The balloon is the latest shiny object in our national discourse, and I'm weary of shiny objects. Still, I have to admit that the Pentagon is doing its best to keep balloon mania going. Here they are following up on their previous admission that balloons had flown over the US during the Trump administration:
“Every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command said when asked about the three other balloons.
....VanHerck added that the intelligence community after the fact was able to gather intelligence “from additional means that made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America or transited North America.”
The Pentagon needs to either shut up or else provide enough information to satisfy a reasonable person. If they say from the start that they won't provide any further balloon information due to national security concerns, then fine. It's probably hogwash, but fine.
But if you drop a few more details that are obviously going to pique even more interest, you'd better be prepared to explain. Why didn't we detect the previous balloons? When did they fly over us? Where did they fly? What "additional means" recognized the balloons that weren't available in real time?
If you're not going to answer questions like these, then don't make things worse by providing titillating half answers that do nothing except keep the balloons in the news, but without providing the American public any context to evaluate how much they should care about them.
My guess: the general's sensing systems--radar, etc. didn't pick up the balloons in real time but NSA's communications intercepts, once decoded and translated, showed the Chinese reporting on/communicating with the balloons, but after the fact.
Brings up an interesting question - what did they do wrong on this balloon? Or was this a sign of some faction WANTING to provoke the US? And is Gen. VanHerck playing along for some reason?
Start making more money weekly. This is valuable part time work for everyone. The best part ,work from the comfort of your house and get paid from $10k-$20k each week . Start today and have your first cash at the end of this week. Visit this article
for more details.. https://createmaxwealth.blogspot.com
Wait -- these things are supposedly the size of a small passenger jet, suspended by a balloon 200 feet tall and NORAD *missed* them? Maybe they're normally flying so high that our normal radar just can't detect them -- which, I suppose, is kinda the point -- but damn. And I presume the "additional means" was probably SIGINT or something intercepted by the NSA talking about "that huge balloon we just floated over the US that they never detected..."
ETA: lol, hadn't seen bharshaw's comment before I posted mine. Great minds and all that, I suppose...
Hmm - a few years ago I heard a TED talk at a computer conference. The speaker had been talking with some Russian military guys and they told him that they were tracking US Stealth planes and the US knew about it. According to him it was very simple. Stealth planes have a lower radar return profile, but there IS a return. It's just down at the noise level - to avoid horribly cluttered sceens that low level stuff is normally filtered out. The Russians reduced filtering thresholds and added some processing to artificially enhance (as I recall) fuzzy signals moving way faster than a flock of birds or clouds. Good enough for plotting intercepts if they needed to do that.
I wonder if someone from NSA attended the same conference I was at? And added that to the bag of tricks so they new what patch of sky the balloon was in to focus their attention on.
"It moves as we move."
"Wait -- these things are supposedly the size of a small passenger jet, suspended by a balloon 200 feet tall and NORAD *missed* them?"
Passenger planes and military aircraft generally have lots of nice flat reflective surfaces, generally made of metal, which make them really easy to spot with radar systems. Ballons generally have none of those characteristics. Round objects (like a semi-spherical balloon) have pretty small radar cross-sections, actually. Actual weather balloons are generally supposed to carry intentional radar reflectors for safety for that very reason.
I'd also wager that our radar systems are set up to flag _fast moving_ returns, since those are more likely to be artificial, whereas slow-moving objects include things like millions of flocks of birds, etc. that we probably don't prioritize.
Yep. Shades of Mathias Rust and his Red Square Cessna.
Somewhere between inverse square and inverse fourth power, assuming the usual spherical cows.
It's not so much a matter of altitude. You have an enormous gas bag made of the lightest, thinnest fabric that will hold together; weight is critical. That thin, light, non-metallic fabric just doesn't reflect radar waves very well; the gas bag is effectively transparent to radar. The actual "cargo" that gas bag is holding up is quite small and even if no effort has been made to make it stealthy it's just not going to reflect much of a signal. When you add that a balloon has zero air speed (which may mean as much as a couple of hundred miles an hour ground speed) it's not going to trip any "fast moving object" alarms. If the fabric is also blue-gray, it will be very hard to detect visually, especially at 12 to 20 miles altitude, and it has no infra-red signature to speak of.
In other words, despite its size that balloon is extremely stealthy.
I really don't get kevin's annoyance here. the DoD regularly provides frustratingly incomplete information on all kinds of things. this just happened to be one that was prominent in the news cycle for a week. and one that seems pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme. china did some light espionage by a method they seem to have deployed many times before. we reacted in what seems to be a reasonable way. pentagon makes a statement that is light on details, as one would expect. if you don't like excessive military secrecy, ok, me neither. but this incident doesn't particularly raise my hackles.
I have to wonder if Kevin is upset about the previous administration having an excuse to have not known.
I'm sure all the Republican Congress people who hit the Sunday shows to talk trash about the Biden administration will be back nest week trashing Trump's administration for completely whiffing on the balloons....
It’s pretty obvious that balloons have been flying over the US for awhile and we have been tracking them. The real question is why balloon-gate inflated past any regular discourse. Slow news day? Intriguing photo from a jetliner? Leak? I hope we do not hear anymore about this.
My guess? Another Dem boring and efficient administration. When those in charge aren't tripping over themselves every two steps, creating crisis after crisis along the way for media to obsess about, any potential source of drama is good, even if that drama is a literal balloon that no one would have cared about otherwise.
NYT: "One explanation, multiple U.S. officials said, is that some previous incursions were initially classified as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” Pentagon speak for U.F.O.s. As the Pentagon and intelligence agencies stepped up efforts over the past two years to find explanations for many of those incidents, officials reclassified some events as Chinese spy balloons."
"…previous incursions were initially classified as “unidentified aerial phenomena…"
A balloon hardly behaves like a UFO. When landed, I am sure writing on the payload can be interpreted as alien.
Maybe the Pentagon is just spreading alarm and suspicion within Chinese intelligence agencies, who knows. Or cares.
I do find it odd that apparently this balloon was easily visible to the naked eye from the ground, whereas nobody saw any of the earlier ones. Perhaps their "brief" incursions were at night.
I suspect that this balloon had lost some helium or perhaps had not been inflated properly in the first place and was therefore flying at a lower and more noticeable altitude, i.e., visible to the naked eye from ground level.
If, as Nathan Bedford Forrest put it, you "keep up the skeer," your budget can only benefit.
If only someone had thought of handing Trump a map and a Sharpie, HE would have located those balloons!
Putting the juice in balloon juice...
I don't think reasoning with the intelligence community as if they're TV show writers is going to work that well.
Remember that The Blob is an entire bureaucracy running in parallel to the one our very excitable media reports on. There is of course crosstalk and overlap, but we don't see the bulk of what's going on in the dark one, and there's a large time lag with a lot of what bleeds over.
That said, I do agree that, if you're going to play along with silly bullshit like this, you need to ante up.
What is it with our obsession with inflation
We have the NFL deflate gate which ironically is now ending now that Brady, Manning and Brees are all retired.
We have fake news and highly inflated fear mongering stories on FOX
Drum is harping on inflation with multiple charts and graphs.
Now the Chinese under inflated a balloon(possibly)????
Sounds like a bunch of "hot air' to me me
Or lack thereof
My working assumption is that prior events did not result in spy balloons passing directly over US territory, but rather, operating offshore. Note that both Texas and Florida have expansive coasts. What happened last week was an escalation, to see how the US would respond, IMO.
Kevin, IT WAS A BALLOON. So it's full of hot air and drifts around aimlessly, sort of like the Orange Buffoon. --- Hey, there it is, the syllogism of the decade: "Trump=Buffoon; Buffoon=Balloon; Balloon=Chinese Spy Gear; Trump=Chinese Puppet"
[Yes, I know this balloon can "direct its flight" by changing altitude and that it was filled with Helium].
Further details, presumably based in part on looking at the thing/debris. Not in time to satisfy Veruca Salt’s cousin Kevin Drum no doubt, but still… https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/09/politics/spy-balloon-technology/index.html