Surprise!

[JasonPratt]

They definitely have a habit of coming up with angulated justifications of things, including in how they build and use territorial water claims. Taiwan's waters are necessarily claimed, of course, so...! 

[JasonPratt]

Meanwhile, in case anyone was wondering whether they did anything similar during the prior administration, as an anonymous source is claiming to some media outlets, to wit:

A top Defense official, who was not identified, said Saturday that the Chinese regime's "surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time," according to a transcript released by the Pentagon.

"We spoke directly with Chinese officials through multiple channels, but rather than address their intrusion into our airspace, the [Chinese regime] put out an explanation that lacked any credibility," the official said.

Here's a link to the public transcript of that meeting: https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3288618/senior-defense-official-and-senior-military-official-hold-an-off-camera-on-back/

Trump says definitely not, but aside from the possibility he's lying, he might just not have been told (or was told but was distracted by tweeting or whatever).

But senior admins at the time agree:

Mark Esper, who served under Trump as secretary of defense, refuted claims about balloons flying over the United States under the previous administration.

"I don't ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States," he told CNN. "I would remember that for sure."

John Bolton, a former U.S. national security adviser under Trump, said that he never heard of any spy balloons entering U.S. airspace or hovering over U.S. territory while Trump was in office. Bolton, also a Bush administration official when he was in office, also said that he never heard of anything like this happening before he joined the Trump administration in 2018.

"I don't know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I'd never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018," Bolton told Fox News on Sunday. "I haven't heard of anything that occurred after I left either."

Responding to claims made over the weekend, Bolton said that the current administration needs to "tell Congress" about any "specific examples." He added that "I can say with 100 percent certainty not during my tenure."

"Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue," added Robert O'Brien, who served as White House national security adviser under Trump. "It never came up," he said. "If a balloon had come up, we would have known. Someone in the intelligence community would have known, and it would have bubbled up to me to brief the president," former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell told Fox.

"It's not true. I can refute it," former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe also said. "The American people can refute it for themselves. Do you remember during the Trump administration, when photographers on the ground and commercial airline pilots were talking about a spy balloon over the United States that people could look up and see, even with the naked eye, and that a media that hated Donald Trump wasn't reporting?"

Leaving aside the necessarily political slant of the claim and counterclaims in the media, the original transcript asserts this only happened briefly over US territory, not like this balloon, so in any case there's a huge qualitative and quantitative difference. If some such balloon grazed our borders a few times going back into the Obama administration, would we have shot it down or even bothered making a public deal about it?

[JasonPratt]

I for one would like to thank George Santos for taking time out of his busy schedule to shoot this balloon down.

I chortled way too hard at that! Well played.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

So?  Is balloon-busting going to make a comeback?  Should we start re-equipping pilots with flare guns?

[MikeGER]

dont worry we are still some 90something  ballons short of a war ;-)

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

You cannot view this attachment.

[Tripoli]

So?  Is balloon-busting going to make a comeback?  Should we start re-equipping pilots with flare guns?

The call signs of the two F-22s that did the engagement were "Luke 1" and "Luke 2", after Frank Luke, the WWI Balloon Buster. 

[Sir Slash]

Gordan Chaing was on Fox yesterday and was saying this maybe a case of internal turmoil among Chinese leadership depending on who gave the go-ahead for this operation. He said it's possible the leadership of the PLA did this without consent from Ping as a way to establish their independence from his control. Also perhaps this could be a way to distract the Chinese people from recent domestic discontent concerning the Economy and Covid Lockdowns and gain support for the government. Who knows?

[ArizonaTank]

Japanese news reports showed videos of a balloon that looked exactly the same, that was hanging around Sendai on the Japanese mainland three years ago.

Apparently China has been sending them all over the place in the last three years.

https://www.ft.com/content/8a2c77c3-58cc-471d-a187-1823faa4f1b6

[Sir Slash]

"Begun The Balloon Wars have". 

[W8taminute]

What I find almost comical in this whole thing is we live in a day and age where a satellite can look down from space and tell you if someone brushed their teeth this morning or not.  Why the balloons?

It's like kids at a playground taunting each other with their childish toys.  Balloons over countries.  Really now?

In any case, anything that violates your airspace should be shot down immediately.  Scan for lifeforms first but otherwise shoot to destroy. 

[JasonPratt]

^ This is what flamethrowers on the F-111 Aardvarks were for.

(...okay, primitive afterburners, but same thing really.)

[ArizonaTank]

What I find almost comical in this whole thing is we live in a day and age where a satellite can look down from space and tell you if someone brushed their teeth this morning or not.  Why the balloons?

It's like kids at a playground taunting each other with their childish toys.  Balloons over countries.  Really now?

In any case, anything that violates your airspace should be shot down immediately.  Scan for lifeforms first but otherwise shoot to destroy. 

Who knows really. But it may be as simple as the balloon as a platform is more flexible and cheaper.

My experience with space going equipment is very limited, but I can imagine that configuring sensors to be deployed by rocket is a very complex endeavor; probably plenty of compromises and expensive hardware changes.

Heck, even if you want to put a sensor in an aircraft, there are numerous hardware compromises and aircraft configuration changes that have to be made.

I imagine that hanging sensors from a balloon is more forgiving, and easier to deploy. Not to mention much cheaper. 

[JasonPratt]

This leads to a technical question that I don't know the answer to, but other Grogs might: the military (or at least the administration) claims on one hand that they neutralized its intelligence gathering capabilities; but on the other hand, they clearly didn't stop it from adjusting height to navigate the wind currents. How could that be possible?

My guess would be the height adjustments were run by an onboard computer receiving signals about local and projected air-current conditions.

[JasonPratt]

Meanwhile, back to the developing story (or non-story or pseudo-story or.... gosh, or whatever it is  ) concerning the reputed three prior times Chinese sensor balloons went over the nation during Trump's era:

According to the original transcript (here's a link to it again for convenience https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3288618/senior-defense-official-and-senior-military-official-hold-an-off-camera-on-back/), three surveillance balloons from the Chinese government briefly transited the continental United States during the Trump administration, and no one did anything about it at the time (with the current political deployment of this claim being 'so why bother getting worked up about us doing nothing about it this time?')

"Transited" means the objects entered and departed from our territory, and "continental US" means it was the lower 48 states and implies over land not (only) over territorial waters.

Then, as I linked to reports above, tons of former administration folks started replying (by paraphrase) "NOPE!" or at least "I never heard of such a thing, and I'd have been told about it or would certainly have heard about it." Since then they've been comparing notes with each other, still nothing.

So the story has changed somewhat. Now the Biden administration has clarified that nobody noticed those three times: not only no civilians (in the air or on the ground), but also no one in the military or related services.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-decision-to-delay-shootdown-of-chinese-balloon-questioned-11675616189?mod=hp_lead_pos2

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/chinese-spy-balloons-over-us-during-trump-admin-discovered-after-he-left-office-senior-biden-official?intcmp=tw_pols

The 'senior administration officials' talking to the WSJ said that the transits were so brief (or more literally that their flights were so short, which couldn't possibly be true in order to reach the continental US at all, or even Alaska, from China), that this (my bolds): "possibly explain[ed] why some went undetected at the time". Some of the three, hm? Not all of the three? So one or two were detected? That still didn't track with the multiform denials.

Thus a senior administration official ("ASOL" as Tom Clancy used to wryly abbreviate it) told Fox News,  "This information was discovered after the [Trump] administration left." Only then, the official said, did the Biden administration piece it all together and realize that the Chinese had been sending massive balloons over the U.S., and nobody, citizen or military intelligence, noticed.

So where did these balloons briefly transit the continental US without anyone in any services noticing, until information was pieced together after the new administration arrived? The Washington Post reveals: "near Texas and Florida". https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/05/china-spy-balloon-gop/

(That's behind a paywall, sorry. I'm referring to an opinion piece providing links.)

"The Defense Department was not specific about where in each state the previous incursions occurred," the WaPo reports, citing Rep. Michael Waltz, a Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. "[Waltz] added that officials did not say whether the balloons made it into U.S. airspace, which extends 12 nautical miles from the shore, or over U.S. territory, too."

The original op-ed article at the Washington Examiner can be found here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-chinese-balloon-story-is-even-bigger-than-it-seems?utm_source=msn&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=msn_feed