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Three things you desperately wanted to know about the spy balloon

On Friday I asked how often the Chinese send spy balloons our way. Today I get an answer:

Administration officials said Friday there have been other similar incidents of Chinese spy balloons, with one saying it happened twice during the Trump administration but was never made public.

....Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Chinese surveillance balloons have been sighted on numerous occasions over the past five years in different parts of the Pacific, including near sensitive U.S. military installations in Hawaii. The high-altitude inflatables, he said, serve as low-cost platforms to collect intelligence and some can reportedly be used to detect hypersonic missiles.

As for maneuverability, balloon expert William Kim provides an explanation:

Modern [machine learning] algorithms allow balloons to control where they go using the wind. In the stratosphere there's always a wind going in the direction you want it's just a matter of adjusting altitude. Sounds simple but it wasn't possible until recently. It's pretty amazing what these algorithms can do. So now these balloons can create a C4ISR network that's far more resilient, persistent, and effective than a satellite constellation. Since modern warfare is all about information, this is a big deal especially as space assets grow more vulnerable.

But why not shoot down the balloon?

Shooting down a balloon is not as easy as it sounds, said Kim. "These balloons use helium... It's not the Hindenburg, you can't just shoot it and then it goes up in flames. If you do punch holes in it, it's just kind of going to leak out very slowly."

Kim recalled that in 1998 the Canadian air force sent up F-18 fighter jets to try and shoot down a rogue weather balloon. "They fired a thousand 20-millimeter cannon rounds into it. And it still took six days before it finally came down. These are not things that explode or pop when you shoot at them."

There you have it.

UPDATE: The Canadians weren't willing to shoot a missile at their rogue balloon, and it turns out that's all it would have taken. Once the Chinese spy balloon was out over the ocean, we sent an F-22 out and destroyed the balloon with one shot.

76 thoughts on “Three things you desperately wanted to know about the spy balloon

  1. morrospy

    You could still fry the electronics without shooting it down. I hope that's what happened to both of them and that's why they are off course.

    Costa Rica? I mean I know Nicaragua loves them some Chinese belt and road bux, but leave the Ticos alone.

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  2. name99

    "Shooting" it down seems very much like a problem not solved because it hasn't been attempted yet. For example I can't imagine that one of these could easily survive being coated with napalm.

    There's no natural way today (as far as I know) to fire a napalm "shell" with some appropriate intelligence/sensor to "explode" as it hits the balloon and thereby cover it; but it also seems like a not-especially-difficult problem for 2023 technology if there's a demand for it.

    1. DFPaul

      I don't understand the disconnect between 1) these things have very sophisticated navigation systems and 2) they can't be damaged.

      1. Altoid

        You mean like shoot out the electronics? Mighty tiny target to find, I'd think. Aren't these balloons about the size of a house?

          1. Altoid

            Sorry, I meant trying to shoot out just the electronics hanging from the balloon, or even exploding something near them that could fry them. The balloons are huge but I have to think the business part of the package, being so much smaller and in effect a pendulum, would be a lot harder to locate and target next to that kind of bulk.

      2. memyselfandi

        Destroying the navigation system just means it becomes uncontrollable. Not that it would cause the thing to fall out of the sky. Remember, it needs a sophisticated navigation system, because you can only make it go up and down. Otherwise it's completely passive. And controlling the passive requires sophistication.

  3. DFPaul

    Didn't they mean to say "The Trump administration quietly allowed at least two Chinese spy balloons to traverse the country amid a controversy about the Chinese government acting to help Ivanka Trump's sales of clothing and jewelry in China"?

  4. rick_jones

    Sounds simple but it wasn't possible until recently.

    I suppose that depends on one's definition of "recently." Project Loon started doing so circa 2013.

  5. Jasper_in_Boston

    ...it happened twice during the Trump administration but was never made public.

    How was Trump able to keep his balloons secret? Were they not visible?

    1. memyselfandi

      This one was visibile only because it was flying below where it should have. The chinese were almost certainly correct in that it was malfunctioning.

      1. KenSchulz

        Not necessarily. It's quite possible they intended this one to be seen, either to create an incident, or to provoke an air-defense response on which they could collect data.

        1. DFPaul

          I suggest being careful about assumptions about who "they" are and what they intend, especially when it comes to the Chinese military.

          Ferinstance, it seems possible that a faction in the military would rather that US/China relations get really bad, maybe as a prelude or part of the foundation for attacking Taiwan. Maybe Xi Jinping is hesitant about attacking Taiwan, and this theoretical military faction saw that Secretary of State Blinken was preparing to go to China and make all lovey dovey with China and wanted to stop that. Which they did.

          Now it's also entirely possible the reverse is true, that the military is very wary of the costs of an attack on Taiwan (ferinstance, watching what's going on currently in Ukraine, maybe the head of the military doesn't want to get replaced immediately when the Taiwanese turn out to be pretty good at fighting back) and wants to create an "incident" in the hopes that makes everyone scream about China/US relations.

          Really, who knows.

          But in their nutty system, the military is its own power base and with a situation like this you just really don't know if "they" are speaking with one voice ("they" here being the Chinese government).

          As an example, you can look up what happened on the streets of Beijing about 10 years ago when the ambitious Bo Xilai (remember him?) was being taken down, partly because of his wife's role in murdering a British expat who seemed to be getting a little big for his britches. There were elements of the military who had bet on Bo Xilai being the next head of China, and when he went down, it looked like they were going down too. There was actual fighting, with actual bullets, on the streets of Beijing, between different factions in the military. You can look it up.

          You just never know.

          1. Altoid

            All good points; there can always be much more going on than appears on the surface, and often is.

            This is all a good argument for taking a deliberate approach, not hitting the panic button, keeping in touch with Xi while you let the embarrassment build and give him space to work on whatever's going on over there (and flay whoever he needs to flay, assuming this wasn't his plan), and collecting and working through as much of the balloon as you can salvage (by finally bringing it down over warm shallow seas instead of, say, over the Aleutians in winter).

            I actually believe the Pentagon when they say they neutralized its ability to phone home-- that's the obvious step. Once you can do that the rest is just theater, plus giving Xi space to firm up his grip so he's a more reliable counterparty. And giving him the chance to do that, if that's what's going on, has other rewards for us.

          2. KenSchulz

            That's a possibility, but so far the Chinese government is putting up a united front on this; and Xi has seemed to have consolidated his power quite effectively.

      2. KenSchulz

        The Chinese were almost certainly lying when claiming that it was malfunctioning, otherwise they would have brought it down while it was in their airspace, either by command, or shoot-down.

  6. Salamander

    To be fair, you can't just "shoot down and it burst into flames like the Hindenberg", even if it were a hydrogen balloon and not helium. In WWI, it proved extremely difficult to down the German manned surveillance dirigibles, filled with hydrogen, because

    (1) the holes from bullets were so infinitessimally small with respect to the size of the envelope that leakage wasn't a big problem

    (2) hydrogen needs oxygen to burn, and even incendiary bullets wouldn't ignite the hydrogen inside the envelope because... there wasn't any oxygen in there. The bullets just went in, and fizzled

  7. Citizen Lehew

    Don't we have a long tradition of *wanting* foreign aerial surveillance of us and vice versa as a way of keeping the peace? We have treaties to that effect. Seems odd such a big deal is being made of this.

    1. Altoid

      It would seem odd, until you remember who's willing to seize on anything, however picayune, inaccurate, or contradictory to anything they've said up to now, to try to make the Biden administration look bad.

    2. rick_jones

      I assume you mean Open Skies? That is scheduled or at least announced. With set flight plans. Not attempted to be covert.

    3. kenalovell

      The MAGA president repudiated the Open Skies treaty.

      Here's the narrative on right-wing discussion boards:
      - The balloon is gathering information vital to America's national security;
      - Its presence would never have been revealed absent an alert member of the public;
      - Biden refused to shoot it down because he's a paid agent of the CCCP;
      - It's been shot down now that it's finished its mission, so Biden can gaslight voters.

      Please don't bother pointing out all the obvious factual and logical flaws in this idiotic nonsense. Right-wingers are long past caring about such things. All they want is a narrative they can use to bray 'FJB!"

      1. Altoid

        Also they seem to be saying trump would never, never, in a million years, have allowed this to happen on his watch but would have shot the damnable thing out of the sky as soon as it hit our airspace.

        Except that he did allow it, apparently three times, and didn't do a thing, and didn't tell a soul.

        1. Art Eclectic

          Yeah, the panty-twisting by Trumpers is a sight to behold. Meanwhile, all their kids have Tik Tok on their phones.

          The stupid is strong with this lot.

  8. rick_jones

    Shooting down a balloon is not as easy as it sounds, said Kim. "These balloons use helium... It's not the Hindenburg, you can't just shoot it and then it goes up in flames. If you do punch holes in it, it's just kind of going to leak out very slowly."

    Judging by the video now surfacing of the shoot down, it seems to have rather dramatically burst rather than a very slow leaking…

    1. memyselfandi

      That wasn't bullets, it was a missile with 3 11 inch wings. The difference in leakage between a 20mm cannon hold and a 27 in hole the missile would leave would be significant. And that assumes the missile warheead doesn't explode.

  9. memyselfandi

    " In the stratosphere there's always a wind going in the direction you want it's just a matter of adjusting altitude. " This is almost certainly an exaggeration. And even if it isn't, this balloon only had access to at most a third of the stratosphere.

  10. rick_jones

    "They fired a thousand 20-millimeter cannon rounds into it. And it still took six days before it finally came down.

    At it, certainly. Into it? We'd need to see the gun camera footage.

    1. rick_jones

      "At it" rather than "into it"

      Two Canadian CF-18 fighters fired more than 1,000 cannon rounds at it off the coast of Newfoundland on Thursday. Earlier in the day two RAF Nimrod aircraft had shadowed the balloon before a US Orion plane took up the chase.

      A Canadian military spokesman, Lieut Steve Willis, said they were not embarrassed by their pilots' failure to hit the balloon. "Our pilots are tops," he told BBC radio, adding that Canadian CF-18 pilots had won the Top Gun trophy in the US last year as the world's best fighter pilots. "With something like this, which is stationary in the air when the CF18s are flying very, very fast, it is difficult to shoot it," he said.

      https://www.irishtimes.com/news/runaway-weather-balloon-dodges-canada-s-top-guns-1.188085

    1. iamr4man

      Looks like the missile hit the equipment at the bottom of the balloon rather than the balloon itself. Hard to imagine that anything they recover will be useful.

      1. KenSchulz

        Well, the guidance package is expecting to be fired at something at an elevated temperature. Apparently the electronics package was warm enough to become the target. In any case, the blast-fragmentation warhead was going to pepper the payload.

  11. cedichou

    comment has been made before but it's ridiculous to use an air to air missile to shoot a balloon. overkill. Dumb pressure of the daily news (and of their assignment editors at the GOP) who wants immediate results for the next cycle.

    1. kenalovell

      The whole exercise was a ruse to get close-up looks at the F-22, according to one of the countless geniuses on right-wing websites. And instead of sending up a Mustang or something to shoot it down, Joe fell right into the trap.

  12. rick_jones

    Administration officials said Friday there have been other similar incidents of Chinese spy balloons, with one saying it happened twice during the Trump administration but was never made public.

    https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/05/politics/chinese-spy-balloons-trump-administration/index.html adds to that, with:

    (CNN) The transiting of three suspected Chinese spy balloons over the continental US during the Trump administration was only discovered after President Joe Biden took office, a senior administration official told CNN on Sunday.

    The official did not say how or when those incidents were discovered.

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