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Merged Chinese balloon raises hackles in US

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U.S. officials first detected the balloon and its payload on January 28 when it entered U.S. airspace near the Aleutian Islands.
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That's the earliest official detection date. Somehow though, the balloon's track is known at least well enough to show a map of its entire life's journey, from its point of origin in China to its tragic demise over territorial waters off NC.
Maybe someone is trying to tell China something. Or maybe someone is just making shit up, But I'd bet that hordes of these things are known to US intelligence, and most are probably detected routinely upon or shortly after their launch. If that is the case, it is of course to the US' advantage to refrain from giving away that capability, though I'm sure Trump (if he was in office) would let it slip if he thought it would improve his image for one 2-day news cycle.
marc said:
Chinese probably got much more intelligence information on any trip they made to Mar-a-Lago by just listening to the blowhard bragging, or looking around for stray papers
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^^^ THAT
 
A lot of people (especially Republicans) seem to be critical of how the Biden government handled the Chinese balloon caper, but the fact is that the balloon was highly visible from the ground and could not just be ignored. That meant that Biden would be criticized no matter what he did. When he didn't shoot it down immediately, Republicans saw that as an opportunity to frame him as a weak and timid president. Biden is fairly weak politically, given his drop in popularity and the takeover of the House by Republicans, so he needed to respond vigorously to what was perceived as a deliberate insult from China. The Blinken trip had to be cancelled, and he had to shoot down the balloon. Otherwise, the embarrassment would just have gotten worse. It didn't matter that the intelligence information gathered by the balloon wasn't much of a national security threat. It was the spot that the Chinese activity had put him in.

Whether China intended to derail the Blinken visit or not is a serious question. Most analysts that I've read seem to think it probably wasn't, but there is a possibility that Xi and his advisors simply miscalculated the effect that their little spy mission would have in the US. It is also possible that they weren't fully paying attention to the timing of their planned spy mission in conjunction with a major diplomatic visit from the US Secretary of State. I find that hard to believe, but the Chinese leaders can be just as incompetent as leaders in any other country. The balloon mission could have been an unintended insult on their part.
 
Elixir said:
RW morons showing their true colors …

Former First Son Donald Trump Jr.tweeted to his followers that if the government won’t take down the balloon “perhaps we just let the good people of Montana do their thing… I imagine they have the capability and the resolve to do it all themselves. “
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I’m pretty sure that nobody on this forum - even our Trumpsters - is THAT stupid. But Trumpsuckers writ large are truly high functioning idiots. Some of the people they elected to govern them are racking up big points by posing with assault rifles pointed at the sky, as if their toys could bring down a child’s balloon at 60,000 feet, let alone a Chinese spy balloon. Just for scale, a liberal assessment of the vertical range of an AR- type weapon -the height that a bullet fired straight up a bullet fired straight up could attain - would be about a mile on a good day. ONE mile, not five. And at one mile, that bullet wouldn’t be moving any faster than you could throw it.
Trumpy politicians posing that way are a perfect representation of conservotard impotence. I can’t imagine anything much more embarrassing.
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A true rightwinger would demand that the Second Amendment guarantees their right to an AIM Sidewinder and the fact they are relegated to an AR-15 is a gross infringement on their Constitutional rights. Maybe that is the statement they are really making??
 
Elixir said:
Republicans have not mentioned the advantages gained by letting it fly and observing it after disabling its intelligence gathering capability. Maybe they don’t believe in that. Or maybe they’re so stupid that they think Montana ranchers could have shot it down.

House Representative Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) told his Twitter followers to “take the shot.” Zinke wrote, “in Montana we do not bow. We shoot it down.”
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In the case of scandal-plagued politicians, Montana doesn't shoot them down. They shoot them back into public office. See A guide to the 18 federal investigations into Ryan Zinke.
 
Copernicus said:
Loren Pechtel said:
...I don't think it's a case of marking at all, but rather informing the missile of where to look for it's target. Sidewinders are fire-and-forget weapons.
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You look at the technology from the perspective of a human pilot, who "fires and forgets". As a former AI researcher, I look at it more in terms of what the automation software is doing. So to "mark" an object is to make the system notice, categorize, and remember. That would be essentially "informing the missile of where to look for its target". So we aren't really in disagreement on that issue. What is interesting to me is the question of whether the automation is integrating or "fusing" different sensor signals to identify the target. The issue with heat-seeking missiles would be to circumvent defensive measures to confuse it with false positive heat signatures. The countermeasures would need to rely on alternative sensor technology such as LiDAR targeting. I don't know whether sidewinders have had that capability added. The Chinese-authored article I posted a link to suggests that China has not yet mastered the technology. They would certainly be interested in knowing whether the US has and, if so, what the target could respond with as a countermeasure. But I just don't know how the AIM-9X has been upgraded from earlier versions. In any case, the data from the balloon package could potentially have been relayed back to China in real time through satellite links. The whole point of sending that balloon in was probably long planned in advance, and the upcoming diplomatic visit could have provided an opportunistic incentive to launch the balloon at this time. After all, the Chinese weren't expecting Blinken's visit to do them much good anyway.
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There are two basic technologies in use:

Heat seeking, in the US arsenal that's the Sidewinder.

Radar guided, in the US arsenal that's the Sparrow (requires the plane to illuminate the target) and AMRAAM (self-contained, fire and forget) missiles.

I'm not aware of anything that uses LiDAR, but the British have the StarStreak which uses a laser on the launcher to illuminate the target--but the laser doesn't actually track anything, it requires the operator to track the target well enough that the laser's pattern paints it. The missile homes on the reflection.
 
Elixir said:
U.S. officials first detected the balloon and its payload on January 28 when it entered U.S. airspace near the Aleutian Islands.
Click to expand...
That's the earliest official detection date. Somehow though, the balloon's track is known at least well enough to show a map of its entire life's journey, from its point of origin in China to its tragic demise over territorial waters off NC.
Maybe someone is trying to tell China something. Or maybe someone is just making shit up, But I'd bet that hordes of these things are known to US intelligence, and most are probably detected routinely upon or shortly after their launch. If that is the case, it is of course to the US' advantage to refrain from giving away that capability, though I'm sure Trump (if he was in office) would let it slip if he thought it would improve his image for one 2-day news cycle.
marc said:
Chinese probably got much more intelligence information on any trip they made to Mar-a-Lago by just listening to the blowhard bragging, or looking around for stray papers
Click to expand...

^^^ THAT
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Yup. This one doesn't seem to have gone anywhere sensitive so the government had no reason to take any action.
 
For those looking at the technical aspects of the missile. The AIM-9X specifically uses thermal imaging. This is a more advanced form of target acquisition combining imagery with thermal overlay, so it's a bit of both, and much more robust obviously, than the original AIM-9 deployed in the mid 50s.
 
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The US now claims to have found evidence that the balloon was designed to spy on communications.

Chinese spy balloon contained technology to monitor communication signals, US says​


Of course, it is hypocritical for the US to act shocked at such behavior, since we conduct the same kinds of spy activities against China and other countries all the time. What turns this into such an international scandal is that the Chinese did it in such a blatant way, not as part of a truly covert activity. There was no way that the US could pretend not to notice a balloon that was highly visible from the ground, and there was no way that a major diplomatic visit to China could take place while the balloon was so visibly conducting surveillance over US territory. The only question is whether the Chinese government really intended this as a provocation or whether it simply didn't really understand the way their behavior would be perceived. It was clumsy on their part.

The balloon itself was manufactured by a company in China that has ties to the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). Apparently, they advertise the use of their balloons for such purposes, and they are understandably proud of their products. However, they are also now a possible target for sanctions by the US, which would only further exacerbate US relations with China.
 
Copernicus said:
The US now claims to have found evidence that the balloon was designed to spy on communications.

Chinese spy balloon contained technology to monitor communication signals, US says​


Of course, it is hypocritical for the US to act shocked at such behavior, since we conduct the same kinds of spy activities against China and other countries all the time. What turns this into such an international scandal is that the Chinese did it in such a blatant way, not as part of a truly covert activity. There was no way that the US could pretend not to notice a balloon that was highly visible from the ground, and there was no way that a major diplomatic visit to China could take place while the balloon was so visibly conducting surveillance over US territory. The only question is whether the Chinese government really intended this as a provocation or whether it simply didn't really understand the way their behavior would be perceived. It was clumsy on their part.

The balloon itself was manufactured by a company in China that has ties to the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). Apparently, they advertise the use of their balloons for such purposes, and they are understandably proud of their products. However, they are also now a possible target for sanctions by the US, which would only further exacerbate US relations with China.
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All major power spy on all major powers. They pretend outrage when they are stopped in a public fashion.

Under the normal rules of the game when spies are captured they're traded for spies the other side captures. Unfortunately, Russia and China don't seem to be honoring the rules anymore and are resorting to hostage-taking in response to their guys being captured.
 
Copernicus said:
The balloon itself was manufactured by a company in China that has ties to the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA).
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Are there any companies in China that do not have ties to the PLA?

It's basically impossible to operate any kind of business in China without at least some connection to the PLA at some level, even if it's just having a friend of a friend who is locally influential in the PLA, to block your competitors from using their friends of friends to get the PLA to obstruct your business activities.

I recall being asked to delay a shipment of metformin (diabetes medication) to Guangzhou, because our customer there had heard rumours that his competitor had arranged for Chinese customs to do a "random" search and seizure that would have led to the shipment being delayed for several months. He resolved this in less than a week, because his daughter was at school with the daughter of the commander of the local PLA district, and through that contact he arranged for the goods to be collected from Hong Kong by PLA trucks, which customs officials wouldn't be able to stop and search at the border of the SAR. His exact words to me were "Army in China is big boss. Not even Customs will take on Army".
 
www.nbcnews.com

U.S. shoots down 'high-altitude object' over Alaskan airspace, White House says

The object was flying at 40,000 feet and "posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight," National Security Council official John Kirby said. Biden ordered the military to shoot it down.
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military on Friday afternoon shot down a "high-altitude object" flying over Alaskan airspace and Arctic waters, National Security Council official John Kirby confirmed at the White House.

The Pentagon had been tracking the object over the last 24 hours, he said.


"The object was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight," Kirby told reporters during the White House briefing. "Out of an abundance of caution, and at the recommendation of the Pentagon, President Biden ordered the military to down the object and they did and it came inside our territorial waters and those waters right now are frozen."

Fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command took down the object "within the last hour," Kirby said around 2:30 p.m. ET. The pilots were able to determine that it was “unmanned” before it was shot down, he added.
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"Unmanned"???

OMG!!!! Aliens!!!! ;)

Meanwhile, the GOP reacts with rage over over-reacting President Biden who is recklessly attacking things and will drive the US into war.
 
bilby said:
Copernicus said:
The balloon itself was manufactured by a company in China that has ties to the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA).
Click to expand...
Are there any companies in China that do not have ties to the PLA?

It's basically impossible to operate any kind of business in China without at least some connection to the PLA at some level, even if it's just having a friend of a friend who is locally influential in the PLA, to block your competitors from using their friends of friends to get the PLA to obstruct your business activities.

I recall being asked to delay a shipment of metformin (diabetes medication) to Guangzhou, because our customer there had heard rumours that his competitor had arranged for Chinese customs to do a "random" search and seizure that would have led to the shipment being delayed for several months. He resolved this in less than a week, because his daughter was at school with the daughter of the commander of the local PLA district, and through that contact he arranged for the goods to be collected from Hong Kong by PLA trucks, which customs officials wouldn't be able to stop and search at the border of the SAR. His exact words to me were "Army in China is big boss. Not even Customs will take on Army".
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Disagree--small businesses can operate without dealing with the PLA. You're right about anybody big, though.
 
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