China balloon & Airship Development
- Thread starter escobar
- Start date
Told you it's just a regular balloon，nothing special about it，just like Chinese officials said
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Words matter, they didn’t say debris weren’t discovered, instead they said debris may never be recovered.
Why does that matter? Because it leaves the door open to simply choose to not bring back any evidence if the debris would be too embarrassing to bring back, like if it was a US weather balloon or similar innocuous object.
"It did not even have a plasma cannon capable of vaporizing the White House and other major landmarks!"
"We did not realize how years of chronic underinvestment into the education system had degraded the general American public's ability to think critically"
- What a Chinese government official should say
escobar
Brigadier
The "UFO" shot down over Canada has probably been identified: A tiny amateur radio pico balloon (K9YO-15), launched on 22 Oct 2022, has gone missing in the area of the shot down. It was on it's 7th circumnavigation of the globe, being aloft for 123 days.
Lethe
Captain
The recent admission that the three non-Chinese objects were probably benign, coupled with the lack of further heroic engagements over the last few days, leads one to suspect that a further paradigm shift has occurred.
1) US is caught unawares by Chinese balloon. National anxiety is stoked, calls for robust response, balloon is shot down.
2) NORAD changes filter settings on its radars and immediately starts picking up all sorts of shit "out there". Queue the several subsequent engagements as national hysteria persists.
3) As analysis begins to catch up and immediate hysteria subsides, the narratives around both the initial Chinese balloon and subsequent objects begin to change.
Perhaps NORAD has advised that it will need a lot more flight hours and Sidewinders if it is going to investigate every flock of birds and shoot down everything it can't positively identify.
It's tempting to derive some satisfaction from observing the US government and society flail around like this, but it should also serve as a sobering reminder about the potential for miscalculation across the full breadth of US-China relations. Governments must often act on incomplete information and their decisions are shaped by domestic political imperatives.
Many people downplay the risks of conflict between the USA and China, specifically the risk of nuclear escalation. Underpinning this attitude is an implicit or explicit belief in a kind of cool rationality fed by accurate and complete information. The balloon saga is a fairly low-cost illustration of how misguided such assumptions are.
1) US is caught unawares by Chinese balloon. National anxiety is stoked, calls for robust response, balloon is shot down.
2) NORAD changes filter settings on its radars and immediately starts picking up all sorts of shit "out there". Queue the several subsequent engagements as national hysteria persists.
3) As analysis begins to catch up and immediate hysteria subsides, the narratives around both the initial Chinese balloon and subsequent objects begin to change.
Perhaps NORAD has advised that it will need a lot more flight hours and Sidewinders if it is going to investigate every flock of birds and shoot down everything it can't positively identify.
It's tempting to derive some satisfaction from observing the US government and society flail around like this, but it should also serve as a sobering reminder about the potential for miscalculation across the full breadth of US-China relations. Governments must often act on incomplete information and their decisions are shaped by domestic political imperatives.
Many people downplay the risks of conflict between the USA and China, specifically the risk of nuclear escalation. Underpinning this attitude is an implicit or explicit belief in a kind of cool rationality fed by accurate and complete information. The balloon saga is a fairly low-cost illustration of how misguided such assumptions are.