The balloon was an aircraft and not a satellite. During WWII, the Japanese used balloons to drop incendiary weapons on US forested areas. The Chinese device could have been used to record inland radar emissions, to test our resolve, or to deviver a high altitude nuclear burst. It seems that Biden authorized a shoot down but someone in the chain baulked. It is pretty unlikely that any debris would hit people or property in Alaska, Idaho, or Montana. An out of control military is a bigger threat than China.

Cool challenge, however. Something unusual and the Pentagon muffed it. I hope that we are not invaded by a couple of guys from Greenland. The office-dwellers in Virginia would never figure out what to do.

Some enemies will always be either at your throat, or at your feet – you’re never going to change them. Failing to recognize this fact only makes your situation worse – weak men create hard times.

[…] blog of the day is Never Yet Melted, with a post noting what would have happened with the Chinese spy balloon if Trump was […]

The Chinese claim it was a civilian weather balloon. This might actually be true. A balloon is pretty much useless for ground surveillance.

First, you have no directional control. The best you can do is inject it into the jet stream (which the Chinese did), and hope it stays there. But any turbulent stream has substantial lateral transport, and objects in it are eventually ejected. Evidently this happened to the balloon.

But even if the balloon stays in the jet stream, it only goes where the jet stream goes. Generally, the jet stream (which circles the Earth) comes down from the northern Pacific, across western Canada, down over the plains to about the Ohio valley, and then northeast across NY and New England out to the Atlantic. Any intelligence gathering is limited to that path.

Second, balloons have very little payload capacity, and there are extreme limits as to what can be carried. It will have to have a radio, if you are going to retrieve any data. It also needs either a solar array (this one apparently did) or batteries, which are too heavy. High resolution cameras and radars also are heavy. So the only realistic information retrieval is radio monitoring.

The real question is why the brouhaha. This is not the first Chinese balloon ever. They must be a monthly or even weekly event. Evidently, Sec. Blinken wanted out of the trip to China and ginned up an excuse using the balloon. Why Blinken wanted out is the real story here. The balloon is all fluff.

Yea, but there were at least 3 balloons overhead during the Trump years and he didn’t do anything.