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Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

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Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#381

Post by Aloha »

PeterisP wrote: post #336
Arubis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the service life on such equipment? Sales of new Huawei telecom equip have been banned outright in the US for a couple months. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-fcc-bans-e...

Decades. Some hardware failure happens, but it's not that frequent, if it's like previous generations of cell technology, most of it will run until the operator chooses to shut down that particular service e.g. switching to a newer generation and freeing up the spectrum for it.

Even with Huawei equipment fieled (which there isnt much left, Cricket and Clearwire were the largest incumbents for it, and those networks are gone) the BTS does not have network access to phone home, they're walled off with very very very non-routable IP's (as in stuff used on the pubic internet) - there are too many layers of access control for what was being alleged to work in a practical sense.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#382

Post by nradov »

oneoff786 wrote: post #138
giantg2 wrote: post #133

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

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

The damaging economic conflict already started in 2018.

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

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#383

Post by anon_cow1111 »

oneoff786 wrote: post #151
akmarinov wrote: post #11

Have aliens invaded and we just don’t know about it, the government holding them off lowkey? Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...

People need to understand that if you’re being attacked by a FTL capable alien invader, you are so incredibly f**ed that it just does not matter. People don’t write popular sci fi novels about realistic alien invasions because they would be so utterly one sided and brief that it simply wouldn’t make a good story.

The odd exception being, halflife (1/2) Apparently those games have a ton of unused lore that actually does a realistic invasion scenario from a dyson-sphere level civilization.

So in that case, it was called the "7-hour war" for a reason.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#384

Post by kube-system »

ALittleLight wrote: post #364
kube-system wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine that if these are small and hard to detect, you may not want everyone to understand the exact extent of your capability to detect them. The first balloon didn’t have this consideration because it could be seen from the ground.

This seems like an argument to not shoot them down. If we can identify and track them then obviously we can determine their speed. If we can fly by with fighter planes then we can get a visual look. I don't see how we'd be giving anything away about our capabilities by sharing these things.

Yes, although the actions reveal different things. Shooting it down establishes that your capabilities are good enough to do so. But sharing more detail about how you detected or observed it may reveal the limits of your capability. Or it may reveal advanced capability that an adversary is heavily relies on you not being capable of.

Your enemy only needs to be slightly better than your capabilities to beat you. If they can judge it accurately, they can more efficiently spend resources to counter your ability. If they misjudge, they either waste a ton of time and money, or they end up outmatched.

It’s like a game of poker. Those who are good at strategically releasing partial information are at an advantage.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#385

Post by kiddz »

theteapot wrote: post #369
kiddz wrote: post #363

It seems like the reporting is that two out of three objects are said not to be balloons. I don’t know of any terrestrial technology that can be that large (size of car) aloft for multiple hours/days that hovers. Am I correctly groking the news here?

Car sized balloons. Gliders. "Hover" is conjecture.

I say hover because the pentagon is saying the same object was seen twice in two days. . . The day before it was in Montana then 24 plus hours later in Michigan.

“A unidentified object has been shot down by U.S. forces over Lake Huron, according to the Department of Defense. The object appears to be the same object that had been detected over Montana a day earlier, said officials.“

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/12/1156428862/us-shoot-down-ufo-...

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#386

Post by lovecg »

LarryMullins wrote: post #217
handedness wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UN is certainly something more than that, and not literally just a forum. They have an active duty peacekeeping force of approximately 81K people. While that's similar in size to the active duty forces from a nation like a Peru or Chile, the Blue Helmets have had a de facto quasi-blanket immunity when committing war crimes, and have some pretty horrifying history in places like Central Africa. For example: "Consi…

You're right of course, but in the context of China and the US this doesn't really seem relevant. Being invaded by UN blue helmets isn't something that happens to any member of the UN Security Council, which both China and the US are. When it comes to relations between these two countries, the UN is "just a forum".

Another function of the UN is to make diplomatic relations between all countries more legible. When everyone is forced to vote yes/no/abstain this information leaks out in a coordinated fashion. Whether that’s good or bad for world peace that’s another matter.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#387

Post by RajT88 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #28
nyokodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You overcome vast interstellar distances with a balloon and then sit there while primitive missiles blow you up?

To be fair, human beings have been to space as well and routinely get trounced by something as primitive as a mosquito bite. Maybe the UFOs were built to withstand alpha-gamma-laser-magma-pulse rays, not our primitive projectile based weaponry!

https://youtu.be/eu3bq1dqzOM?t=84

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#388

Post by Turing_Machine »

thrill wrote: post #213
Turing_Machine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, pilots generally need to fire a certain number of missiles every year just to stay in training. At least this saves the additional cost of a drone (the usual target for training missions, I think).

No, they don't. Most peacetime pilots would likely fire one missile during their entire careers if they were lucky.

Yes, they do.

The USAF has purchased more than 10,000 of the AIM-9X model alone (not counting the other operators, domestic and foreign, and not counting all the other variants of the Sidewinder, the basic model of which has been in service since the 1950s).

That's a helluva lot more than "one per career".

https://www.navair.navy.mil/news/Air-Air-Missiles-Takes-Deli... 1

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#389

Post by postmeta »

martyvis wrote: post #299
georgeg23 wrote: post #6

Balloons could be a clever counter to what the US is doing with Low Earth Orbit satellites recently. SpaceX is launching tons of spy/missile defense satellites over China as part of the Space Development Agency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm More details: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Star…

Actually this morning I was thinking about the inaugural and hopefully successful flight of Starship maybe next month. While it is meant to demonstrate capability to orbit, it won't complete it and is intended to crash land off the coast of Hawaii. I think it will be passing over China to achieve that. Maybe they would like interpret it as effectively an ICBM test - and by allowing these balloons to be shot down give…

That flight plan doesn't indicate flying over China does it, more like Africa? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2W788nSjJ4

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#390

Post by ShredKazoo »

gambiting wrote: post #153
localplume wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surveillance satellites are very different to directly flying this equipment into US airspace, including the fact that this equipment could hold paylods other than ISR. Not to mention this comment implies China does not have equivalent spy satellites, which it does. Also the UN is an absolute joke. That article links has China and Russia complaining about the West being aggressors so honestly its kinda BS. Also forge…

>>Also the UN is an absolute joke UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters. Nothing more nothing less. I have no idea why people expect UN to take action, when UN is explicitly not an organisation for taking any actions.

It's interesting to me that this has become such a common internet talking point. A while ago, I finished reading a history of the UN (the one by Stanley Meisler), and I definitely got the impression that the founders of the UN wanted it to be more than just a forum. E.g. here are some passages I hilighted from Chapter 1:

"Americans could envision the Soviet Union joining the United States in policing the peace in the brighter new world that would arise from the carnage [of WW2]" (page 2)

"The Soviet ambassador... was even stronger than the others in pleading for a security council with teeth" (page 9)

"Chopping the air with his hands to emphasize his words, Truman said the new UN must keep the world 'free from the fear of war'." (page 19)

More generally the ongoing theme of the book is the extent to which the UN has been successful, and unsuccessful, at ensuring world peace in various conflicts that have flared since its founding.

I did get the impression that not a lot of thought was put into the design of the UN, and there is the possibility that it could've been much more successful with a radically different design.

[Edit: To be more concrete -- Google tells me that global military spending was $2.1 trillion in 2021. You'd think it would be worth putting a mere 1% of that $2.1 trillion, something like $21 billion, into essay competitions, agent-based simulations, online diplomacy games, academic literature reviews, etc. in order to design an optimal UN structure that minimizes the risk of war. But the actual structure of the UN was designed using far, far less than $21 billion worth of analysis, based on what I recall from the Meisler book.]

That's not to say that the UN being a forum is bad or unnecessary. But it's interesting to me how everyone seems to have forgotten its original eutopian aspiration to create a world free from war. Maybe has something to do with the fact that people who lived through WW2 are mostly dead now, and few living people understand at a visceral level how horrifying war between great powers really is.

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