The story surrounding the Chinese spy balloon makes very little sense. Here are just a few anomalies:
The Chinese appear unusually angry over something quite routine: If your spy equipment gets caught violating someone else’s airspace, it gets shot down. There is nothing to protest, nothing to complain about. Those are simply the rules of the game. Given that no human casualties were involved, this should be considered totally routine. And if this was a scientific research balloon, then it was unlikely to be recovered anyway, which brings us to our next point.
China claims that this is a civilian research balloon that simply ended up badly off course. Whole continents off course, interestingly enough, even though somehow none of China’s neighbours have ever experienced anything similar. Indeed, this magnificent coincidence took the balloon from China, over Alaska, down through Canada and then over the continental United States along a path that just happened to contain our largest collection of ICBM silos, a spectacular accident indeed.
China has not presented any details regarding what exactly this civilian research balloon was, well, researching: They don’t even appear to be trying to make their cover story plausible. To not even go to the trouble of creating a semi-plausible cover story is interesting in and of itself. All they have said is that it is for “meteorological and other research purposes.” This is basically saying “it is for researchy research, stupid American. You not smart enough to understand. Go back to watching NFL.” If a civilian team had launched the balloon, China would be able to give us details about who did it and what they were trying to research (of course, we also have to deal with the possibility that this was technically a civilian balloon that was doing research at the behest of the military.) The equipment used by metereologists has not undergone any radical changes in decades. The equipment on the balloon was not metereological.Why wouldn’t you colour the balloon dark grey or sky blue in order to make it harder to see?
Blinding white is an unusual colour for a spy balloon. Unless the Chinese were using some sort of radar absorbent material that necessitated the white colour, one has to conclude that this was not a spy balloon (see point 2) or that the Chinese wanted it to be discovered. If the latter is true, that means this whole incident may have been nothing more than a test.
Why use a spy balloon instead of a satellite?
This question we have some potential answers to. The balloon may have been interested in listening in on radio communications, or may have wanted to get pictures with better resolution than is possible using a spy satellite.Why wait so long to shoot the balloon down—esp. if you were not going to try to capture it?
The ostensible explanation, that the government feared hurting someone on the ground, is hard to believe. The chance that the balloon lands on a person while it is hovering above the Montana landscape is very, very low. Indeed, if the balloon was traveling over US government land as has been claimed, the president could have ordered US military personnel out of the area.
A more likely explanation is that the government was hoping it would come down on its own and that they could capture the equipment.Why did we use an Aim-9 Sidewinder missile on the balloon when the F-22 has a gun?
Using the F22 makes sense because it can fly higher than any other fighter we have in our arsenal, and that balloon was very high up, but a few rounds from the autocannon would have made recovering the balloon’s equipment much easier. You will have a much more gentle descent if you puncture the balloon than if you blow the balloon to hell. Furthermore, the remnants of the punctured balloon would have increased the wreckage’s buoyancy and made it easier to find once it hit the water.
Why did the US do this over water? Wouldn’t it have been easier to recover the remnants of the balloon on land?
Shooting the balloon over water makes it possible for the wreckage to sink, while shooting it over land ensures that you find something—even if that something is in bad condition. It is possible that Biden was just being indecisive and couldn’t manage to make up his mind until it was almost outside of US territory—or, as said above, that the government was hoping it would descend on its own. That said, one also has to reckon with the possibility that the US did not want to recover the balloon after all: Perhaps because they did not want to have to answer questions about what it was really doing.
The official cover story makes very little sense to me. The chance that a balloon hovering over Montana hits a person when being downed is incredibly low—much less likely than being struck by lightning. I would argue that your chance of hitting someone might actually be higher within twelve miles of the South Carolina coast. When you consider how few people are hit by debris in Ukraine, despite the fact the ongoing air war there, the claims about a debris field seem utterly absurd. However, if the government really was concerned with this debris field, it seems odd we did not detect the balloon and shoot it down while it was over Alaska or northern Canada. Why allow the balloon to complete its mission? It was almost certainly transmitting, by shortwave radio or some other means, back to China. Was the US able to intercept these transmissions? Perhaps the real reason we didn’t shoot it down was that we were listening to it?
Whatever happened here, we are not being given the complete story.
https://youtu.be/k2xz21HvLs8
Interesting video describing the takedown.
Maybe the Chinese government did the whole thing as a domestic propaganda project -- trying to excite hawkish Chinese internet-patriots. That would explain the bright color and the silly (from our point of view) expressions of supposed government anger. The bright color would result in the posting of American videos of the balloon on the Chinese internet, attracting Chinese attention to the drama, and angry American average-guy comments like those at Breitbart and Citizen Free Press would arouse responsive angry Chinese average-guy comments, the latter being what the Chinese government wanted.