Balloon Antics
What’s that Chinese balloon all about?
Photograph, KSVI-TV (Billing, MT)
Americans – and others! – have been fixated on the saga of the Chinese high-altitude balloon that has been drifting across the US over the past couple of days. The legacy media are working overtime to downplay the significance of the unauthorized overflight and blatant violation of US airspace and sovereignty by the Chinese communists, as well as to excuse the cowardly inaction by the Biden regime.
Take for instance excerpts from this NBC News report on 2 February (emphasis added):
The U.S. military has been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northern U.S. for the past few days…
On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin convened a meeting of senior military and defense leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, NORTHCOM/NORAD Commander Gen. Glen VanHerck, and other combatant commanders….
The leaders reviewed the threat profile of the Chinese stratospheric balloon and possible response options, and ultimately decided not to recommend taking it out kinetically, because of the risk to safety and security of people on the ground from the possible debris field. Pentagon leaders presented the options to President Joe Biden on Wednesday.
“Currently we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective over and above what the PRC can do through other means,” the senior defense official said. “Nevertheless we are taking all necessary steps to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information.” The official said the balloon does not pose a threat to civil aviation because of its altitude.
The official said the U.S. military will continue to monitor it closely and will keep the option of taking out the balloon on the table.
So the balloon’s presence was known for days, but the Biden crew didn’t want to inform the public of China’s violation of US airspace. There was no decision to shoot down the balloon for public safety concerns despite the fact that it loitered over sparsely populated central-eastern Montana. The excuse to “let it continue its flight” was that the ChiComs aren’t getting any real value-added from the balloon – as if surveillance collection is the only possible reason for its incursion into US airspace. And senior DoD leaders recommended against shooting down the balloon (a highly unlikely NATSEC decision result since DoD leadership is nominally more aggressive in making recommendations in such matters than the White House, which takes into account “political considerations”). And absolutely no good reason has been forthcoming for why the balloon was allowed to complete its mission without being shot down. Complete misdirection and excuse-making!
The Biden cheerleaders at NBC are eager to convey that the regime is “on the job,” and that Americans should not be concerned about the Chinese balloon. But as usual with issues that are damaging to Biden/Democrat political interests, the passage of time exposes other inconvenient truths that answer some of the questions of critiques and average Americans.
And of course, the legacy media will change their narrative when facts force them to do so (or they will conveniently ignore those facts!). A good rule of thumb to follow in tracking the truth or fiction of sensational stories is to “wait 48-72 hours after the initial report, and the real facts will start to seep out.” Sometimes – for example the Trump-Russia collusion hoax – it takes years for the truth to come out!
That is also the case with “Balloon-gate”!
Here are some facts and observations that deviate from the legacy media spin that Biden and company have everything under control.
The NBC article above omits the reason why the story only broke after the balloon was already in US airspace over Malmstrom AFB in Montana. As noted here, “Malmstrom is home to 150 Minuteman III ICBMs, 50 in each of 3 squadrons, the 10th, the 12th, and the 490th. A detailed life extension program is under way to keep the missiles safe, secure, and reliable well into the 21st Century.” The reality is that the balloon was spotted by civilian observers, and local Montana media broke the story, which forced the Biden DoD to issue formal statements to the press about the situation.
Why was there no national reporting of the balloon when it first violated US airspace over the Aleutians days earlier? Bloomberg speculated that the Biden regime wanted to keep the balloon’s presence under wraps to avoid derailing Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s scheduled trip to Beijing. That smells like more Biden kowtowing to Xi Jinping, i.e., Blinken’s trip is more important than informing the American public of China’s blatant violation of US sovereignty. After the embarrassing story broke, Blinken “postponed his upcoming trip to China in response to the flying of a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the United States,” as reported by CNN on 3 February.
Republicans – and even a few Democrats – were not as sanguine as the Biden White House about the Chinese balloon and demand “kinetic action.” As reported by Bill Gertz at The Washington Times:
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican, urged the administration to take action against the spy balloon.
“This balloon should have never been allowed to enter U.S. airspace,” Mr. McCaul said. “Instead, the Biden administration allowed it to continue so that it now poses a direct and ongoing national security threat to the U.S. homeland, while at the same time threatening the privacy of every American. I am calling on the Biden administration to quickly take steps to remove the Chinese spy balloon from U.S. airspace.”
As reported here, in an ongoing contest for control and dominance in the “near space environment,” Chinese balloons and airships have also been harassing India, Japan, the Philippines, and Kauai in recent years.
The Chinese foreign ministry claimed that the balloon is a weather balloon that had “deviated far from its planned course,” as reported here. “The airship is from China. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes,” said the foreign ministry spokesperson. They even blamed it on force majeure (an event or effect that cannot be reasonably anticipated or controlled; an act of God).
Oh, really? How many weather balloons are capable of maneuvering? There are many possible purposes/missions being carried out by that balloon. Here are some of those possibilities based on informed speculation for this and future balloon missions (consider this particular balloon a “test case”):
Dispersal of chemical weapons or more biological diseases. Weaponized biological warfare agents, including bacteria and viruses, could be released that are designed to rapidly spread and attack vital US food crops in the American heartland, or to infect cattle and swine with a fatal disease such as a weaponized variant of hoof and mouth or anthrax, or to infect or incapacitate human beings.
Collecting upper atmospheric weather data for mid-course corrections of ICBMs and hypersonic missiles. From the Gertz article linked above: “Military analysts suspect the balloon, which can take high-resolution images and measure temperatures, atmospheric and weather conditions, is considered a ‘near-space’ system. As such, the information gathered from the balloon could be used by the Chinese military to help direct ICBMs.”
A standard surveillance mission. Just what are those arrays under that balloon, anyway? Solar panels or sensor collection systems? Photographic reconnaissance of sensitive US locations without permission, as well as collection of sensitive US infrastructure data, is a possibility for a future balloon mission if not this one. Conversely, the balloon may have been meant to test US surveillance and tracking capabilities of near-space objects.
A practice mission for a future low-altitude Electro-Magnetic Pulse attack. Multiple low-altitude EMP balloons could take out wide swaths of electrical components and communications.
Still other possibilities include:
Cloud seeding and weather disruption
Jamming and interference with commercial and military communications systems
Probing the ability of the US to shoot down a balloon at 60,000, as well as to gauge US geopolitical response in general to the balloon overflight
An information warfare psyop to psychologically condition Americans to Chinese hegemony by showing the weakness of the current administration
Let your mind wander, and the possibilities are virtually endless!
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
While the Biden crew dithered, the balloon drifted over sensitive military installations in the heart of America - on its merry way without any impedance from the US whatsoever. And after the balloon completed its unknown mission by overflying much of the US, it was finally shot down over the Carolina coastline today (4 Feb). The PLA generals are probably high-fiving each other in Beijing! The fecklessness of the Biden regime knows no bounds.
The end.