navy was directed by the Executive branch to release the videos. They released the videos and a non-statement about what the videos were.
My guess is that there's an internal report describing the FLIR system and how the FLIR system works and how the internal workings of the FLIR system caused the visual phenomena. But that's all classified.
So they did the absolute minimum the Executive branch required them to do and left it up to the White House Press Secretary to explain it to the American public.
To me it reeks of the brass not wanting to have any more of their time wasted. There's a great scene in The Wire where the metro police, the harbor police, the state police, and the county sheriff arguing that a string of murders don't fall under their jurisdiction; it's your problem you deal with it etc, subverting the trope of the local cops fighting with the federal/state police (usually the FBI) that "this is my jurisdiction" or whatever. I think this is the same. The Executive branch (I'm 80% sure it was Trump, coulda been Obama, too lazy to look it up) demanded that they do a thing they didn't want to do, and then they dragged their feet and did the bare minimum, and in the process made a mess that now the Office of the White House now needs to clean up. (which they didn't, because they don't want to explain a classified sensor system in a public briefing either)
I could be wrong, but this doesn’t seem accurate. The videos were leaked some time ago, and in 2020 the DOD confirmed that they were legitimate videos from the Navy (https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/216571...).
As for the other reports/hearings, it seems like it’s driven more by Congress. For example: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelima...
> This preliminary report is provided by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in response to the provision in Senate Report 116-233, accompanying the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2021, that the DNI, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF), is to submit an intelligence assessment of the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the progress the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding this threat.
I wouldn't trust anything that originated on TikTok
why does every debunking focus on the footage and ignore the fact the objects were also confirmed on radar? Do they just assume the Navy is filled with morons who decided to report this through the chain of command based on nothing but footage and didn't consider a lens flare?
We haven't been provided proof that anything was confirmed on radar, nor what "confirmation" means. This is the same military that has a history of using alien/UFO conspiracy theories to obfuscate sightings of classified aircraft. It's not a case of the Navy being morons, but whether or not the military is being truthful.
My assumption is that sensationalized UAPs are illusions, but the reason the military keeps putting out press releases about them is not because they're aliens. The first reason is that there are unidentified aircraft entering US airspace. They're likely cheap attempts at both intelligence collecting and psychological warfare on behalf of US adversaries. Drones are easily mass produced and a nation flying a handful of drones in US airspace can easily send hundreds/thousands/millions because of how cheap and easy they are to make and deploy.
Since drones can vary in size and be flown in a ton of different conditions/patterns/scenarios/etc, they might be hard to detect. The mainstreaming of the "UAP mystery" narrative encourages civilians to look for, record and massively platform adversarial drones should they be seen by people, but go undetected by systems that are looking for them. The narrative also neuters whatever attempt at intimidation or psyops adversaries are waging against the public/military/etc. "Our militaries can send whatever we want into your airspace and there's nothing you can do about it" can be a powerful message that was effectively neutered with "maybe they're aliens lol".
The Navy has a patent on creating fake UFOs that appear on radar and other sensors so that seems like a perfectly logical explanation. It would also explain why the Navy disproportionately sees the UFOs when compared to the Air Force.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/05/11/us-nav...
Isn’t it better to let people underestimate us? Especially any potential adversary.
Regardless, liminal warfare will continue to give rise to this kind of scenario so we should try not to outsmart ourselves in a desperate bid to be right
> Isn’t it better to let people underestimate us? Especially any potential adversary.
Depends on the domain. Underestimation could lead to perceptions of weakness and opportunity for attack. Even if you are prepared for attack, not getting attacked in the first place is better than getting attacked at all.
Same goes for positioning in negotiation.
Mick West's videos are so good, specifically because the analysis are based on what's actually shown in the interface in the videos. There's no big "like, comment, subscribe"-section either. Just a pure explanation of why the object shown isn't as mystical as it appears at first glance.
I agree the videos are thoroughly debunked as being aliens, but there still are credible reports that navy/air force see craft observing them periodically. That doesn't have to be aliens for the reports to be true.
e.g. The video that got debunked as Bokeh (accurately) is still someone on that ship attempting to video a craft that they see nearby them. It's only viewers of the video who get confused and believe that the bokeh effect is what they are supposed to be seeing in the video.
Mick Wests videos on the topic have been thoroughly debunked by fighter pilots and experienced aviators.
He also completely ignores the eyewitness testimony and radar data.
He’s one of the least credible debunkers you can find.
> Mick Wests videos on the topic have been thoroughly debunked by fighter pilots and experienced aviators.
I have never seen a counter-analysis. Can you explain why you think this? It's not common knowledge that the observations of Mick West has been "debunked"...at least not as commonly known or easy to find as the Mick West analysis or the source videos.
Well Lemmino's video on the topic had a source for an interview with a specialist for the pod optics who disputes it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fefUZAGtCO4&t=310s
Regardless I think the simplest counter argument is that if that were really the case, you'd see these damn things on every flight facing the sun and people would know to ignore them. Lens flares also don't show up on radar and on pilot's eyes. No crazy analysis needed.
> No crazy analysis needed.
That's unnecessarily pejorative. Presenting something as evidence, requires some amount of rigor. This is why an in-depth analysis is valued. Presenting as strong a case as possible for either side, is the method by which we can best decide on what is known.
> Regardless I think the simplest counter argument is that if that were really the case, you'd see these damn things on every flight facing the sun and people would know to ignore them
I don't believe that's a counter-argument, as it applies to both conclusions. A unique coincidence does not imply it's common. ie If the gimbal video was a UFO, you'd see these damn things on every flight, etc.
> Lens flares also don't show up on radar and on pilot's eyes.
Mick West's analysis video does not contend that the object is only a lens flare, but an object with a lens flare (or lens artifact) overlaying it. There is no dispute that the pilots saw a group of objects with targeting information on a singular physical object from the video source.
Love your references for these claims. They're so thorough.
Funny, though tbh it seems like there are cheaper ways to cause the US to spend gobs of cash. I even hesitate to mention some ideas that immediately come to mind that would be easier/more efficient to really nail than the Pringles can idea.
Plus many of the more prominent base-personnel sightings land quite a bit far from that particular ballpark. Take a look into the Rendlesham Forest incident for example.
The problem with "summing up UFO contact" is that the variety of encounters is absolutely insane. Compare Rendlesham to Varginha, etc.
It really starts to bring out the "inter" in the more colorful inter-dimensional contact theories.
Yeah.Funny, though tbh it seems like there are cheaper ways to cause the US to spend gobs of cash.My best understanding based on watching a lot of retired military personnel is that isolated incidents cost the US almost exactly zero additional dollars.
The way an Air Force base works is this: there is a budget. This covers the (considerable) costs of the base itself, the personnel, the equipment, and so on.
Active-duty fighter pilots must fly a certain number of hours per month to remain on active status. Just like any other demanding activity (sports, competitive gaming, whatever) their skills require constant maintenance. These flying hours are of course budgeted. (This will be true of literally any air force; it's not specifically a USAF thing)
Things like these incident responses, and even things like flyovers before sporting events, come out of those predetermined budgeted flying hours that they were going to fly anyway. So isolated incidents like these don't really increase USAF expenses in a meaningful way. Those $400K/ea missiles will presumably need to be replenished but this must be compared to the USAF's total budget of $180 billion.
To put any strain whatsoever on the US's capabilities our foes would need to start sending large amounts of drones: essentially, a saturation attack. More than we can comfortably respond to. Which is of course... extremely possible.
But as long as these remain isolated incidents we can surmise that our adversary's goal is not "cost the US a bunch of money."
A potential flaw in this plan: while everything you say may be true, it is not broadly known. If China (or whoever) was to keep floating these things our way and we kept shooting them down at a don't worry about it, we're pot committed rate of ~$400k per incident, maybe people's blind faith in the military and politicians might be replaced with some rare curiosity, and maybe even displeasure! (Though: it's not like they have an alternative to vote for, but that too is not immutable, it only seems that way.)
Keeping people immersed in a complex narrative is a lot easier than one would think, but it is also a very tricky balancing act that can get upset by the weirdest things.
Personally, I'm all for it - anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my books, plus it makes for good entertainment.
Can you elaborate?
It's readily available public information. As far as "widely known," I guess that's true. Most people haven't really nerded out on the details of how pilots maintain combat readiness and how budgets work, but uh, your point?while everything you say may be true, it is not broadly known
I'm not exactly the biggest fan of any government, but what specifically are you talking about here?anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my booksWhat is the "dream state" that these incursions might shatter?
> It's readily available public information. As far as "widely known," I guess that's true.
It's even worse: even when people do ingest available information, they very often do it erroneously, forming a misunderstanding (without realizing it).
> Most people haven't really nerded out on the details of how pilots maintain combat readiness and how budgets work, but uh, your point?
Broadly: humanity runs mostly on untrue stories, and does not realize it (actually, there's a "it's even worse' here too).
>> anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my books
> I'm not exactly the biggest fan of any government, but what specifically are you talking about here?
Simplistically: people's understanding and trust in their government (abstract and concrete), and what is going on in general is highly erroneous, and not only do they not realize this, they believe the opposite. I consider this to be an extremely dangerous state of affairs, despite it having always been the case and "we're doing ok" nonetheless. Things often go "ok" for a very long time, and then suddenly start going "not ok", often without an obvious trigger.
> What is the "dream state" that these incursions might shatter?
The phenomena resulting from the combination of consciousness + culture + time, both individually and collectively.
You might be best served by filing this under "woo woo" though...but then again, you also might not - there's only one way to (possibly) find out!
> it seems like there are cheaper ways to cause the US to spend gobs of cash.
Yeah, the Mig-25 / F-15 thing comes to mind. Soviets develop a super secret jet, very big, very fast.. it must be very impressive fighter jet! America is spooked so tons of resources are poured into the F-15 to make the absolute best possible air superiority fighter jet they can, to counter this new Soviet threat.
Except then it turns out that the Mig-25 was never a fighter jet, it was an interceptor that was very fast in a straight line but not much more. So the US built an incredible air superiority fighter to counter a phantom of a jet that never really existed in the way America thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle#F...
Come to think of it, maybe China is going low-tech with balloons to avoid this dynamic?
> So the US built an incredible air superiority fighter to counter a phantom of a jet that never really existed in the way America thought.
Are you sure that's what really happened, or did a group of people in the Air Force want an air superiority fighter and use the Mig-25 as the excuse?
By all accounts I have read, the defection of Viktor Belenko with a Mig-25 really did change the way NATO understood the Mig-25.
But it does not end there. The f-15 in turn spooked the soviets, and they put a bunch of money into the Su-27 program.
Had never heard of the Rendlesham Forest incident - what a rabbit hole. Thank you for sharing.
Knowledge like this is what keeps bringing me back to HN.
If you know something about how the USAF responds to incidents, the idea of the deputy base commander and disaster preparedness running around in the middle of the night chasing UFO's is hilarious. It's obviously a practical joke that got out of hand.
Just watched some interviews. The guys claiming to have “downloaded” an alien signal by touching the craft.
The signal was transmitted in binary and just happened to be ASCII encoded English. Odd that a ship from 8100 transmitted data in an archaic dialect of an ancient language using an ancient encoding that just happened to match the language and encoding in widespread use during this guys lifetime.
Having a hard time with this.
It's like Israel's "Iron Dome" interceptors. $50,000 each to take out what amounts to a $50 Estes model rocket.
I don't think it's a fair comparison because a rocket hit could be much more expensive in direct and collateral damage than 50k
Yeah, a $50k missile to save even a single unoccupied house is a missile that paid for itself. And if it saves a few human lives then it was positively cheap.
If bankrupting Israel by forcing them to expend Iron Dome interceptors is Hezbollah's plan, it obviously isn't working.
I wonder how much is going into location technology much like ShotSpotter but for rockets and mortar and all that sort of thing. They may already know the origins of fire but maybe can't fire back at that precise location or something?
Counter-battery radar that can track artillery shells or ballistic rockets back to their point of origin have been around for many years now; the Israelis surely know exactly where the rockets are being fired from. I think they (usually) avoid firing back because they know there would be civilian casualties and want to avoid some of that bad PR.
One such system operated by Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EL/M-2084
True. But they're unguided, almost none of them will cause real damage, but you have no choice but to take all of them out to prevent the losses from a lucky shot - at great expense. It's a great way to drain your enemies funds, great asymmetric warfare. Casualties are just icing on the cake.
Part of Iron Dome is trajectory analysis. If the profile of a target matches that of an unguided rocket and the CEP is in some unoccupied area, no interceptors are fired. If it looks like it'll land in a populated area, interceptors are fired. It doesn't just shoot everything in the sky.
Iron Dome is selective and only fires when the trajectory will go to a built up area.
It's also a great way to test and hone one's missile shield with live unscheduled "drills" that may not be drills.
Makes it a lot easier to get funding when requested too.
That analog for a $50 Estes rocket can blow a family apart into little pieces. The discipline is sound - protect your citizens from external threats, no matter the cost. That's the purpose of government and by extension, its military.
I would most definitely sleep better at night with a system like that watching the skies.
This is a cat and mouse game that we've been playing for decades. USA has surveillance aircraft in the air at all times, especially near ADIZ. It also has at least one of two national command and control aircraft in the air at all times. The USA has been probed more times than can be counted, and we've probed other countries just as much. What's new is ignoring a threat while over territorial waters or sparsely populated areas and letting it glide across the country before deciding to shoot it down.
I don’t think that’s new based on the most recent incident. I recall the pentagon saying this has been going on for a few years. But if, by saying new you mean the last decade, that’s fair.
I was referring to the general surveillance of opposing forces by governments. Even still, balloons have been used for surveillance and attack for over one hundred years.
During the siege of Yorktown in 1862, Union General Fitz Porter decided to do some surveillance using only one rope on an observation balloon. The rope snapped and he drifted over enemy lines. Confederates tried to shoot him down but missed. Eventually the wind sent him back over Union lines.
Balloons were used in WW1 as observation posts (ushering in wide-spread use of parachutes) and in WW2 for both observation and area over-flight denial.
By May 1945, Japan sent almost 10,000 armed balloons across the pacific. They were largely ineffective, however, they did kill a pregnant mother and five children who discovered a downed balloon in Bly, Oregon. 285 Japanese balloons were recovered, one as far east as Texas.
It's certainly the most likely explanation.The proposed theory on why they'd get caught on purpose was to gather up intelligence on what a response would be flying through the airspace.Accordingly, it seems highly possible that the countries targeted by such incursions (a) realize their response time is being tested (b) fuzz/delay their responses by some certain amount of time in order to frustrate such efforts.
More or less the premise of this 2021 article: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones...
Making a high altitude balloon highly visible (eg, put lights inside it) and sitting back and waiting is actually a terrific tactic for finding out maximum operational ceiling of interceptors when the number is non-public.
Mission accomplished. The previously published ceiling of the F-22 was 50K feet. The Pentagon said it (edit: by "it" I mean the F-22) was flying at 58K feet when it shot down the first balloon. Guess it can do (at least) 58K.
This was probably not entirely groundbreaking news to anybody including China. Everybody knows that the published specs of military hardware are intentionally distorted in one direction or another.
The F-15's known ceiling is 65K feet for example. So it's not surprising that newer fighters can match that.
Most US missiles can shoot above the operational height of their planes.
Sorry. I should have been clearer with that "it." The Pentagon said the F-22 was flying at 58K feet and the balloon was at 60-65,000 feet.
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/32...
Of course, that could be a lie too!
There's not really any reason the Pentagon needed to state the F-22 was at 58k if that was actually new information (I haven't investigated the previously admitted service ceiling). They could have just as easily have claimed it was at 50k when it fired.
EDIT: Wikipedia claims the service ceiling of the F-22 is 65k feet anyways.
Check the Wikipedia edit history. Bunch of arguing over it. It was 50,000 feet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lockheed_Martin_F...
Yeah it’s not new, people have known.
I don’t think it was 50K in practice, published maybe but it was widely known it reach higher.
That was actually similar to a concern from CIA director Walter Bedell Smith:
>According to Smith, it was CIA’s responsibility by statute to coordinate the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts.
https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cias-role-in-t...
Pringles cans have never been observed to move in ways that violate Newton's laws
Given the possibilities of an alien spacecraft observed on Earth violating the known laws of physics, or some error on the part of the observer, I'm going with the latter every time.
First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level. Then explain why our completely wrong models of physics still work as well as they do. Then explain the Fermi Paradox in light of the apparent existence of easy faster than light/antigravity technology and confirmation of the existence of other technologically advanced civilizations in the universe. Then I'll be willing to concede the still practically nil chance of any of those aliens actually being here given the vast size of the observable universe as being likely enough to consider.
Don't get me wrong, I want it to be true. I desperately want it to be true. I've been fascinated by UFOlogy and sightings and the related folklore for decades. I want some fate for humanity other than us slowly choking to death on our own poison, alone on this island in the midst of vast seas of infinity. It's just that the bar for proving any other possibility is higher than a third-hand account of someone seeing a light in the sky that moved really fast.
> Given the possibilities of an alien spacecraft observed on Earth violating the known laws of physics, or some error on the part of the observer, I'm going with the latter every time.
You know, it isn't (physically) necessary to choose anything.
> First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level.
Why does everything have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
> Don't get me wrong, I want it to be true.
I dunno man, the opposite seems to be the case - are you not at least suffering from motivated reasoning, to some degree?
> I want some fate for humanity other than us slowly choking to death on our own poison, alone on this island in the midst of vast seas of infinity.
Me too!! Consider this idea: our cultural tendency to form beliefs absent of proof (therefore: faith based, which is usually considered a big no no) causes substantial harm, and our tendency to write it off as "that's just people" or (begrudgingly) as "well, of course I'm only expressing my opinion, that's what everyone is always doing" are not proper common sense and reasonableness, but rather are emergent behaviors that cause humanity to be permanently stuck in a local maxima (on certain dimensions, while ongoing successes in specific domains like science, engineering, computing, etc make it appear like we have our shit substantially together comprehensively).
Of course, this is speculation - but what if it is actually true to a non-trivial degree?
>You know, it isn't (physically) necessary to choose anything.
Sure, but we're here on a discussion forum so not committing to any point of view seems counterproductive.
>Why does everything have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
Because the laws of physics as we understand them, even quantum mechanics, don't allow for things like antigravity or faster than light travel or propagation of information. Theoretical warp-drive models like the Alcubierre drive, or wormholes, or other solutions either require different spacetimes or exotic matter or negative energy or some kind of fudge factor that makes it not work within our universe. Special relativity says it's impossible. Quantum mechanics says it's impossible.
If it turns out that FTL travel is possible, it means we live in a universe without causality, where the relationship between cause and effect is arbitrary. If it turns out to be not only possible but also trivial, to the point that you can fit a warp drive onto something the size of a plane, Then E=MC^2 turns out to be meaningless. Since everything we observe about the universe, at every scale, suggests causality exists and that E=MC^2 holds, we can't be wrong about those without being wrong about everything.
But hey, maybe we are. Great. Show me some equations then. That's all I'm asking. Prove it's wrong, first. Show me a working anti-gravity drive or a warp drive, built by humans, or something that can be tested independently, peer reviewed and verified. Faster than light teleportation. Something.
But all I'm expected to hang my hat on is rumors, folklore and videos for which mundane explanations exist.
>I dunno man, the opposite seems to be the case - are you not at least suffering from motivated reasoning, to some degree?
Everyone suffers from motivated reasoning, that's how reason works. I'm just saying my personal bar for proof is higher than those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics as a prior to making the UFO argument semantically trivial.
Rather than believe that we're exactly as ignorant now - even though we can measure gravitational waves and the cosmic microwave background and use quantum tunneling in our microchips and GPS has to take relativistic time dilation into account - as we were thousands of years ago when we believed the stars were inscribed on crystal spheres, I believe our models of the universe have become more accurate over time, and that as a result, fundamental paradigm shifts become less and less likely.
That doesn't mean I don't want to believe, it just means I don't also believe in magical thinking. And I'm far from the only skeptic who wants to believe out there. Eyewitness testimony is interesting, video is interesting, but it isn't enough. At least not for me.
> Sure, but we're here on a discussion forum so not committing to any point of view seems counterproductive.
But if you think of it from the perspective of what is actually true, what do you come up with?
Also: assuming you're a programmer/techie type: is this the same epistemic methodology you use when writing code?
Given the possibilities of an alien spacecraft observed on Earth violating the known laws of physics, or some error on the part of the observer, I'm going with the latter every time.
>>> First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level.
>> Why does everything[!] have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
> Because the laws of physics as we understand them, even quantum mechanics, don't allow for things like antigravity or faster than light travel or propagation of information. Theoretical warp-drive models like the Alcubierre drive, or wormholes, or other solutions either require different spacetimes or exotic matter or negative energy or some kind of fudge factor that makes it not work within our universe. Special relativity says it's impossible.
Here you are only describing that some things that we believe would have to be incorrect, and you do not even attempt to substantiate the "irreconcilable" part, as far as I can tell.
> Quantum mechanics says it's impossible.
Saying something is true does not necessarily mean it is true, but it certainly often causes it to appear true.
> If it turns out that FTL travel is possible, it means we live in a universe without causality, where the relationship between cause and effect is arbitrary.
Why?
> If it turns out to be not only possible but also trivial, to the point that you can fit a warp drive onto something the size of a plane, Then E=MC^2 turns out to be meaningless. Since everything we observe about the universe, at every scale, suggests causality exists and that E=MC^2 holds, we can't be wrong about those without being wrong about everything.
Why (in general, and also specifically related to everything having to be wrong)?
> But hey, maybe we are. Great. Show me some equations then.
The burden of proof lies with the person making an assertion.
> Prove it's wrong, first. Show me a working anti-gravity drive or a warp drive, built by humans, or something that can be tested independently, peer reviewed and verified. Faster than light teleportation. Something.
First: prove to me, and yourself, that you are correct.
> But all I'm expected to hang my hat on is rumors, folklore and videos for which mundane explanations exist.
Who is it that is expecting you to do that here, and how did you acquire that knowledge?
> Everyone suffers from motivated reasoning...
Do all people suffer from it, always? And where people do suffer from it, do they suffer from it equally?
Also: where have you acquired this comprehensive knowledge?
> that's how reason works.
Not really.
> I'm just saying my personal bar for proof is higher than those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics as a prior to making the UFO argument semantically trivial.
To me, your personal bar for proof seems essentially/abstractly identical to most people's: if it seems true, it is true.
Also: how sure are you of "those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics"? (Emphasis mine.)
> Rather than believe that we're exactly as ignorant now - even though we can measure gravitational waves and the cosmic microwave background and use quantum tunneling in our microchips and GPS has to take relativistic time dilation into account - as we were thousands of years ago when we believed the stars were inscribed on crystal spheres, I believe our models of the universe have become more accurate over time, and that as a result, fundamental paradigm shifts become less and less likely.
How about a third option: the second option from your false dichotomy, combined with believing that despite our substantial accomplishments, we remain substantially ignorant. I mean, is this not fairly obvious if one just looks around at the world? Do you think that what we have going on is all that we could have accomplished, had we been paying closer attention and trying harder?
> That doesn't mean I don't want to believe, it just means I don't also believe in magical thinking.
Do you believe that not believing in magical thinking makes one invulnerable to it?
> And I'm far from the only skeptic who wants to believe out there. Eyewitness testimony is interesting, video is interesting, but it isn't enough. At least not for me.
Tautologically, what is enough for you (and everyone else) is what's enough. A way to think about it: are our individual and collective epistemic & logical standards adequate? I am extremely concerned that they are not, and for evidence I would open with climate change (as the first card I'd play, from a infinite deck).
To be fair though, I am kinda picking on you. You are surely a very nice and well-intentioned person, a product of the environment you were raised in. Though, conflating causality with justification is also a risky maneuver, especially when practiced at massive scale....but then, now I'm kinda doing it again lol. Also, I'm partially joking.
If we don't know what it is, we don't know it's not a pringles can.
You never know what a pringles can or can't do.
Like a decent microwave antenna, for instance.
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wireless-hacks/05960055...
Nor has there been good evidence of UAPs doing so.
When the US spends on the military, where does the money go?
To the US economy.
That's the reason why US is the biggest arms dealer in the world and wars are a boon to its economy.
Contractors mostly, since everything they use must be acquired from a vendor.
Military stuff.
They need to stop doing this. If they send out thousands of cheap balloons it would be like a denial of service attack!!
We don’t have the bandwidth to basically dog fight thousands of aircraft simultaneously!! We’ll go bankrupt!
> We don’t have the bandwidth to basically dog fight thousands of aircraft simultaneously!! We’ll go bankrupt
The defense industry will go ritch, though
The F-22 has gone from zero kills to two in under a week.
Indeed. If you charted those it'd be likely show as a breakout event vs. relevant moving averages at this point.
So from that POV, one may start to think about a quick buildup of momentum in the general direction of F-22s shooting things down, or air combat, or just combat, etc.
Not so much to predict the future, as to ideate and prepare frames of mind for potential changes in circumstance.
Extrapolating from here, expect 2^52 objects shot down by F22s this time next year.
I'm seeing Fibonacci so far, not doubling.
Technical analysis is astrology!
Now even with the number of fatalities in the F-22's flight history, I believe.
And now three.
Hopefully this isn't on that kind of hair-trigger that shoots down civilian airliners by mistake. It's happened literally dozens of times [0], so it's hard to believe any kind of blanket "this can't possibly happen because..." logic.
Seems to be particularly likely to happen in panicky situations, or when someone has something to prove. E.g., the Soviet-American tensions surrounding an American spy plane, a RC-135, were a factor in the Soviets shooting down KAL-007 (they thought it was the RC-135) [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
It wasn't a hair-trigger decision. From the AP article [0]: "U.S. pilots who flew up to observe it determined it didn’t appear to be manned"
[0] https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-shoots-down-unknown-flyi...
Protocol is to visually identify the target. In the case of an airliner, they try to make visual contact with the pilots if they don’t respond by radio. There are visual verification methods commercial pilots are trained on.
And airliners have transponders and flight plans. If a civilian plane stopped talking to ATC, the Air Force is likely already involved.
Additionally, we’re not on a high-alert war footing like during the Cold War. As far as I know, we don’t have hostile military aircraft routinely flying with transponders off on our coasts.
Even if we did, I’m pretty sure the larger military radar systems that would be used to track this stuff can read transponders and separate out which plane is which.
They didn't let this one hang for a few days to finish its torrent seeding?
Their private tracker ratio is at an acceptable level now.
I’m releasing a high altitude balloon soon for a prize competition. Whoever guesses the closest landing zone of the balloon wins a new cybertruck. Just a silly promotion for my startup. I really hope my balloon gets shot down by a US jet, the free pr would be great for us. Unlikely my balloon will cross the pond though.
I'm not sure if you're serious, but some friends and I launched weather balloons with a payload (aprs broadcasting location) twice. Tons of fun, and there is a bunch of software out there you can use to estimate the crash location.
On the first balloon we failed to acquire enough helium, and ended up "floating" the balloon in the upper atmosphere overnight. Our prediction system kept indicating it was going to land in Africa.
I wonder if hydrogen would be a better choice. It's an application where the device is unlikely to endanger anybody if it catches on fire.
If you mix hydrogen and helium, say 50/50, the risk of any fire is minimal. I wouldn't smoke around it, but I wouldn't be afraid of it causing a fire in a crash. Looking at the recent shoot down, the brief white cloud suggests to me that they might have been using such a mix.
We seriously considered it, but were most worried about issues while we were transporting it to the launch site.
And amusingly we ran into the helium issue because our initial vendor didn't have any available, forcing us to buy a bunch of smaller, lower pressure containers from a party store. We miscalculated, assuming there wouldn't be anything left when the pressure equalized..
Likely not if you need long flight times, since it leaks out far quicker iirc.
hindenburg disaster comes to mind
I realize that, but the Hindenburg disaster happened when it landed, and a balloon that's not carrying cargo or people doesn't need to land gently. It can jettison the hydrogen before it gets too close to the ground.
Is it dangerous to fill a balloon with hydrogen if you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing? Because that’s me. Helium just seems like I’m more likely to keep my hair and eyebrows long term.
Valid point. I certainly wouldn't want anybody to get hurt, or operate outside their comfort zone. At the very least I'd say that a helium system could be hacked (still some dangers from any compressed gas) but a hydrogen system would need to be engineered (and I'm not an engineer). And note the sibling comment about hydrogen leaking out faster, so it might not be practical anyway.
Yep, 100% serious. Sounds like a blast. You can actually further protect the balloon with uv repellent paint to stop it popping as easily.
Where can I enter? I want a cyber truck
https://moby.finance/app/competition
Funnily enough I just launched this competition about 2 hours ago so nobody has entered yet.
To get a free entry you need to get 5 likes on a post.
Keep'em monkeys jumpin' through'em hooks if they wanna join the club, that's what I always say :)
In other news - a Richard Branson type balloon enthusiast has just gone missing in Alaska...
Cheap balloon vs expensive missile, seems a good way to bankrupt us by sending continuous balloons.
They shot down a couple of balloons using whatever they had. If balloons were a common target, they'd design something more suitable. Maybe a monkey throwing darts.
What about a monkey in a superman suit shooting lasers?
A government that spends more money on their military than the rest of the world combined isn't at risk of bankruptcy from firing a couple missiles.
We're at risk of bankruptcy because our debt is 31 trillion dollars and in June we won't even be able to issue securities to continue bullshitting ourselves out of cutting spending. Welcome to America, we're broke because we spent all our money on guns rather than infrastructure, healthcare and education.
> Welcome to America, we're broke because we spent all our money on guns rather than infrastructure, healthcare and education.
This sentiment is completely untrue. Defense is approximately 12% of US government spending, healthcare approximately 24%, education approximately 15%, and social security roughly 20%. Infrastructure is harder to categorize, but the truth is that the US government spends at least 4x more on healthcare, education and welfare (combined) than defense.
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2023USrn_...
The fact that this 12% of government spending amounts to the largest military on earth is in large part a consequence of the fact that the US is really, enormously wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world, has a fairly large population, and still has a larger GDP per capita than any other large or even medium-sized country.
> the US government spends at least 4x more on healthcare, education and welfare
And we’re terrible at all three vs nations that spend fractions less…
Yes, and that's why we should oppose more tax increases and more government spending, and focus instead on how to make government more efficient and get more value for the money we do spend.
Be careful. Cutting education will decrease our future efficiency.
Yep. Basically welfare far exceeds all other costs.
Standard reply to debt rhetoric: US debt service costs measured against the economy are not particularly high historically: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S
The 80's were much, much worse. If we were ever going to go bankrupt, it was in the early Clinton administration due to the Reagan/Bush spending boom. We got through just fine. Those bonds were all paid off decades ago.
Be very very very cautious any time someone comes at you with this kind of hyperbole about federal debt. They're selling you something.
We spend more on Healthcare and education per capital than almost any other country. Don't let people bullshit you on the amount spent. Now results on dollars spent is a different question with a different answer.
Interesting, didn't know that. I imagine it includes private/public spending as well?
We spend more per capita just in public money than some peer states do to provide universal healthcare, while ours isn't universal.
It makes more sense when you consider how many programs we have—a pretty high percentage of our population is covered by public spending, and—crucially—the ones who are are in some cases among the most expensive to care for.
1) Medicare (old or disabled)
2) Medicaid (poor)
3) Tricare or whatever they call it now, since I think the name changed (active and IIRC retired-with-full-benefits military and their spouses and kids, at least for the active-duty ones, can't recall if that part carries over in retirement)
4) VA (military veterans, including those with short terms of service)
5) Federal employees
6) State employees
7) County employees
8) City employees
9) Cops and firefighters and such, if not covered under any of the above.
10) School district employees (there are lots of these)
Not all of these are cases in which all the spending is covered by public money, but some of them are, and in other cases a great deal of it is. Also I've probably missed some programs.
[EDIT] Oh and that's not counting public money that goes to private companies but ends up paying for healthcare for those companies' employees and families, who are employed expressly to work on those publicly-funded projects—I can see arguments either way for counting that, depends on what you're trying to understand.
> Cheap balloon
I'm surprised this seems to be such a common point. Why is it believed that it was cheap?
Yeah, these balloons that can hold small car to school bus sized payloads are not like a commercially available thing. It seems like they'd require truckloads of helium, which is a hard gas to store and not always available in massive quantities (seems like it should be prioritized for keeping MRI scanners cool instead of balloons). The balloons are probably really hard to produce, not made in great numbers, and require specialized equipment and processes to launch without puncturing. Not quite an airplane's cost but this isn't the send-a-gopro-to-100,000ft type of trick that relied entirely on products available to consumers.
It's also possible whomever is running this operation doesn't care about their staff at all and they just use hydrogen.
There's only so much you can spend on a bag of helium; anything is cheap compared to satellites or stealth long range recon aircraft.
The bag of helium isn’t the expensive part I consider. I’m wondering how much computer hardware “the size of multiple buses” costs. I’m sure much of that is casing but much of it also is not. How much effort went into designing these things? There’s probably a significant price tag on these bags of helium all things considered.
Jurassic Park taught me that heavy things are expensive. It stands to reason that light things must be cheap.
The USAF pops off live missiles while training from time to time, so these could just come from that supply, and not really cost anything. Shooting down balloons is a good enough training exercise.
The US Department of Attack budget for 2023 is $1.9 trillion dollars. A couple of missiles is petty cash.
China will need to send nine million five hundred thousand balloons and then the budget will be all used up.
We already spent the money on the missiles, may as well use them.
It's sad to see comments that are so obviously bait on HN.
I think I’ve played this game.
latest: https://www.voanews.com/a/us-shoots-down-mysterious-high-alt...
>According to the Pentagon, the object first moved into U.S. airspace late Thursday and was tracked by U.S. Northern Command as it moved over the skies of northeastern Alaska, staying consistently at about 12,000 meters (40,000 feet).
>Pentagon and White House officials said U.S. planes approached the object, said to be the size of a small car, and determined that no human was in it before one of two F-22 fighter jets sent on an intercept course shot it from the skies with an AIM-9x Sidewinder missile.
…
>"This was an object ... it wasn't an aircraft per se,” Ryder said, briefing Pentagon reporters. “We have no further details about the object at this time, including any description of its capabilities, purpose or origin.”
…
>“We do expect to be able to recover the debris since it fell on our territorial space but on what we believe is frozen water,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said during a separate White House briefing. “We’re hopeful that we’ll be successful and then we can learn a little bit more about it."
I'm curious what the definition of an aircraft is, because I'd think anything manmade that is meant to traverse the atmosphere would qualify.
Probably not a great sign of things to come.
Probably didn't help that an Air Force general was openly and loudly proclaiming that war is inevitable. I looked up some speeches of his, and he is off the rails, like the German general in All Quiet Along the Western Front.
I mean, it's nothing compared to the internal speeches that China gives its troops. Heck it's nothing compared to the speeches Xi gives internally to troops. Chinese troops are currently training on their missile corp on models of US aircraft carriers.
Edit: Chinese propaganda video of attack on Guam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBOho1AOKYY
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36598/chinese-air-forc...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-builds-mockups-us-...
That's been going on for decades, and supposedly the balloons are nothing new. What's changed is the USA response, in terms of the American general's rhetoric and the coverage and downing of balloons. So there's been a shift on the part of the USA.
That's a lie. It started in 2012 but it took until the middle of the 2010s before they started openly threatening war. This is not some status quo situation that the US General upended. China's been escalating toward war since Xi took over. I mean before Xi it was hide your strength bide your time.
Ok, a decade ago.
> it took until the middle of the 2010s
Here's a Chinese general openly threatening war with Japan in 2012:
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/chinese-general-pre...
The Taiwan Strait crisis of the '90s was before my time but it'd be interesting to know how bellicose the rhetoric got back then.
Different than threatening war with US. Edit and yes, it stepped up in 2012 when Xi took over. Started with Japan and has migrated to aggression against US and allies.
Edit: Taiwan crisis wasn't great, but it ended when the US sailed an aircraft carrier through Strait of Taiwan. So while it wasn't great, it wasn't like they were threatening war against US.
Some of the propaganda videos people are posting on douyin (OG tiktok) are hilarious (even if the historical events they're inspired by are very serious). It's interesting to compare foreign propaganda about the US military to US propaganda about foreign militaries.
China's actions are unacceptable but so are the general's words. I would be very surprised if he wasn't reprimanded in some way.
my speculation is that the main goal of Chinese covid lockdown was to train and simulate mass policing of population in case of upcoming war.
Why would you need to police population in case of war for returning Taiwan? It will be very popular war and you definitely won't need to lock people down.
Look at Russia as an example. The war has been longer and less popular than expected and economic sanctions have hurt the working class the most.
China imports 66%-75% of its oil. That would drop dramatically in a hot war, as oil imports via the South China Sea would likely be blocked. This would require any imports to sail around Australia, which would likely be stopped by the US.
Russia would happily sell China oil, but it doesn't produce nearly enough to cover the gap.
No oil, no military. No oil, no economy.
If anything, war is much more popular in Russia than expected. There are no widespread protests, draft went ok, etc. Putin is still popular.
I do not think oil is such a big problem. China import is 10mln barrels while Russia exports is 5mln barrels, Kazakhstan is 1.2mln barrels. I am sure they can transport Iranian oil if needed. What will also happen is that Russia will buy oil on international market to resell to China. There is no infrastructure now to transport that much oil but it can be built surprisingly fast. Germany just demonstrated that it's possible to built LNG terminal in six months. If you ignore property rights and all enviromental regulation and enlist military you can built trans-asia pipeline in a few months. China can also import oil thru Vietnam.
there will be consequences from these war for population.
Like everything I think this is at least a half truth. COVID did happen but probably not intentionally. And then China (And a few other countries) saw it as a great excuse to try a few things out on the general population and see what they could get away with.
As with speculation about US Covid measures being some kind of training or testing for god-knows-what crazy thing, the political and economic costs of the measures are far too high for those to make any sense as major motivations.
My understanding is their vaccine doesn't work at all, they don't have a strong emergency medical care system, thus it was the only real option for them.
they could buy western vaccine
And admit weakness?, autocracy doesn't like doing that much.
They not necessary need to tell population it is foreign vaccine.
But maybe they were trying to solve the problem of aging population that way.
That is entirely up to China and what it decides to do with regards to Taiwan.
Xi has made it very clear he would like to invade Taiwan, and soon. If Ukraine was going well for Russia, he may have already invaded.
Do you have a link or name of the guy? I haven't heard about this
Parent is presumably talking about recent comments by Gen. Mike Minihan (Air Mobility Command).
IMHO, people/news are blowing it out of proportion.
If the boss of FedEx said we're going to end up in a war with China, how much does that say about what defense contractors are doing?
What it was probably actually about was shocking the troops assigned to AMC, establishing an important mission and raising morale, and declaring business as usual was no longer acceptable.
Gotta be creative to make people excited about moving supplies.
See also: every ridiculous statement by every startup CEO in a bubble, ever
edit: Maybe this? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-air-fo...
I dont see anything crazy there
> Minihan said in the memo that because both Taiwan and the U.S. will have presidential elections in 2024, the U.S. will be “distracted,” and Chinese President Xi Jinping will have an opportunity to move on Taiwan.
You need to read the full memo, sent out as an email and watch his prior speeches. The memo appears to have been admonished by actual national security experts. Irregardless of the accuracy, there are better ways to handle these things, and he doesn't seem to have proper authority to make those statements.
Yeah, he’s … a little excitable. Dude runs Air Mobility Command, he could stand to remember he’s not running ACC, he’s FedEx for things what go bang.
Warmonger tries to sell a war. Film at eleven.
Would be great if just more people had read this great book nowadays (and please, not watch that super bad recent movie that doesn't deserve to bear the same title (: ).
And cannot belief statesman proclaiming that now everywhere :( War should always be seen as evitable, at least that belief needs to hold up til the last second.. and even further. But who am I...
I'd say it feels like a return to the era of cold war tensions but I wouldn't know, I was born around when the Berlin Wall fell. What say you older HNers, is this what it was like?
I would say the tensions seem similar, but the consequences seem different.
In the 80s, it felt like you might find yourself vaporized or living in a nuclear apocalypse hellscape at any moment, likely due to a misunderstanding or malfunction.
These days it seems like we're more likely to just be in a long-term adversarial position with likely proxy wars.
I feel like the WWII and Cold War eras were more about existence, whereas these days the aggression is more about how much more bounty do we want. Look at the Chinese land grabs around disputed islands versus Japan. They don't need them, but it would be nice to have them.
The whole thing just seems like a bunch of unnecessary, ego-driven B.S. on every side.
It feels to me like things are just starting to spool up. Unlike during my youth, I think the playing field is much more tilted in the United States favor.
I had lots of nightmares about seeing a bright orange flash in the window back in my youth. I've had a few recently.
If they decide to take out the Steel Works in Gary, I'll be toast. If not, fallout is something that can be avoided by staying inside, away from exterior walls and the roof, and waiting it out for at least a week.
I've had Potassium Iodide in stock for my child's use since the Fukushima meltdown... I bought a new bottle when Ukraine kicked off.
> What say you older HNers, is this what it was like?
I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis — to borrow from Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie Wag the Dog, "This? THIS is NOTH-ing!"
The Cold War had expectations, guardrails, rules. Those don't exist in the current setup. China didn't even pick up the emergency hotline in the first balloon crisis.
From first approximation, there are 2 major questions to initiating a conflict.
1. Will I be able to stay in power? (Related: Will my populace support this war? Will my economy keep functioning?)
2. Will I end the conflict with more power / prestige / resources? (Related: How expensive will the conflict be in blood and treasure?)
Most of the things the West are doing over Ukraine are to make the "Related" answers less palatable. Very few people are calculating enough to climb to power, then risk everything on a gamble with bad odds.
If China gets serious about Kinmen and Matsu, then everyone should start worrying.
So... it's worse?
In the 80s, I resided on a US Military base in West Germany. Currently, I feel like the world is getting closer to World War III, which is the closest experience I have had in my lifetime. There is ongoing conflict in Europe involving a country that possesses nuclear weapons.
Additionally, tensions are escalating with China and the economy seems unstable. I sincerely hope that reasonable minds will be able to prevent any further escalation of these conflicts, but there is always the possibility of an unintentional incident that could lead to an expansion of these wars.
The Cold War wasn't uniform of course, there were periods of greatly increased tension and periods of relative relaxation (e.g. Détente.) What we have now is somewhere in the middle, I'd say on the peaceful/Détente side of the scale.
Honestly, I've been watching this unfold since 2012 and the point where we are now is pretty bleak. Unless something intervenes to change the course of where things are going, we're headed for a bad place. It's bleak to the point where experts on both sides (Chinese and US) seem resigned to conflict.
What say you older HNers, is this what it was like?
The Cold War was a lot scarier than what we have now. In the back of your mind, every day you thought that today could be the day we all get wiped out.
I'm not too worried about Russia or China starting anything nuclear these days. Russia invade Scandinavia? Sure. China invade Taiwan? Absolutely. But I'm not worried that they'll nuke someone else from a distance.
> But I'm not worried that they'll nuke someone else from a distance.
I'd like to hear more about this perspective- is this based solely on the fact that they haven't done it before or something else?
You know parts of Scandinavia are protected by the UK, right?
No one is protected from nuclear bombs. That's the point.
I was a teenager in the 80s. It’s hard to say how similar these events are, at least to me.
Information and and disinformation travels so much faster and so much more thoroughly these days that it’s hard to compare.
For example, in the 80s, I couldn’t even tell you what Russia looked like through photographs. there was just very little available information.
There was a big gray outline of the Soviet union on my high school history class wall, and that was about it. I had seen a few pictures of the Kremlin …the onion domes and what not. And maybe I had seen one photo of Brezhnev shown every so often on the news, but that was about it.
It’s amazing how much things have changed as far as the wealth of information is concerned.
So I’m not really answering your question, but the sheer magnitude of the lack of information … let’s say about four decades ago… is something that I really don’t see pointed out much so I thought you might find it interesting.
So in the 80s, the Soviet union was worrisome for the most part. But mostly it was just the blackest of black boxes to me.
Edits: sorry… numerous typos…typing on treadmill.
I agree with dctoedt.
This is nothing.
"Not sure what the object was"
"Shot Down using an Aim9x"
That actually narrows it down a bit. Heat seeking warhead.
I just learned (yesterday[2]) about the rolleron[1], a stabilizing mechanism that prevents roll. It uses the airstream to spin up a gyroscopic mass.
The AIM9 is the only use I'm aware of.
His long hair dangling by that spinning disc while he demos it... ugh.
Unlike previous Sidewinder iterations with a single-sensor thermal seeker, the AIM-9X has a thermal imaging seeker - it was used to shoot down the much larger balloon last week.
So it doesn't really narrow it down that much, then. Could be a plane, could be a balloon.
If it was not a drone, and "not a balloon", what could it be?
Assuming this was a drone, the "car-sized", "unmanned", "not a balloon", "not maneuverable" (!?), the operating altitude (40k feet / 13 km), and use of AIM9X (IR/heat seeking) should narrow down the possible drones.
Also, one thing I pondered: why F22 instead of F35 to shoot it down? Maybe a question of availability. But, at least publically the F35 operating ceiling is lower than F22, so I was thinking whether the object was in reality higher than the publically known F35 operating ceiling.
> If it was not a drone, and "not a balloon", what could it be?
It could be an unmanned glider with some solar power. Several companies make those. Including Google, which was considering them as data relays back around 2016.
The F22 is America's superiority fighter, still beating the F35 in stealth and capability for anti flying things action. The F22 will probably be the default in most intercept circumstances.
Could also be a flying promotional bearskin bladder from a local hunting lodge.
Which I have to say is where we may start to see a tragic lack of creativity unfolding on China's part.
Dang, you're correct. It still had a thermal signature, but it wasn't as definitive as what I thought.
> Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, told reporters Friday that an F-22 fighter aircraft based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson shot down the object using the same type of missile used to take down the balloon nearly a week ago.[0]
[0] https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-shoots-down-unknown-flyi...
It's considered a "system-guided" missile, not heat-seeking. It's much more advanced than the original heat-seeking concept and integrates additional optical technology in the fuse.
We should figure out a way to harvest the helium.
Shoot first ask questions later? Why not intercept it, disable it, and then dismantle it to figure out what and why it is?
What's the difference between disabling a flying object & shooting it down?
How many pieces it’s in, I suppose.
Would be hilarious if they shutdown some high school project with a Go-Pro attached to it.
In northern Alaska? How are they getting this level of helium in the region as consumers?
Buy a K cylinder from Airgas in Fairbanks and ship it to wherever you are.
> The object, which the U.S. learned about on Thursday evening, was described as "roughly the size of a small car," Kirby said.
A high school project could definitely launch a car sized balloon.
Working hypothese 1: High school achieved the impossible. Not a single student taking a selfie while doing <big cool thing that will ignite my instagram>
Working hypothese 2: The Chinese shaped the balloon as a d*ck so it appears blurred in all videos and nobody can figure out what is that, or describe its shape. Invisible ninja genius move.
That would probably make it some of the best non-armed forces footage of an F-22 in action, wouldn't it?
Even more hilarious if it's a UAP.
My out-there pet theory:
Russia made some weird looking (but non-threatening) drone and mimicked some Chinese flight path. Thus, hoping to stoke a bit more drama between the US and China after the balloon affair.
> An F-22 fighter jet shot down the object using an A9X missile
What a waste if $200k, shooting Chinese baloons. These shold be zapped using lasers.
The US defense industry will absolutely find a way to make the marginal cost of shooting the laser be $200k or more.
There is always stock that has to be used up before they go bad and the pilots and machines need flying time no matter what. It's not as bad as it sounds and the rockets have their warheads removed.
Don't most f-22s come with a 20mil cannon? Wonder we we're preferring the missiles to just plain old lead?
At those altitudes the combination of a very high closing speed (air is thin) and the short range of the gun creates a real risk of flying into the target you're trying to hit.
This sounds paradoxical to me.
Using the same reasoning, a gun bullet should also be faster with higher altitude, hence have a longer range.
It's not that the bullets won't fly a long ways. It's that the range where the gun is accurate is fairly small. Sure you could theoretically shoot it from 20 miles away as long as you're 15 miles above the target and can successfully plot the ballistic arc, windage, etc. But fighter jets aren't flying artillery pieces so their computers don't do that kind of targeting.
The high speed is necessary so the plane doesn’t fall out of the sky. A bullet is going to have a different friction coefficient than a plane so is not as affected by the altitude.
It turns out that high altitude balloons don’t pop when you put small holes in them: https://apnews.com/article/268893fddde785d029d5a51b136951eb
Idk, but I'm guessing they treat it like target practice for the missiles.
Ordinance doesn’t last forever. Might as well use them if you’ve got them.
Lots of zaps needed. But I guess if you cut a big enough line (or circle) it’ll do the job.
The YAL-1 747 Airborne Laser had a megawatt class chemical oxygen-iodine laser. In an unclassified presentation I was at they claimed a hubcap-sized (30cm-ish?) spot diameter firing from Seattle to Wenatchee (~200 km) with the capability to melt thru an aluminum ICBM skin in just a few millisecond pulses. I think we could pop that balloon.
> Daytime temperatures Friday were about minus 17 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius).
Oops.. minus 27 degrees Celsius. Yes, you might assume the `minus` applies to both, you only have to go up 17 degrees Fahrenheit for the signs not to match (better to be specific).
Part of me thinks they wanted to shoot down the first balloon, but the president was kind of incapacitated and unable to give the order. That's the only thing I can think of for why they didn't shoot the first one down when it was over Alaska, but they shoot this one down when it is.
Which part of you thinks this?
Part of me thinks they wanted to shoot down the first balloon, but the president was kind of incapacitated and unable to give the order. That's the only thing I can think of for why they didn't shoot the first one down when it was over Alaska, but they shoot this one down when it is
New explanation from the Senate Appropriations subcommittee:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-balloon-carried-antenna...
tl;dr - nothing important in Alaska
----
Pentagon officials, in testimony to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense, said that the balloon wasn’t deemed to be a threat as it crossed Alaska where it didn’t pass over sensitive sites.
They added that no analysis had been done at that point on where the debris from the Chinese craft might fall. The risk to people on the ground was considerable, they said, given that the balloon was 200 feet tall and carried an equipment array the size of a small airplane.
Shooting down the balloon in the waters off Alaska would likely have made recovering it more difficult due to the depth and frigid ocean temperatures, said Melissa Dalton, a senior Pentagon official with responsibilities for homeland defense.
Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims II, director of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, cautioned that shooting down an intruding craft not seen as an imminent threat might encourage other nations to act hastily if Western planes approached their borders.
“Once you take a shot, you can’t get it back,” Gen. Sims said. “I think it’s important for us to remember that if we establish that precedent… we may meet the same precedent.”
“We may create something that is to our detriment,” he added.
The U.S. has conducted reconnaissance flights in international airspace close to China’s territorial limits, drawing frequent objections from Beijing. In December, a Chinese J-11 fighter flew within 20 feet of a U.S. RC-135 surveillance plane near South China Sea islands controlled by Beijing.
The Pentagon testimony didn’t assuage some lawmakers, particularly Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. Ms. Murkowski said that the Pentagon appeared to be treating potential threats to her state as a secondary concern.
“At what point do we say a surveillance balloon, a spy balloon coming from China is a threat to our sovereignty?” she said. “ It should be the minute it crosses the line, and that line is Alaska.
The “danger to the ground” thing is weird. Either they didn’t know about it until civilians reported it (and it was over populated areas afterwards but I find that hard to believe) or they didn’t care about it.
Because if they really wanted to they’d have issued a “everyone get the fuck indoors we gonna shoot some shit” order and done their best. Montana and those places aren’t heavily populated at all.
The previous one wasn't in civilian airspace.
I noticed some odd things while watching the press conference. Pat Ryder had a potential Freudian slip and said that it was taken down because it "posed a threat to civili..." and he enunciated the "li" as if he were going to say "civilization," but he then paused and corrected himself to say "civilian." Another odd thing was when Pat Ryder answered a question about why the President's decision to take down the object was necessary. Pat mentioned something like, "Presidents usually make decisions when certain threats in our airspace pose a danger to civilians on the ground."
It's extremely odd to me that they were able to identify the object by sending our own airmen to visually confirm it, but if that's the case, wouldn't they be able to definitively conclude that it wasn't a balloon? Pat kept it ambiguous and kept insisting that it was some sort of object.