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

abcnews.go.com

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

#511

Post by shultays »

vinay427 wrote: post #509
shultays wrote: post #506

Wouldn't it make more sense to capture such objects? Or shot down in a less destructive way instead of rockets and then investigate what they are about, which countries they are from. Or is US past that point already?

> then investigate what they are about, which countries they are from That is what is currently happening, and it’s a little odd that the linked article didn’t seem to mention this. Divers with special cold water gear are being sent to fetch debris from this latest object, and a similar situation is going on for the others.

Oh I was assuming the intent was to just destroy it since they are using rockets. Why wouldn't they just bullets and such and just make it land? Or better capture it somehow without any damage, I am sure they could achieve that

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

#512

Post by braymundo »

ihatepython wrote: post #486
poooogles wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everything the mainstream media says is a lie. You've lost credibility completely with this sentence. While I'd agree that many news outlets have their biases, some hugely so, saying everything they say is a lie is just categorically wrong. Many news outlets like Reuters and the PA have business models based around factual reporting for others.

[flagged]

You just parroted russian propaganda. It tells everything one needs to know about you.

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

#513

Post by imtringued »

Seb-C wrote: post #501
arwineap wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm failing to understand how balloons are different from satellites, save for altitude; those sats could be carrying payloads other than ISR as well.

A limit to the airspace belonging to each country has to be defined. Otherwise (for example) the Apollo missions would have violated USSR's airspace whenever the moon's orbit was above it's territory, which would make space unusable for everyone.

It would be a ridiculous definition of airspace if it included the vacuum of space.

So yes, Ballons are by definition in airspace because they use lighter than air buoyancy to rise and sattelites do not.

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

#514

Post by pasabagi »

handedness wrote: post #342
pasabagi wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are we comparing them to, though? The US Military publically ran (and runs) an international network of torture camps. I don't think the US military is especially bad: rather, all militaries are awful, all war is unadulturated evil, and any attempt to make it 'clean' through ROEs or accountability procedures is stupid.

The whole point is that they are without comparison. There is no other force like it in the world. By definition it may have to be that way (if it should exist, which I'm not entirely sure it should), but so long as there are UN peacekeepers there will be armed troops where nobody's really both motivated and able to prosecute their war crimes with any reliability. The legal framework surrounding UN peacekeeping is in…

I'm not really doing whataboutism. I just think that the contemporary framework for thinking about 'war crimes' is asinine, and the traditional framework, where a war of aggression was in itself the 'ur-crime', makes more sense. The US is an interesting case study for me, not because they're so awful, but rather because they (almost uniquely) have both the resources and the resolve to avoid war crimes, and yet, the results are hardly distinguishable from states with neither. The figures are not yet there, but I doubt the rate of violent death during the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be signifigantly in excess of that seen in Iraq in 2003, or in 1990, despite the fact that the Russians seem to make no effort to avoid civilian casualties, and the US made fairly comprehensive efforts.

The vast majority of the damage done by a war is not in massacres, or isolated incidents, but rather in the normal practice of warfare: attacks upon infrastructure, collateral damage, blockades and sanctions. These are the drivers that send life expectancy plummeting, and the idea that you can 'clean' war by avoiding some forms of violence, generally selected for symbolic reasons, is absurd.

So in the case of the UN, the reason why it's a good model is that the UN is unlikely to engage in wars of aggression, so even if the conduct of its soldiers are awful, they are ultimately less problematic than a national military.

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

#515

Post by bakuninsbart »

poooogles wrote: post #481
ihatepython wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Everything the mainstream media says is a lie. You've lost credibility completely with this sentence. While I'd agree that many news outlets have their biases, some hugely so, saying everything they say is a lie is just categorically wrong. Many news outlets like Reuters and the PA have business models based around factual reporting for others.

Calling everything a lie is certainly wrong, but glossing over biases in publications like Reuters is also a big mistake. Fact-based reporting can still communicate a wrong picture by deciding what and how much to report on something, and how the tone is set. To give a random example of this, in 2020 Australian soldiers were caught murdering and torturing Afghanis. In a "gloaty" response, the Chinese foreign minister retweeted a caricature on the topic made by a Chinese artist. [0]

From what I could find, Reuters wrote 3 articles on the topic of war crimes committed by Australian forces, with a very balanced and careful tone [1], and at least 8 articles on the tweet, consistently calling the caricature a "fake image" while not even showing the picture. Not only is there an obvious association between "fake image" and "fake news", apparently twitter drama was also deemed more important than the actual investigation into war crimes.

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8999917/China-attac...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-defence/austral...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-china/australia...

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

#516

Post by lm28469 »

dx034 wrote: post #493

I always wondered how countries control their airspace to detect foreign objects. Wouldn't these balloons show up similar to birds? Or do they have methods to distinguish birds from other objects of a similar size/radar profile? And if so, couldn't foreign military build "fake birds" that look similar?

The smallest balloon will be much bigger than any flying bird: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a13aac_691b42bc63104000a4...

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

#517

Post by lm28469 »

ioman wrote: post #251

I'm assuming that the cost of building and launching these balloons is lower that launching fighter aircraft to shoot them down with missiles. I wonder if we're about to see thousands.

They most likely always have been there, there are hundreds of balloons released all around the globe every day. This is some kind of mass hysteria we see every now and then. "china bad" + "spy balloon" + "UFO", I can't come up with a better keyword selection to trigger that

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

#518

Post by PicassoCTs »

handedness wrote: post #187
gambiting wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

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…

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/dec/01/h...

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

#520

Post by PicassoCTs »

dsego wrote: post #491
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…

Don't forget the brave Dutch battalion that protected the civilians of Srebrenica in the secure UN enclave, oh wait, they didn't, they handed them off to Serb forces to be executed.

Then there were the Nordbats: https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/9/20/trigger-h...
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