521–530 of 1001 posts
In previous times, the US would ignore these balloons and quietly take them down. Instead they made a big deal out of it and milked it. Brilliant and opposite of what china expected
The US state apparatus did not make a big deal of this. The media and the public did, and the US state apparatus answered to the media and the public, as is their duty.
Their job isn't to respond to every current outrage in the media cycle. That's why we have a representative democracy and not a full direct democracy. They're to be held accountable for their overall performance every few years, and in the interim are supposed to be resilient to the short term ebbs and flows of public sentiment (which are fickle and can be manipulated) and do what's actually good for the people in the long run.
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I’ve seen some unconfirmed claims that they show it with a missile whose warhead fuse was disabled. Normally anti-aircraft missiles are proximity fused and throw out lots of fragments when they explode, kind of like a giant shotgun blast. With the warhead disabled presumably it just punctured the balloon to deflate it and, as you say, hopefully let it come down intact.
F-22s have a 20mm cannon, and they can operate at 65k feet. I don't know why they would need a disarmed missile just to poke a hole in it.
Somehow I doubt wasted funds were at the top of the priority list (because intel is valuable, this whole incident has been a huge "WTF?" so far).
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I really do wonder if this is them testing that they can reliably and cheaply get high-altitude balloons to the U.S. mainland. In the event of a military conflict, I can imagine them swarming us with these. They must cost far, far less than the average American military aircraft. If our air power becomes partly tied up defending Taiwan, dropping bombs from craft like these might be an effective strategy to demoralize…
> If our air power becomes partly tied up defending Taiwan, dropping bombs from craft like these might be an effective strategy to demoralize the U.S. population. No, it would have the opposite effect, like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. They'd be starting WW3 and deciding to solo it vs NATO and friends. > Suddenly, lots of people in the U.S. have Chinese aggression on their mind. Knowing Americans pretty well, I would expect…
This is technically the first combat kill by the F-22.
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What's your point? We should make military decisions based on how much the target costs? You don't understand why that's ridiculous?
> We should make military decisions based on how much the target costs Yes?.. > You don't understand why that's ridiculous? No?.. Don't you understand how the cost of action is the base of military economy? This is hardly a military decision, it's purely a PR decision.
We stand to learn a lot from capturing the surveillance platform. This alone is priceless. We send a message that Chinese aircraft that violate our airspace and leave in tact. If data was stored onboard, it's possible that we prevented a large cache of surveillance data from making it back to China.
So that $400,000 missile had a benefit that is hard to quantify, but is easily in the multiple millions of dollars.
Your argument makes no sense. Let's say a sniper is in a building and is about to fire on a high value target. Before he can fire, we hit that building with a missile to take him out. According to you, we paid $400,000 to take out a sniper and his $1 bullet. The truth is that we spent $400,000 to protect a high value asset that may have been worth far more.
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I posted this link earlier but it was tracked. Here is a flight path of Canadian fighters checking the balloon out as it crossed towards Montana. https://twitter.com/steffanwatkins/status/162136299808111001... The link was in this longer, and good article: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinas-spy-balloon-ove...
Oh wow, that's messed up. Kind of irritating to see the thing was being closely tracked all through BC and just... nothing? Nice...
It was surprising how this balloon spread through the public consciousnesses, kinda like the balloon boy hoax I suppose.
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> While that's true, i think crimea and the associated warm water port (sevastopol) is of strategic value. Russia already had naval basing rights is Sevastopol, before the invasion of Crimea. I don’t think the strategic explanations hold up.
They had it on a lease from Ukraine until 2017. Renegotiation of the lease barely passed Ukraine's parliament back in 2010.
I had seen reports that the balloon was the length of 3-4 school busses but it appears that was misreported and just repeated. The PAYLOAD was the length of 3-4 school busses. I haven’t been following this much until today/ vaguely aware as an amusing background story. But, has anyone seen high res photos of the balloon or someone doing back of the envelope math on the size of the balloon portion? I ask simply becaus…
Multiple people reported that it was visible to naked eye from the ground, it must have been huge for that.