Well, this story just gets better and better. If – and I stress the ‘if’ part – we can believe
General Glen D. VanHerck (Commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), the Chinese have floated balloons over the US multiple times … that we know of.
A senior U.S. general responsible for bringing down a Chinese spy balloon said on Monday the military had not detected previous spy balloons before the one that appeared on Jan. 28 over the United States and called it an "awareness gap."
The Pentagon said over the weekend that Chinese spy balloons had briefly flown over the United States at least three times during President Donald Trump's administration and one previously under President Joe Biden.
Air Force General Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command, said the balloon was 200 feet tall and the payload under it weighed a couple thousand pounds.
"I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that's a domain awareness gap," VanHerck said.[1]
We are basing our entire military future and national security/existence on total battlefield awareness, data, surveillance, and networking and yet a simple balloon has eluded our detection at least four times … that we know of. How many other times did it occur that we never became aware of?
Our very best surveillance equipment, networks, and software couldn’t see a balloon.
These were not tiny little children’s birthday party balloons. As Gen. VanHerck stated, the balloons were 200 ft tall with slung payloads of a couple thousand pounds. How do you not detect that? How many people on this site have claimed that our various radar systems can spot aircraft and ships hundreds of miles away … and yet we can’t see a giant balloon? Heck, we claim to be able to spot tiny submarine periscopes in the middle of the ocean with our all-knowing, all-seeing radar … but we can’t see a giant balloon.
How many people on this site have claimed that carriers are a thing of the past, just waiting to be sunk, because satellites will be able to track carrier groups anywhere in the ocean … and yet none of our satellites could see a giant balloon slowly drifting towards and across America for days on end?
Do you people who believe in the omniscience of our radars and detection systems see the ignorance of your claims?
Consider these previous examples of our vaunted systems being unable to see what’s in front of them:
Yemen Missile Attacks – Recall that the Navy claimed that the Burke class destroyer, USS Mason, was attacked multiple times by anti-ship missiles from Yemen. In reality, despite all the sensors in the region, satellite surveillance, Aegis radar, etc., the Navy was unable to even decide whether an attack had occurred despite the ship launching several defensive missiles (see, “Yemen Missile Attacks").
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 – This commercial aircraft disappeared without a trace in the middles of one of the most heavily monitored regions of the world. Searchers had no clue where to even begin looking.
Balloons – Apparently, there were four previous balloons that entered US airspace undetected.
Destroyer Collisions – As you know, two Burke class destroyers collided with giant merchant ships during simple sailing.
If these examples of large objects, none of which were making any attempt to evade, couldn’t be detected, why are assuming we can detect enemy forces that are stealthy and making every effort to hide? Our entire foundation of future warfare is invalid.
____________________________________
[1]Newsmax website, “General: US Failed to Detect Past Chinese Spy Balloons”, 6-Feb-2023,
https://www.newsmax.com/us/china-spy-balloon/2023/02/06/id/1107478/
The panic over the "spy balloon" is ridiculous. Think logically: How can one control the direction a balloon will go, after it's launched? Answer: It cannot be controlled unless it's fitted with a propulsion system, i.e., a propeller and a motor- which are not visible on the balloon everyone is panicking over.
ReplyDeleteThat means there is no guarantee the "spy balloon" will actually fly over anything worth spying on, or remain over such a thing long enough to collect useful intelligence. That means any spy equipment it carries, will likely end up dead weight.
It's certainly conceivable the Chinese military will add spy equipment to what is actually a weather balloon, on the off chance it will actually fly over something worth spying on; but as this chance is laughably miniscule, I think the Chinese military will insist the equipment be cheap, to avoid wasting money. The cheapness will further diminish its chances of catching anything worthwhile, but the "spy balloon" wasn't a worthwhile platform in the first place.
And why use an irreplaceable F-22 stealth fighter to shoot down the defenseless balloon? Shouldn't the Air Force conserve its remaining flight hours for use on something worthwhile, e.g., shadowing J-20 stealth fighters over the Taiwan Strait?
With a basic understanding of wind patterns, one can certainly forecast a reasonable approximate destination of an unpowered balloon (we're assuming it has no small, simple motor but we don't know that). Given the number of military installations in the US, there's a fair chance that any balloon passing across the US would overfly an interesting installation. Intel collection is easy and quick (radio signals, photographic images, etc. and easily transmitted back to China). We made enormous efforts to overfly the Soviet Union with U2 spy planes that would only be over any given target for seconds so the effort must be worthwhile.
DeleteBeyond any actual intel collected, the balloon serves a political and propaganda purpose by making the US look weak and incompetent and portraying China as a peace loving, innocent, collector of scientific weather data victimized by the unfortunate mishap of a stray balloon that the warmongering US tried to turn into an international incident.
At that altitude it could adjust similar to how the space shuttle manuevers or a PAC-3 MSE. Little rocket bursts.
DeleteIn 2 cases the Chinese Spy Ballon was classified as a UFO(UAP in NewSpeak). IIRC the Roswell alien landing was given a cover story of a weather balloon.
DeleteI suggest sending a giant Winnie the Pooh balloon with ROC flag over China in retaliation.
Id heard on various radio conversations that the balloon had significant maneuverability in that by adjusting altitude, it could "catch" winds of different directions. There was at least one fellow that was in the balloon industry (is that a thing??) and desribed the abilities with some seeming knowledge. Of course until the remains are looked at, its just supposition if it actually had that capability or not...
DeleteThe balloons for the Google Loon project had that capability with an onboard compressor and helium storage bottle to adjust buoyancy.
Delete"I suggest sending a giant Winnie the Pooh balloon with ROC flag over China in retaliation."
DeleteI would love to see them do that!
Lutefisk
Occam's Razor suggests that the current administration's multiple explanations are essentially BS
ReplyDeleteNot a surprise that a CVBG didn't notice it, nor a satellite. Why NORAD didn't see it is a more interesting question. Some possibilities that immediately come to mind:
ReplyDelete1) It didn't come into CONUS via an axis that the North Warning System is looking at, and the over-the-horizon radars looking west were all disabled years ago, so no fixed radar installation even had a chance to detect it.
2) It did come through an axis that our radars are looking at, but was discarded either automatically (eg. via a Doppler notch, or a velocity gate) or manually because of its low speed. Given this thing probably controlled its altitude to go in and out of the jet stream and other atmospheric currents a number of times to get where it wanted to go latitude- and longitude-wise, it may have showed up and disappeared in different places a number of times without the individual readings ever being correlated into a contact/track, and simply nobody paid attention to it until civilians spotted it in Montana.
3) It was detected, the contact wasn't discarded, and the folks in charge simply chose to do nothing.
If it's #2, I'm not too worried - in that case there are probably process improvements that could be made to counter these things in the future without making the opposite error and scrambling the ANG to intercept every flock of mallards (service ceiling > 20k feet) or cranes (service ceiling > 30k feet). The clowns running the show probably won't bother, but at least they could.
I leave it as an exercise to others to explore the negative implications of #1 and #3 and the myriad other possibilities.
RE: why didn't the radar see it:
DeleteNote that materials are not all equally visible to radar. Visibility varies dramatically, by many orders of magnitude.
Most visible tend to be things (like most airplanes) made of metal, which have high conductivity and lots of free electrons that interact with the signal.
Also visible are things that contain moisture (like birds, for example) since water molecules interact with the signal. This is why meat cooks in your microwave oven but paper (at least dry paper) doesn't.
Much less visible are non-metallic fabrics (like what some balloons are made of.
There are even materials that are nearly (or even perhaps completely) transparent to radar. In fact, some of these are on most military aircraft. It's what radomes are made of. If the material enclosing the radar at the front of your f-22 wasn't transparent to radar waves, the radar couldn't see anything.
" Republicans jump on Biden"
ReplyDeleteComment deleted. We're not going to do politics.
"Our very best surveillance equipment, networks, and software couldn’t see a balloon."
ReplyDeleteThere may be some good news here. The detection/ reaction problems we appear to have may be shared with the chinese. It is certainly not automatic, but omniscience is probably not a quality that they have mastered either. The problem is taking advantage of it without taking advantage of us too much.
As an old USN OS, this official "Domain Awareness Gap" storyline isn't particularly credible.
DeleteWhen the Japanese conducted the their Fu-Go bomb balloon campaign against the US in WWII, radar was quickly deployed to detect them, and direct fightsrs for intercepts. Sure the detection rates were low, but this was 7 decades ago when radar was still very new.
After WWII, when the US launched surveillance balloons against the USSR, the Soviets quickly adapted radars provided to them through lend-lease to detect them and provide intercept info for MIG 15's.
And now, in 2022, we have a "Domain Awareness Gap".?
Somebody needs to be fired for incompetence.
A non-balloon but related example has been on British TV recently.
ReplyDeleteThere's currently a documentary airing about the QE's first deployment. While she was in the Eastern Med, she was being shadowed by Russian ships but managed to give them the slip, despite being just a few miles away.
Either radars weren't on (in which case, their quality is irrelevant during EMCON) or they weren't capable of tracking a 65,000 tonne carrier (and several escorts) at relatively short range.
Lofty.
That story strikes me as extremely unlikely and is probably just a PR spin. Countries constantly shadow each other's naval forces and the shadowing assets come and go. A shadowing asset probably left of its own accord and someone decided to claim a 'victory'. This is exactly what China routinely does when we conduct a FONOPS and they claim to have chased us away.
DeleteTruthfully, Skipper, I don't know why they didn't shoot it down with their guns. Why waste a $500,000 AIM-9 Sidewinder? Tempest in a teapot, let no incident go to waste for a childish rant, that's their creed.
DeleteI did wonder about the validity myself but the language used definitely implied that it was an 'escape' through various course changes and an escort playing the part of a road block.
DeleteThe Russian ship was also back on QE the following day after they'd been spotted again by aircraft (operating out of Syria I think). Suggesting that it hadn't returned to base, etc.
As you say, probably PR for the cameras though. After all, there were also a lot of positive words about the F35 hehe.
Lofty.
"secretly hates the country they are working for"
ReplyDeleteComment deleted. Feel free to remove the idiotic aspects and repost.
The problem could be we actually detected everything, however, because we detect everything we dismissed them as false alarms like storm warning below:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.weather.gov/bmx/research_falsealarms
After all on the radar screen a balloon may look like a seagull or some cloud etc.
On and I should add the filtering aspect of our radar screens allows us to "filter" away false contacts to not have such a cluttered radar screen (think aircraft flying close to the ground to hide in the radar clutter) thus the balloons who were "undetected" were actually detected by filtered away.
Delete"The Pentagon said over the weekend that Chinese spy balloons had briefly flown over the United States at least three times during President Donald Trump's administration and one previously under President Joe Biden."
ReplyDelete"I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that's a domain awareness gap," VanHerck said.[1]
It was stated that these balloons crossed US airspace at least four times without being detected. If they were not detected then how is it now known that at least four seperate crossings took place.
If not previously detected, then how long has/could this activity have been going on for?
Also, if not previously detected, then what has changed that permitted awareness on this occasion?
" what has changed that permitted awareness on this occasion?"
DeletePeople saw it!
Don't reveal sources and methods. HUMINT or going back and looking at data once we know what we should have been looking for. Literally Jonesy slowing down that tape to tell the Red October's noise was man made.
DeleteNo people did not "see" it. It was detected and monitored north of the Aleutian Islands before it then travelled into Canadian Airspace. The earliest "sightings" were over Montana.
DeleteSo again...what change had taken place that now enabled it to be discovered and tracked by NORAD.
The US pioneered High Altitude Balloon surveillance ops. After WWII, German immigrant Otto C Winzen -then working for the General Mills company- developed the lightweight polyethylene gas envelope which made getting to the high altitudes possible.
ReplyDeleteUnder various project names, thousands of HABs were launched for both pure research and direct surveillance missions into the early 60's.
See Project Genetrix...
As more time elapses since the event concluded, more information gradually trickles out. No less than two (2) U-2S Dragon Lady's had shadowed the balloon as it transited across the Continental United States. The U-2S's flew at least 70,000 feet, roughly 8,000 feet about the balloon.
ReplyDelete(source: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/u-2-spy-planes-snooped-on-chinese-surveillance-balloon)
As far as using an AIM-9X instead of the M61A2, I am reposting apart of my pot from the initial blog about the balloon:
The balloon was at about 62,000 feet when the F-22 fired a single AIM-9X from its altitude of 58,000 feet.
The AIM-9X was used because it will target what object an F-22 pilot is looking at. 10-mile or so effective range. The M-61A2 Vulcan has an effective range of 2000 feet or so and the F-22 only carries about 460-480 rounds of 20mm ammunition, coupled with a rate of fire of 4,000 to 6,000 rounds per minute with a dispersion of 8 milliradians diameter, 80 percent circle.
(Milliradians or MILS is a unit of measurement dividing radians in a circle. A radian equals about 57.3 degrees. There are 1000 Milliradians in 1 radian. Basically, that translates to approximately 6,283 MILs in a circle (360 degrees). In artillery, we use MILS because they are a hell of a lot more accurate than Degrees (17.78 MILS per Degree). (FYI)
(Sources: https://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/aim-9x-sidewinder-air-to-air-missile/, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11714125/How-200m-F-22-Raptor-shot-Chinese-spy-balloon-400k-Sidewinder-missile.html, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military//systems//////////aircraft/systems/m61.html,
You've described a Sidewinder and a Vulcan but nothing about that says why the decision was made to use a missile instead of bullets. I note that the video of the event showed no explosion. Presumably, the missile passed through the balloon causing it to lose gas and descend rapidly. Bullets would have shredded the material equally well and been much cheaper. The gun shoots where the pilot aims it so no problem there.
DeleteIf you know why the missile was chosen, please explain!
Sure thing, Com! It is rather simple. The AIM-9 as you know is a heat-seeking/IR-guided AAM. It is an all aspect missile. So, the balloon had solar panels and it made sense to use the Sidewinder instead of a close-in kill attempt with the M61. Less risk to pilot and aircraft and the Sidewinder getting a hit/kill was the surer and safer bet.
DeleteYou don't know what was contained in the balloon/payload. Evidently, explosives were a concern when they started recovery operations, they brought in a Navy EOD team, I do believe.
The pressure in the balloon is very close to the pressure outside the balloon, its not a birthday party. Bullets make holes, the aim-9x explosion rapidly moves air, shreding the ballon and the lighter than air contents within. What do you think an explosion at 62k feet looks like where there is almost no atmosphere, less Oxygen, and no fuel from an aircraft to make the flame you are used to seeing?
Delete"What do you think an explosion at 62k feet looks like where there is almost no atmosphere, less Oxygen, and no fuel from an aircraft to make the flame you are used to seeing?"
DeleteYou've taken a small bit of correct knowledge (burning requires oxygen) and drawn an incorrect conclusion. Here's a quote from a Worldbuilder site that explains nicely:
*begin quote*
"Almost all currently used explosives have an oxidant (or it's equivalent) "built-in". They already work in space, under water, etc just as well.
Let's look at thermite (which is not an explosive, but incendiary, but it's easy to understand) as an example. It consists of pure aluminium and iron oxide. The aluminium burns by taking the oxygen from iron oxide, resulting in aluminium oxide (slag) and molten iron. The energy of burning aluminium is greater than the energy of "un-burning" iron, so the net result is still hellish fire. It burns the aluminium with oxygen, but it doesn't use external oxygen. Thus, works in space.
The only kind ordnance I know about that won't work in space are thermobarics (fuel-air explosives), but they're extremely rare even with all that oxygen readily available on Earth."
Explosives cannot rely on mixing with anything, including atmospheric oxygen, as a part of the exploding process because to actually explode, it has to go out all at once. If it had to wait for the outer layers to oxidize and expose the inner layers to oxygen - that's how a bonfire works, not an explosion."
*end quote*
Torpedoes explode underwater, guns can shoot underwater, missiles would explode in space, and so on. True, there would be no oxygen to support supplemental burning but the initial explosion would look like a typical, fiery explosion.
I don't know the exact warhead composition of a Sidewinder but, presumably, it has an oxidant or produces an oxidant as part of its chemical reaction.
It uses a Annular Blast Fragmentation Warhead or A Continuous-Rod Warhead:
DeleteA continuous-rod warhead is a specialized munition exhibiting an annular blast fragmentation pattern, thus when exploding it spreads into a large circle cutting through target. It is used in anti-aircraft and anti-missile missiles.
(FYI: The AIM-9X is the first version of the AIM-9 that can be used against ground targets).
Guns have been tried against a much smaller weather balloon in recent years (over Canada); two CF-18s shot three balloon with a thousand rounds of 20mm and it stayed aloft for several more days. 20mm holes in a sphere dozens of meters across, with a pressure differential of 1 psi or less, simply don’t leak enough to bring down a large balloon quickly. Since we were trying to bring down this balloon inside our territorial waters, and it was moving at a good clip, a missile was the only sure choice.
Deletehttps://news.yahoo.com/weather-balloon-went-rogue-almost-161314996.html
The explosive charge is PBXN-3 which is 85% HMX and 15% Zytel 63. Zytel is a polymer Resin, the HMX is the explosive with chemical formula C4H8N8O8.
DeleteThermite is an incendiary and among its uses has often been combined with an explosive.
Oxygen is present in a chemical explosive reaction, that release of energy can rapidly release heat, but doesn't equal "fire."
We're struggling with the fog of peace. Imagine what the fog of war is going to be like.
ReplyDeleteLutefisk
Maybe I should have said the partly sunny of peace vs the fog of war.
DeleteLutefisk
They'll land troops on Thailand instead of Taiwan, but no biggie.
DeleteOff topic : According to an article in Defense News, all 4 of the jet thrust deflectors failed and the USS Ford had to return to port. This advanced carrier has had many technical issues over the years !
ReplyDeleteHere's that article about the Ford's 2022 failures.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.defensenews.com/naval/2023/02/03/navy-replaces-troubled-part-on-ford-carrier-after-test-cancelation/
The Navy insists all is working great on the Ford.
Also, Craig Hooper slaps down the Ford.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2023/01/25/americas-new-aircraft-carrier-struggled-to-certify-pilots-before-2022-deployment/?sh=7cc4eaa14d55
If this balloon is dangerous, why not shoot it down while approached Alaska? If it is harmless, why shoot it down?
ReplyDeleteEx post facto - to learn and demonstrate we can exert our will any time we want. In this case, on their Valentine's Day.
DeleteApparently the balloon continued sharing intelligence it's entire trip? I foolishly was willing to give the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt when they said they were jamming the balloons transmissions during it's cross-country tour (monitoring it and learning about it risk-free).
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'd call this dereliction of duty. Not shooting this down when first detected is another shocking case of negligence. Nothing was learned from the disastrous evacuation from Afghanistan. It's business as usual, competence optional.
How do we fire half that building tomorrow?