What Just Happened: The Balloon Threat

It’s rare that a so-called national security event provides so much grist for humor. From beginning to end, the Chinese Spy Balloon Saga has been on a steady trajectory from the sublime to the ridiculous, with politicians and news media playing a leading role. I can’t wait to see what Dave Barry does with it next January!

This crisis, if one wants to call it that, launched with bureaucratic stupidity. It climbed with partisan hype and bald-faced diplomatic lies. It escalated further with the media seeking headlines but failing to ascertain facts. It reached a crescendo with a military over-reaction of stunning proportions. It finally came crashing down with a series of inane government comments and a Presidential non-address. During all of this, I experienced some grins, a few chortles, a belly-laugh or two, and of course near-continuous ROTFLMAO.

Let me share!

So What did Just Happen? The Chinese launched a balloon from Hainan island, from where they previously launched balloons to float over the Pacific to places like Guam and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where the US Navy likes to port. Except this balloon caught some waves from a Polar Vortex (hey, wait, can we blame climate change for bringing us to the edge of World War III?) and swept north to the Aleutians, then down across Canada, Montana, Kansas, and eventually North Carolina. Where the US military shot it down. Oh, and it was a spy balloon.

Blinding Flash of the Obvious (BFO #1): China spies on the United States, every day, every way it can. As we do against China. There are very few exceptions to who-spies-on-whom rule, but suffice it to say China in the skies with balloons is not one of them. China has satellites over the US continuously. They mine things like TikTok for data. They task Chinese students and academics to find specific information. They ask Chinese visitors to gather information. They establish Chinese “police” stations in the US (and other countries) which keep track of Chinese expats and no doubt facilitate intelligence collection. Heck, they even stole the entire human resources holdings of the US Office or Personnel Management a few years back (Note to China: update your records, I’m in Mexico now!).

This balloon does not represent a significant escalation in spying, or any kind of breakthrough. You don’t send a new or novel collection platform gently floating, attached to a giant balloon, over your opponent. What it does represent is Chinese bureaucratic incompetence. They have sent these balloons before. They know Chinese-American relations are tense these days. Yet some fool in charge of the balloon program launched one a week or so before the US Secretary of State was due to visit and patch things up. Nobody in his chain-of-command thought to say “wait.” Nobody in the balloon operations team asked, “Hey, where’s the jet-stream taking our balloons now?” That’s some prime bureaucratic incompetence there. I wonder if the guy in charge is making iPhones in Xinjiang now. And we’re off!

So the balloon drifts off course, and what? It’s too high to affect commercial air traffic. Who cares? Nobody. We’re tracking it, but only because it’s huge. BFO#2, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD, a joint US- Canadian military structure) constantly watches the skies for large, fast-moving objects like missiles (which are bad) and planes (which might be bad). They are most famous for their annual tracking of Santa Claus, who apparently is large and fast-moving enough for them to identify. They generally don’t look for small or slow things, of which there are many. How many? Nobody knows, since nobody cares. One estimate is almost a thousand on any given day. They can be weather balloons (the National Weather Service launches 180 high altitude balloons every day!), model rockets, high school science projects, or a guy in a lawn chair. But in this case, the balloon is so large it gets spotted from the ground by regular people. Well, not really regular people, because who sits around all day staring at the sky? And even if you did, who makes a big deal if they see a balloon? But somebody did, and away we go!

Now it’s a public issue, so the Chinese Foreign Ministry bureaucrat opened the file labelled “what to say in case our spy balloon is noticed over the US.” and read it out, including the part that says “start lying here” and “stop lying here.” Of course it’s a weather balloon, he reassures us. Which only confirms the fact that (1) it is not a weather balloon, (2) the Chinese are lying, and (3) somebody in the US must take the political blame. Some Conservatives and Progressives in the US are outraged, OUTRAGED, about Chinese spying (see BFO #1), and why are we permitting it to continue?

Which leads to the utterly ridiculous government response that we can’t shoot it down over Montana because it might fall and hit someone. Now space junk (man-made and natural) falls to earth every day, and when some piece becomes famous because it is large–or radioactive–the government reassures us that the chance of it hitting anyone are infinitesimally low. Nothing to worry about. The government can’t even tell what hemisphere is going to be hit until the day before it enters the atmosphere. But a big balloon with a multi bus-sized object attached, which we can exactly determine its location, can’t be shot down because it represents a threat? Pull-eaze. My guess is we waited for the ocean because the balloon payload would better withstand crashing in water than the ground. As it stands, that explanation was nonsense.

But it gets better. We send an F22 Raptor up and shoot the balloon down with a Sidewinder air-to-air missile. That’s about $400,000 of hardware we spent. Why didn’t the F22 just use its gun, which would ably destroy a balloon? The Sidewinder explodes near the target, shredding it with shrapnel. I hope they didn’t destroy the parts we intended to salvage and exploit. Please someone tell me the Air Force had a good reason for using a missile rather than a few cheap bullets.

And thus Our Democracy was saved. Except now partisans were asking why the President let the Chinese fly their balloon over our sensitive sites and collect against them. The balloon mostly uses the wind patterns to navigate, although it appeared to have some type of motor and a rudder to make small path adjustments. Here’s a map of sensitive US intelligence sites, from the Washington Post circa 2002:

BFO #3, there’s a lot of them, everywhere. That map doesn’t include some military facilities and critical national infrastructure. I think a great new virtual reality game would involve flying a spy balloon over the United States and NOT flying over sensitive sites! Probably can’t be done.

Faced by the inquisitive press, a public demanding answers, and partisans complaining, the government issued a strong statement defusing the burgeoning crisis. Of course they didn’t; instead they clammed up. Meanwhile, NORAD “opened the aperture on their radars” to catch slow and small things, quickly demonstrating why this was a bad idea. The Air Force began a live-fire game of Space Invaders. Over the course of a few days, NORAD sighted new “objects” over Alaska, the Yukon, and Michigan. Off went the jets, away went the missiles, and down went the objects.

Wait, wasn’t it dangerous shooting things down over. . . . nevermind. The Air Force managed to use up more expensive missiles, and an Air National Guard pilot even managed to miss a balloon with a missile. We all felt better immediately, until White House Spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre helpfully explained that (1) we don’t know what the objects were, but (2) they pose no threat, and (3) they certainly weren’t from outer space. There used to be a simple rule for government officials appearing before the public: under no circumstances are you to refer to extra-terrestrials, space aliens, or UFOs, because (BFO#4) every time the government mentions them, more people believe in them. I don’t know what was more terrifying: the fact no one in the White House noticed that statements (1), (2), and (3) are logically inconsistent, or the fact the US government was announcing it was shooting off missiles at anything moving in the sky, for no apparent reason.

“Wait!” you say, “aren’t balloons a threat to civil aviation?” Well, they’re more of a risk than a threat. Over the decades since thousands of weather balloons and aircraft have taken flight, there does not exist a single documented case of one hitting the other. There are some, rare plane-strikes of other balloons, which result in a destroyed balloon and a pilot making a routine report upon landing. See, civil aviation is a little more resilient than it appears. That extra large Chinese Spy Balloon actually could have damaged a plane, but, you know, we can’t shoot things down over land, until we can.

Suddenly, somebody in the US National Security leadership sobered up. NORAD must have re-tuned their radars, since they stopped reporting on every piece of floating mylar, the Air Force put away its missiles, and calm returned. The President went before the Press to say, “Get a Grip, man” which may have been his best moment at the podium, ever. He said all the right things about China, danced around the unidentified aerial object phenomenon, and walked off when the press went ballistic.

Hardly a “day which will live in infamy” Presidential moment. What might a competent response looked like? For starters, China needs to get its act together, since it all began with them, accidentally or not. First Covid, now balloons; what next? Next, the American government had a choice. Option one was to ignore the balloon, as it had in the past. When it became public knowledge, they could have asked China for an explanation, and when China provided the lame weather balloon excuse, the White House could have publicly offered President Xi an account with the National Weather Service and a streaming subscription to the Weather Channel. Privately, they should have called the Chinese explanation BS and told them to knock it off. I would call this the “Mature Superpower Response Option.” Now if the partisan political heat got too much for the White House, they could have chosen option two: publicly denounce the balloon as an unacceptable breech of sovereignty unfit for a nation which constantly harps on it. Shoot it down immediately, then offer to return it after processing for the illegal importation of items into the United States. Take the damn thing apart down to the last nut and bolt, exploit it, then send the box of trash to the Chinese embassy in DC, along with two more things: a bill for the cost of importing and analyzing the illegal product, and a live carrier pigeon in a box with a note saying (in Mandarin) “try this next time, pendejos.” That’s the “Welcome to the big leagues” approach. The Biden administration seemed confused or frozen, depending on the moment.

What did we learn? Well, if you were unaware of BFOs 1-4, maybe that was educational. Otherwise, not much. I do think that someday the balloon (eventually) shot down over Lake Huron will wash ashore. It will be an exceedingly large piece of brightly colored mylar still bearing traces of helium. And on its side will be the words “Welcome to Chuck E. Cheese’s, Kalamazoo!”