Spy balloon bursts sense of security
Last week, a Chinese spy balloon floated over the nation and into the national dialogue. Videos of the white orb dominated the news, lifted punditry, and gave rise to dread and jokes.
The balloon — and the rightful act of shooting it down — does have foreign policy implications, reflecting mounting tension between the United States and China.
But here’s a reality check: Foreign spy satellites overfly America every day, and all sorts of surveillance lurks on our electronic devices. A key difference, though, is we can’t see those forms of surveillance, so beholding a 200-foot-tall spy ship loitering over the Midwest pierced a sense of security.
The episode raises many questions about the defense of the nation’s skies, and it has offered another reminder of the United States’ complicated relationship with China. It also left us wondering, why now?
Especially troubling was the government’s failure to acknowledge the balloon until it was over Montana, several days after discovering it off the coast of Alaska.
Worse yet is the revelation that multiple other spy balloons — at least one since President Joe Biden took office and three during the Trump era — have trespassed into America’s skies.
“We did not detect those threats,” Air Force Gen. Glen Vanherck, leader of Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, told reporters Monday. “And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”
Does this mean the people charged with protecting our nation from foreign missiles, jets and bombs missed a slow-moving airship carrying a payload the size of a regional jetliner? A balloon awareness gap?
The craft offered an “opportunity for us to collect intel where we had gaps on prior balloons,” the general said. “This gave us the opportunity to assess what they were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities existed, and I think you’ll see in the future that the — that time frame was well worth its value to collect.”
That last clause implies the nation will see (or perhaps not see) more balloons or other threats from China in the future.
When asked why the U.S. didn’t down the craft over the waters off Alaska, the general said, “It wasn’t time.”
Vanherck determined the craft
posed no “physical military threat,” and his organization closely tracked it. He also said the government took “protective measures” to mitigate the balloon’s collection and transmission of information but declined to elaborate.
U.S. officials quickly discounted Chinese claims that the craft was a civilian research platform studying the weather.
The incursion comes as the U.S. government continues to expand its military footprint in Asia and ramp up rhetoric about the threat of China. It also came days after a U.S. Air Force general predicted war with China in 2025.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was traveling in Asia during the balloon blowup, which scuttled Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s scheduled trip to Beijing that was set to begin this week.
The Biden administration’s response to the Chinese balloon drew bipartisan fire from legislators who pledged to investigate the incident.
On Saturday, news outlets broadcast the spectacle in the skies off the coast of South Carolina. Contrails from fighter jets circled the balloon. One announcer couldn’t resist the “sharks circling their prey” analogy.
People watching from the beach cheered when an F-22 fighter destroyed the balloon with a missile. The payload dropped to the sea, and the cameras held on the balloon material as it drifted down. It fell to the Navy, Coast Guard, FBI and other agencies to collect the wreckage.
On the surface, the safe destruction of the craft is a public relations win for the White House and the military. After all, the nearly $200 million F-22 Raptor notched its first air-to-air kill. Plus, there was plenty of tough talk, posturing and on-screen action without casualties.
For a few days, America came together to face a foreign threat we could see. And despite seeing it, there’s much we still don’t know.
Beneath the surface, though, reside fears of the deterioration of U.s.-china relations and, yes, the possibility of war between two superpowers.
The balloon captured our attention, but the more worrisome national security threats are the ones we never see or hear about.
The more worrisome threats are the ones we never see or hear about