Hopefully The Final Balloon Update

Last week Old Uncle Joe spoke to a nation weary of balloon drama about the necessity to develop sharper rules to identify and, if necessary, shoot down unidentified aerial objects.  All of this a consequence of weeks of breathtaking drama associated with the transit of a Red Chinese spy balloon that crossed the airspace of the United States and Canada.

As I have said before, I take seriously the encroachment of anything suspicious in our nation's airspace.  This includes civilian private and commercial aircraft, military aircraft and balloons;  anything without a previously-filed flight plan.   Satellites are a completely different matter.  On this matter there is nothing funny about China's criminal conduct and willful disregard for our laws.

It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that roughly half the population dislikes Old Uncle Joe.  That is OK.  Everyone is entitled to an opinion.  It is a foregone conclusion that this population will complain if a balloon isn't shot from the sky immediately.  Considering the Red Chinese balloon was more than 200 feet tall and carrying a payload the size of three school buses if blown to bits it might result in a very sizeable debris field.  Suppose you shoot out of the sky something of this size?  Suppose all of that mass broke-up at an altitude of 50,000 feet, scattered and fell from the sky, damaged property, injured some children or killed someone?  Do you think these same people might howl even louder? 

Seems to me Old Joe is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.  But that's his problem, not mine. 

I'm actually slightly tickled to have witnessed some people contort themselves into knots over the course of events because as days passed we eventually learned that by the time the spy balloon had crossed into American airspace late last month our military and intelligence services had been tracking it for nearly a week already; watching as it lifted-off from its home base in Hainan Island near China's south coast.

Expecting it to surveil our extensive military installation on Guam an unexpected jet stream carried it far off course to the north where a cold Canadian weather front pushed it back south and then eastward penetrating the American heartland.  Chinese ineptness following a bad turn of events?  What, no self-destruct mechanism?  Or a Chinese attempt to exploit a bad turn of events?  Its sloppy carelessness either way.

So yeah, I'm kinda pissed about this.  Floating thru our airspace is at a minimum an affront to national pride.  At worse an act of aggression.  Nevertheless, if I had to hazard a guess the PLA was caught flat-footed by this untoward turn of developments; so much so they wouldn't even pick-up the phone to answer our calls to ask- WASSUP?

Their playbook was reminiscent of a Mad Magazine Spy vs. Spy cartoon strip.  Did the PLA do and end run around President Xi?  Or fall on their sword for President Xi?  Meanwhile, if you paid attention to the rhetoric last week at the Munich Security Conference, China's senior foreign policy advisor Wang Yi  was indignant and laid blame for all of this at the feet of U.S. indiscriminate use of force. He demanded an apology.  In Asian cultures Face counts for much more than in western culture.

So, in my view, I thought it prudent to follow the advice of the military and intelligence services to track it, jam its transmissions, study it, photograph it, record its telemetry, shoot it down in shallow territorial waters, recover as much wreckage as possible, move the debris to the FBI lab at Langley to study it further and reverse engineer as much as can be done.  Maybe even rub their nose in it.

Big loss of face to be punked on those terms.  Plausible?

You may disbelieve all of the foregoing or disagree with it.  That's perfectly OK.  Inasmuch as anyone reading this (including yours-truly) isn't privy to secure briefings in a SCIF we all are entitled to an opinion.  Nevertheless, and because I try to keep an open mind, if your narrative of the spy balloon drama includes our military lying to us, all of the combined intelligence services deceiving us, the Biden Crime Syndicate accepting billions of dollars of Chinese bribes, Hunter's laptop, and the Canadians implicated in the entirety of it than by all means please share.  If you have evidence of a cover-up or conspiracy you have an obligation and absolute duty to reveal it.  Post it in the comments section.  The congressional inquiries, indictments, impeachments, arrests and firing squads will follow.  

Which is more plausible; the latter or the former?

One more thing; I believe that splashing some hobbyist's or a university's or other legitimate entity's non-nefarious and totally legit balloon with an air-to-air Sidewinder missile at $400,000 a pop is just a wee bit over the top.  So we'll just have to see how this is parsed in the real world.

In closing, and to remain grounded in some rational perspective on the whole affair, consider this:  People routinely allow Face Book, TikTok (Red Chinese spyware), Pinterest, Alexa and similar platforms to spy on their lives willingly and all the damn day long.  Is a Chinese spy balloon a larger threat than Google Earth?  Want to see a missile silo from above?  Open source photos are readily available on the web.  (The silo doors are always closed BTW and everyone knows their locations).  Listen-up people, everyone's satellites have already photographed everyone else's secret stuff by high resolution means already.

It occurred to me the other day that the commotion over Red China's balloon is reminiscent of the hysteria that followed the launch of Sputnik by the Soviets when I was a little kid.  Or a scary cold war era episode from The Twilight Zone.

For the love of God and all that is holy I sure hope I don't have to publish anything further on the subject of balloons.

Speaking of balloons - these are one more of many useful tools that the US Weather Service uses to forecast their guesses.....