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 o…
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 certainly the most likely explanation.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.