We changed the url from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/politics/unidentified-... to what appears to be the article with most recent updates (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34745940 - thanks yabones!).
If it's cheap enough, there will probably be youtubers and tiktokers buying them en-masse just "for the lulz".
If this is an actual spy object you also need to factor in the cost of the surveillance. How much money does the military lose due to the sensitive information being lost. Or how much does the military need to spend to regain strategic advantage? That probably costs more than a F22 flight and a missile.
Obviously this depends on the number of objects that one needs to respond to. Cheap surveillance devices can obviously overwhelm this and then you have a war of attrition.
In the example of the article we need to consider the cost of flights being downed (which they down when considering the cost of hitting an object and downing an aircraft. Quite expensive). Flights being canceled and/or delayed is expensive.
Then 100. Then 1000.
By all means, let the US military shoot as many as they want.
Let the propagandists call it "a great military display".
Then, just like the West is doing with Ukraine when it comes to artillery rounds, watch the Western arsenal of A2A missiles drop to critical levels that they won't be able to rebuild with any sort of expediency.
It should be a lesson the US learned a thousand times over, but we just saw them do it again: the aeronautical equivalent of bombing a farmer with an AK-47 and calling it a "victory".
Anyone stupid enough to do it without following FAA rules (assuming launched in the US) is going to find themselves in some serious trouble.
Technically whoever launched this thing saved us money on the target. So the cost was negative.
Think about how much healthcare, food, housing, we are burning up with this nonsense.
It does indeed sound like something like that. The size of a small car would mean a tiny payload as those balloons get huge in the stratosphere. One thing I wonder is why it didn't burst. Weather balloons are meant to burst as soon as they get that high.
The chinese balloon, and I quote the article: "was like two or three buses". That thing was big.
The US was an original signatory of the Meter Convention. Our customary units have been based on metric units since 1893. Our food packaging features metric units. Our scientists use metric units. Our school children learn the metric system. Our military uses the metric system. Our cars are built with metric fasteners.
Changing informal habits takes decades and has questionable benefit. Canada tried it in the 70s and is going to take another generation at least to fully convert for informal use.
If that unit causes you any pain, @throwaway4good, here is a translator perhaps to more native units:
https://www.converttobananas.com/
1 car == about 26 bananas.
Improvement?
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103
"One of the most unusual military actions of World War II came in the form of Japanese balloon bombs, or “Fugos,” directed at the mainland United States. Starting in 1944, the Japanese military constructed and launched over 9,000 high-altitude balloons, each loaded with nearly 50 pounds of anti-personnel and incendiary explosives. Amazingly, these unmanned balloons originated from over 5,000 miles away in the Japanese home islands. After being launched, the specially designed hydrogen balloons would ascend to an altitude of 30,000 feet and ride the jet stream across the Pacific Ocean to the mainland United States. Their bombs were triggered to drop after the three-day journey was complete—hopefully over a city or wooded region that would catch fire.
Nearly 350 of the bombs actually made it across the Pacific, and several were intercepted or shot down by the U.S. military. From 1944 to 1945, balloon bombs were spotted in more than 15 states—some as far east as Michigan and Iowa. The only fatalities came from a single incident in Oregon, where a pregnant woman and five children were killed in an explosion after coming across one of the downed balloons. Their deaths are considered the only combat casualties to occur on U.S. soil during World War II."
https://www.history.com/news/5-attacks-on-u-s-soil-during-wo...
The airforce then bombed hydrogen generating facilities nearby the suspected launch sites.
Section offense and defense
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/battle-of-attu-60-years.htm
Much like this story, many Japanese planners did not appreciate the vast size of the American west. A hundred random firebombs were basically irrelevant compared to the many thousands of yearly lighting strikes that also regularly cause fires. Who knows how many Japanese balloons are out there hanging from some tree undiscovered.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-sep-11-me-then1...
The site of the people that found the remains of the plane is online and has a nice old-times look (with frames):
But who knows really, maybe the US govt is better at hiding its secrets than I give it credit for.
"Not maneuverable" and "previous balloon" so is it fair to assume that it's a balloon as well?
Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/rHGWmyyb9nI?feature=share
There was something about fear being the mind-killer. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam to the Red Telephone please - paging the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam!
User dTal is on the same train of thought as I was regarding the "not maneuverable" part.
What other type of object exists which can fly and yet does not have the ability to maneuver?
Most balloons are not equipped to actively change their bouyancy.
I assume a weather balloon can handle those issues though. [0]
Good. Right?
This increases the risk of being killed by a drone for everybody, even if is as collateral damage. If international laws can be so easily violated for free, why do we need them? Do we really want a world without rules?
Edit - this video isn't loading for me, but I've just watched what I assume is the same briefing on Twitter. They have a pilot assessment that the object was unmanned - but they can't tell us balloon, missile, drone? I'm not understanding how a pilot could see the thing, communicate ("I'm looking at an unmanned object, should I shoot?") and somehow not convey what the object was. I appreciate the speed of this briefing, but I would prefer they wait at least until they know what they are saying. In the briefing below the guy says NORAD has been tracking it for a day - and they still don't know what it is? I guess that rules out missile, at least.
No details beyond this yet due to classification restrictions.
Research med kit and laser too.
Air to air kills since entered service:
2005-2022: 0
2023: 2
Reminds me of George Carlin's joke: shellshock becomes battle fatigue becomes PTSD. Don't make it better, change the name!
In this case, though, I imagine the difficulty (and associated prestige) is considerable less... :)
(I'm British and so not a US tax payer, just a spectator, but would argue the same here)
It's a crying shame the F-22 production line was shut down, so it's great to see it performing well.
(Speaking as a DCS sim pilot with a long time interest in military aviation).
Air to air missiles cost on the order of $300,000.00 weather balloons cost and order of magnitude less.
It might be possible to shoot down balloons with unguided rockets. It depends on how close the fighter can get and how accurate the rockets are. Rockets are super cheap.
The problem is what can you fly that has a cannon and can reach those altitudes. Apparently only the F22 and F15 could, and that was their very limit.
The shoot-downs used AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles (per TFA). We also don’t know the ceiling altitude of the F-22 since it’s classified.
However, the F-22 can carry the AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile (AMRAAM) which has a disclosed engagement altitude of 70,000 feet - capable of engaging even higher altitude balloons than these. As I understand it, the Extended Range AMRAAM-ER is believed to have an engagement ceiling of 85,000 feet.
Meanwhile, the US also has the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system, an air defense system capable of engaging targets at very high altitude. While its capabilities are classified, its max engagement altitude is at least 490,000 ft. or 93 miles … though using it to attack a balloon is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. THAAD is mobile and could be deployed in response to a high altitude balloon threat (some of which can fly 120,000 ft.)
This seems like conjecture. Is there any reliable data on how much said balloon cost?
It's conjecture for me to presume the sky is blue without looking out of my window, but it's a safe bet on days with good weather.
Unless this balloon -- or whatever it was -- was diamond-bedazzled and platinum-plated and filled with alien technology it's a safe bet that it was a fair amount cheaper to produce/launch/maintain than sortieing one of the most expensive and exclusive modern aircraft in the world and shooting off a missile that costs 600k/ea -- and that's not even considering collateral costs associated to the action.
See also:
F-22 Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon Off Carolinas With Missile (Updated) https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-22-shoots-down-chine...
U-2 Spy Planes Snooped On Chinese Surveillance Balloon https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/u-2-spy-planes-snooped...
F-22 Shoots Down “Object” Flying High Over Alaskan Waters https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-22-shoots-down-new-o...
The Soviets Built Bespoke Balloon-Killer Planes During The Cold War https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-soviets-built-besp...
With a missile, the pilot can shoot from several miles out and never has to fly directly at the target. So, it's much safer.
The airforce would have thousands of missiles. Assuming they have some FIFO system they would use missiles heading for expiry.
Not sure how pilot training goes but would assume they have training hours requirement. If a mission covers those hours all the better for more real experience on what they would be flying anyway.
Anyway I don't know this as an expert, but logically seems costs are largely sunk regardless of an infrequent balloon incident.
The world will run out of helium before the US runs out of missiles.
Probably fits nicely in the training budget.
The US would deorbit everything China ever put into space if they started shooting at satellites. Those satellites are part of the strategic triad and would be a direct threat to the US nuclear umbrella. The AEGIS systems off the Chinese coast would take care of any attempts to add satellites back into space.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942463
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970609
You could fly a flashing cow in this times and nobody would stop looking down at their phones.
These are the same clowns that have claimed to have extant physical samples of extraterrestrial materials, but only offered them to independent examination once, which didn't go well supporting their claims, and have paraded an endless number of excuses since while doubling down on claims it offers incontrovertible proof.
There's no big mystery here, these are relatively unsophisticated conspiracy nuts that got above average traction. That's it.
- Drones can be the size of small cars
- 40K feet is not a problem for a drone
In such a case it'd be more about the class / properties of the drone...
If the above hypothesis is true, it means the U.S. is trying to rile up / ready / etc. the population to view China as a threat.
Kind of ironic given the intense scrutiny and fears prior to Trump getting elected that he would trigger a depression or war because of his isolationist attitude about China specifically.
But more importantly what does that mean now? Will it justify laws passed to further isolate China?
In your comment, you say "it means the US is trying to rile up / ready /etc" the population. That's not the only plausible (or even most likely) scenario though.
The publishing of this info could indeed be for that purpose. Or it could be for something else, such as to influence the currently-ongoing negotiations with other players (eg European) at a critical time.
Or it could be for some other purpose again, that's neither of those. :)
The hypothesis above is roughly connected to this wider idea about international relations that the 'big ideas' happen behind closed doors, and there is a second 'public' face. Here the balloon type incidents leak to the public strategically while other incidents go unmentioned except in private or in some esoteric place.
If true, why would the US press and mainstream media be headlining it when of course it'll enrage the population. It was a choice to publicize it and a choice for our political parties to point fingers at each other over it, as part of the typical spin cycle.
If so, the previous balloon was a pretty fuckin' stupid way to do that, since letting it wander all over the US was obviously going to be used by political adversaries to attack the administration (justly or unjustly, doesn't matter).
Is it to take advantage of a training opportunity? I would think less advanced aircraft may be more cost effective to operate.
This one was considerably lower. But IIRC Alaska is a common station location for f-22s so may have just been coincidence.
* Flying at 40k feet altitude
* Size of a small car
* Not manned
* Didn't appear to be maneuverable
* Shot down with an AIM-9X heatseaking missile
What could that be? Also, seems premature to assume China again when Russia is far closer to the Alaskan coast and just as antagonistic.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-mill...
EDIT: found my astonished comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22694150
There was a consequence -- we shot it down.
> That is the irreversible change it signifies, imo.
It's not irreversible. Additional consequences can be initiated at any time.
Were you hoping the US would react without thinking through their options?
Personally, I want a considered, measured response. We can always add sanctions or start a nuclear war later. Right now it seems important to understand what happened, discuss with other leaders, and figure out a smart response.
But yeah a lot of people just want to escalate every situation.
They're unmanned and ambient, yet are clearly a provocation and give China an information advantage over where it would be without the balloons, and in a geopolitical sense it asserts Chinese ascendency. At the same time, it's hard for the US or other powers to figure out an appropriate response. Very similar to Russian/NK/Chinese/Israeli/American state-sponsored hacking groups--it continually forces the adversary to ask "where do we draw a line, and what consequences do we give for crossing it?"
The USA is already on their doorsteps by having bases in almost all the neighboring countries, and conducting operational freedom exercises by flying and sailing through disputed areas.
Quite possibly. Minor provocations that by themselves are too inconsequential to warrant a response, nothing to start a war over, but incrementally provokes the target into lashing out in some way that is advantageous for China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_salami_slicing_strateg...
(Other countries do it too, of course..)
The Biden White House seems happy to play along, justifying more equipment from top donors Raytheon and Boeing.
The balloon panic helpfully distracts from the massive freight derailment chemical disaster currently spewing vinyl chloride into the atmosphere over Ohio.
Like if they are watching the launch and then waiting 2 days, the adversary isn't learning the whole story.
The full capabilities of satellite and sonar are hidden, but they're easily past the "good enough" line for any relevant military activities.
Legal Eagle actually covers that detail a bit in their coverage of the prior balloon.
So can geosynchronous satellites, but they're much further away from earth.
If you knew that secret you'd understand what to look for in order to unveil the next secret.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident
I've got a fanciful notion that the "foo fighters" are living creatures. The Air Force supposedly gave someone some of the excretions to examine and they found "unearthly isotopes" or some such.
I figure something that lives, say, a couple hundred miles down inside a planet might only even notice the surface phenomenon that are the most dense, energetic, and anomalous (certainly at first), and pay more attention to those things. How might such beings interact with us and could we discern their efforts as such if we wanted?
Aren't civilian flights more a threat for the planet? Not suggesting to shoot them, just to stop them
from linked article https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government...
My pull quotes:
> The Pentagon downed an unidentified object over Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden, according to U.S. officials.
> Mr. Kirby said the object was traveling at 40,000 feet. He said officials were describing it as an object because that was the best description they had of it.
> A recovery effort on the debris will be made, Mr. Kirby said. He said the object was “roughly the size of a small car” — much smaller than the spy balloon that had a payload the size of multiple buses.
"They shoot down our surveillance balloons, giving us precedent to shoot down their high altitude drone planes or satellites in the future."
It may not be exactly what they have in mind, but I think it's the right way to think about the question - they are engineering scenarios which work to their advantage no matter how the US responds. US shoots them down? Play outraged. US leaves them alone? US looks weak.
It's more likely a coordinated event to get people to talk about something other than covid and the last 3 disastrous years. Lets be honest here, neither china nor the US wants people asking uncomfortable questions about covid. Now that the covid era appears to be over, what better way to distract people than "war".
They did the same thing with 9/11. Uncomfortable questions about 9/11 was overshadowed by war and iraqi "wmds". Eventually people forget or move on.
Call me a cynic, but china ends covid lockdowns and all of a sudden we get "surveillance" balloons. And the entire media apparatus has us talking about silly balloons instead of wondering what the last 3 years of covid was about. My guess was a staged "terrorist" attack somewhere to transition us from the covid news cycle. Turns out we got balloons instead. Whatever works in the end.
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 on purpose) and cause a base to scramble to intercept. 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 possible they've been doing this for more than a decade and the military has gotten caught with egg on it's face having ignored the reports for so long.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
Turns out we like to spend gobs of money even when we're just chasing our shadow.
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 problem with "summing up UFO contact" is that the variety of encounters is absolutely insane. Compare Rendlesham to Varginha, etc.
It really starts to bring out the "inter" in the more colorful inter-dimensional contact theories.
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.
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.
>According to Smith, it was CIA’s responsibility by statute to coordinate the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts.
https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cias-role-in-t...
We don’t have the bandwidth to basically dog fight thousands of aircraft simultaneously!! We’ll go bankrupt!
So from that POV, one may start to think about a quick buildup of momentum in the general direction of F-22s shooting things down, or air combat, or just combat, etc.
Not so much to predict the future, as to ideate and prepare frames of mind for potential changes in circumstance.
Seems to be particularly likely to happen in panicky situations, or when someone has something to prove. E.g., the Soviet-American tensions surrounding an American spy plane, a RC-135, were a factor in the Soviets shooting down KAL-007 (they thought it was the RC-135) [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
[0] https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-shoots-down-unknown-flyi...
And airliners have transponders and flight plans. If a civilian plane stopped talking to ATC, the Air Force is likely already involved.
Additionally, we’re not on a high-alert war footing like during the Cold War. As far as I know, we don’t have hostile military aircraft routinely flying with transponders off on our coasts.
Even if we did, I’m pretty sure the larger military radar systems that would be used to track this stuff can read transponders and separate out which plane is which.
On the first balloon we failed to acquire enough helium, and ended up "floating" the balloon in the upper atmosphere overnight. Our prediction system kept indicating it was going to land in Africa.
We're at risk of bankruptcy because our debt is 31 trillion dollars and in June we won't even be able to issue securities to continue bullshitting ourselves out of cutting spending. Welcome to America, we're broke because we spent all our money on guns rather than infrastructure, healthcare and education.
I'm surprised this seems to be such a common point. Why is it believed that it was cheap?
>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."
"Shot Down using an Aim9x"
That actually narrows it down a bit. Heat seeking warhead.
Russia made some weird looking (but non-threatening) drone and mimicked some Chinese flight path. Thus, hoping to stoke a bit more drama between the US and China after the balloon affair.
What a waste if $200k, shooting Chinese baloons. These shold be zapped using lasers.
Oops.. minus 27 degrees Celsius. Yes, you might assume the `minus` applies to both, you only have to go up 17 degrees Fahrenheit for the signs not to match (better to be specific).
It's extremely odd to me that they were able to identify the object by sending our own airmen to visually confirm it, but if that's the case, wouldn't they be able to definitively conclude that it wasn't a balloon? Pat kept it ambiguous and kept insisting that it was some sort of object.