401–410 of 864 posts
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…
When the US spends on the military, where does the money go?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny, though tbh it seems like there are cheaper ways to cause the US to spend gobs of cash. I even hesitate to mention some ideas that immediately come to mind that would be easier/more efficient to really nail than the Pringles can idea. Plus many of the more prominent base-personnel sightings land quite a bit far from that particular ballpark. Take a look into the Rendlesham Forest incident for example. The probl…
> it seems like there are cheaper ways to cause the US to spend gobs of cash. Yeah, the Mig-25 / F-15 thing comes to mind. Soviets develop a super secret jet, very big, very fast.. it must be very impressive fighter jet! America is spooked so tons of resources are poured into the F-15 to make the absolute best possible air superiority fighter jet they can, to counter this new Soviet threat. Except then it turns out t…
Are you sure that's what really happened, or did a group of people in the Air Force want an air superiority fighter and use the Mig-25 as the excuse?
>According to the Pentagon, the object first moved into U.S. airspace late Thursday and was tracked by U.S. Northern Command as it moved over the skies of northeastern Alaska, staying consistently at about 12,000 meters (40,000 feet).
>Pentagon and White House officials said U.S. planes approached the object, said to be the size of a small car, and determined that no human was in it before one of two F-22 fighter jets sent on an intercept course shot it from the skies with an AIM-9x Sidewinder missile.
…
>"This was an object ... it wasn't an aircraft per se,” Ryder said, briefing Pentagon reporters. “We have no further details about the object at this time, including any description of its capabilities, purpose or origin.”
…
>“We do expect to be able to recover the debris since it fell on our territorial space but on what we believe is frozen water,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said during a separate White House briefing. “We’re hopeful that we’ll be successful and then we can learn a little bit more about it."
Part of me thinks they wanted to shoot down the first balloon, but the president was kind of incapacitated and unable to give the order. That's the only thing I can think of for why they didn't shoot the first one down when it was over Alaska, but they shoot this one down when it is
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-balloon-carried-antenna...
tl;dr - nothing important in Alaska
----
Pentagon officials, in testimony to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense, said that the balloon wasn’t deemed to be a threat as it crossed Alaska where it didn’t pass over sensitive sites.
They added that no analysis had been done at that point on where the debris from the Chinese craft might fall. The risk to people on the ground was considerable, they said, given that the balloon was 200 feet tall and carried an equipment array the size of a small airplane.
Shooting down the balloon in the waters off Alaska would likely have made recovering it more difficult due to the depth and frigid ocean temperatures, said Melissa Dalton, a senior Pentagon official with responsibilities for homeland defense.
Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims II, director of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, cautioned that shooting down an intruding craft not seen as an imminent threat might encourage other nations to act hastily if Western planes approached their borders.
“Once you take a shot, you can’t get it back,” Gen. Sims said. “I think it’s important for us to remember that if we establish that precedent… we may meet the same precedent.”
“We may create something that is to our detriment,” he added.
The U.S. has conducted reconnaissance flights in international airspace close to China’s territorial limits, drawing frequent objections from Beijing. In December, a Chinese J-11 fighter flew within 20 feet of a U.S. RC-135 surveillance plane near South China Sea islands controlled by Beijing.
The Pentagon testimony didn’t assuage some lawmakers, particularly Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. Ms. Murkowski said that the Pentagon appeared to be treating potential threats to her state as a secondary concern.
“At what point do we say a surveillance balloon, a spy balloon coming from China is a threat to our sovereignty?” she said. “ It should be the minute it crosses the line, and that line is Alaska.
This is a pretty cheap way for foreign adversary to test our detection capabilities.
Like if they are watching the launch and then waiting 2 days, the adversary isn't learning the whole story.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not theory, it’s actually military practice. Adversaries spend 100k for a military grade drone. What do shoot it down with? A 1M dollar Patriot? Whatever you choose will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone. Israel’s Iron Dome has the same issue. It costs massively more for defense than attack.
One of the oldest tricks in the (SIGINT) book is to trick the enemy into activating their radar and/or trigger a response to an incursion to collect all of the resulting signals intelligence.
I’m sure that NORAD doesn’t use their most advanced sensor platforms in such a circumstance, but there could be all kinds of interesting close range data to collect on the aircraft and weapons systems used to respond.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be an air to air missile like a sidewinder which still costs $400k. Just scrambling a couple jets would cost tens of thousands on top of that I’m sure.
More than tens of thousands of dollars, military aircraft are incredibly expensive to operate and maintain. Beyond the obvious fuel costs, every hour of flight time is followed up by N hours of service. If I remember correctly, the F-22 Raptor is the champ in terms of highest ratio of service required per hour of flight (40:1). The F-35 clocks in at 4-8 hours of service per hour flown (6:1). One example from the arti…
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…
It’s not theory, it’s actually military practice. Adversaries spend 100k for a military grade drone. What do shoot it down with? A 1M dollar Patriot? Whatever you choose will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone. Israel’s Iron Dome has the same issue. It costs massively more for defense than attack.
We need a cheaper way to down these spy balloons. The sidewinder missile + F-22 flight time costs are an order of magnitude greater than the total cost of launching one balloon. Send over the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler (HELIOS) to protect the west coast.
What keeps a cannon from working? That would already reduce the costs by a lot, and from the visual identification it seems that 40,000 feet is well within the flight ceiling of fighter jets