> The Pentagon downed an unidentified object over Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden, according to U.S. officials.
> Mr. Kirby said the object was traveling at 40,000 feet. He said officials were describing it as an object because that was the best description they had of it.
> A recovery effort on the debris will be made, Mr. Kirby said. He said the object was “roughly the size of a small car” — much smaller than the spy balloon that had a payload the size of multiple buses.
From that very link you can find info on the recent litigation accusing the government of an errant missile hit. There is enough evidence to bring forth the suit whether you agree it is a conspiracy or not.
Civil suits are incredibly easy to push through (which is why there are various civil suits from assassinations and murders, even if the underlaying accused person/entity was found innocent), it doesn't mean it happened.
re: evidence, I'm just quoting what the article says:
The wrongful death suit claims that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) evidence has "emerged proving that TWA 800’s explosion was not caused by any defect in the airplane, but instead by an errant United States missile fired at aerial target drones flying nearby."
I am curious to see how this turns out and how it is refuted.
Can't find anything remotely recent on a list of shoot-down incidents on Wikipedia (aside from these balloons), but I'd not be surprised if a few smuggling-related drones have been shot down in the last couple decades, depending on what we're counting.
> Either it was shoot down, or would have been later
The jets were scrambled in such a hurry to intercept Flight 93 that they weren’t loaded with ammunition. I’m afraid that the plan was to collide the fighters with the plane if necessary. It was a suicide mission. [1] However, we have plenty of evidence that the passengers resisted and in the course of that the plane crashed.
I'd also recommend taking a look at "The Only Plane in the Sky" by Garrett Graff, which is an oral history of 9/11; basically, a huge number of in-person interviews that construct a timeline of the days leading up to, during, and after 9/11, including those of the pilots who went up in the fighters, knowing that should they need to, mid-air collision was the only option if they needed to intercept something. For what it's worth: a great read, but a tough one. I'm sure you won't have trouble finding a book link, but Politico [1] has an excerpt if you're interested.
"One of the most unusual military actions of World War II came in the form of Japanese balloon bombs, or “Fugos,” directed at the mainland United States. Starting in 1944, the Japanese military constructed and launched over 9,000 high-altitude balloons, each loaded with nearly 50 pounds of anti-personnel and incendiary explosives. Amazingly, these unmanned balloons originated from over 5,000 miles away in the Japanese home islands. After being launched, the specially designed hydrogen balloons would ascend to an altitude of 30,000 feet and ride the jet stream across the Pacific Ocean to the mainland United States. Their bombs were triggered to drop after the three-day journey was complete—hopefully over a city or wooded region that would catch fire.
Nearly 350 of the bombs actually made it across the Pacific, and several were intercepted or shot down by the U.S. military. From 1944 to 1945, balloon bombs were spotted in more than 15 states—some as far east as Michigan and Iowa. The only fatalities came from a single incident in Oregon, where a pregnant woman and five children were killed in an explosion after coming across one of the downed balloons. Their deaths are considered the only combat casualties to occur on U.S. soil during World War II."
Much like this story, many Japanese planners did not appreciate the vast size of the American west. A hundred random firebombs were basically irrelevant compared to the many thousands of yearly lighting strikes that also regularly cause fires. Who knows how many Japanese balloons are out there hanging from some tree undiscovered.
That's what's so surprising to me nowadays I'd just assume they'd have googled and found a paper by some Japanese scientists, but back then someone from the US must have taken those probes across Japan.
That's an interesting aspect to this story to me. Maybe it was truly based on intel and the geological survey was a farce to justify the facilities targeting. That wouldn't surprise me, there's a ton of lore around WWII and military activity in general.
Or maybe the US government chooses to fund all areas of research, like mineral surveys, in the hopes they can call on a field of knowledge repository to use in a war machine.
I'd like to believe there is a soil library that staff were doing microscope slide searches late into the night.
Wow that's really fascinating. I wonder what sorts of properties allow geologists to characterize sand to that level
Also wonder how effective it is. Especially nowadays in such an interconnected world where products, and especially sand, could be coming from the opposite side of the globe
It being varied doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that it doesn't vary that much within a sample. That you can parse out specific patterns or characteristics enough to figure out exactly where this sample of sand is from
Asking why Japan invaded the Aleutians is a fun question for flat earthers. On most map projections it's way out of the way but on a globe if you draw a geodesic from Tokyo to Seattle (or Sapporo to San Diego and Los Angeles) it's basically halfway.
Now compare that to the 800+ indigenous Aleutians that were interned during WW2, many of which died in the American concentration -- err, I mean internment -- camps. The Aleutian people were also legal citizens of the US.
Edit: some more info. 881 Aleuts were gathered up, endured slave labor, and 118 died from lack of food, warmth or medical care. All extremely preventable as is evidenced by the camp just 30 miles away of around 700 Nazi POWs. All 700 returned home alive and in good health. Historian Stan Cohen even wrote, "All in all, the German imprisonment in Alaska was quite pleasant."
Thanks for that link, I knew some Americans were relocated in Alaska but I didn't realize there were internment/concentration camps. I also didn't know about the Nazi POWs kept there during the war.
The last two paragraphs are a pathetic conclusion from the governement.
Hawaii was still an "incorporated territory" of the US though, surely it would have qualified as "US soil"? I gather at least some deaths did occur in Honolulu itself too.
The Pentagon showed during the whole Afghanistan situation that they are perfectly comfortable making Biden look bad to the press. I see no reason why they would lie to run cover for him now.
I've got a fanciful notion that the "foo fighters" are living creatures. The Air Force supposedly gave someone some of the excretions to examine and they found "unearthly isotopes" or some such.
I figure something that lives, say, a couple hundred miles down inside a planet might only even notice the surface phenomenon that are the most dense, energetic, and anomalous (certainly at first), and pay more attention to those things. How might such beings interact with us and could we discern their efforts as such if we wanted?
Working hypothese 1: High school achieved the impossible. Not a single student taking a selfie while doing <big cool thing that will ignite my instagram>
Working hypothese 2: The Chinese shaped the balloon as a d*ck so it appears blurred in all videos and nobody can figure out what is that, or describe its shape. Invisible ninja genius move.
Probably didn't help that an Air Force general was openly and loudly proclaiming that war is inevitable. I looked up some speeches of his, and he is off the rails, like the German general in All Quiet Along the Western Front.
Would be great if just more people had read this great book nowadays (and please, not watch that super bad recent movie that doesn't deserve to bear the same title (: ).
And cannot belief statesman proclaiming that now everywhere :( War should always be seen as evitable, at least that belief needs to hold up til the last second.. and even further. But who am I...
I mean, it's nothing compared to the internal speeches that China gives its troops. Heck it's nothing compared to the speeches Xi gives internally to troops. Chinese troops are currently training on their missile corp on models of US aircraft carriers.
My understanding is their vaccine doesn't work at all, they don't have a strong emergency medical care system, thus it was the only real option for them.
Why would you need to police population in case of war for returning Taiwan? It will be very popular war and you definitely won't need to lock people down.
Look at Russia as an example. The war has been longer and less popular than expected and economic sanctions have hurt the working class the most.
China imports 66%-75% of its oil. That would drop dramatically in a hot war, as oil imports via the South China Sea would likely be blocked. This would require any imports to sail around Australia, which would likely be stopped by the US.
Russia would happily sell China oil, but it doesn't produce nearly enough to cover the gap.
If anything, war is much more popular in Russia than expected. There are no widespread protests, draft went ok, etc. Putin is still popular.
I do not think oil is such a big problem. China import is 10mln barrels while Russia exports is 5mln barrels, Kazakhstan is 1.2mln barrels. I am sure they can transport Iranian oil if needed. What will also happen is that Russia will buy oil on international market to resell to China. There is no infrastructure now to transport that much oil but it can be built surprisingly fast. Germany just demonstrated that it's possible to built LNG terminal in six months. If you ignore property rights and all enviromental regulation and enlist military you can built trans-asia pipeline in a few months. China can also import oil thru Vietnam.
Like everything I think this is at least a half truth. COVID did happen but probably not intentionally. And then China (And a few other countries) saw it as a great excuse to try a few things out on the general population and see what they could get away with.
As with speculation about US Covid measures being some kind of training or testing for god-knows-what crazy thing, the political and economic costs of the measures are far too high for those to make any sense as major motivations.
That's been going on for decades, and supposedly the balloons are nothing new. What's changed is the USA response, in terms of the American general's rhetoric and the coverage and downing of balloons. So there's been a shift on the part of the USA.
That's a lie. It started in 2012 but it took until the middle of the 2010s before they started openly threatening war. This is not some status quo situation that the US General upended. China's been escalating toward war since Xi took over. I mean before Xi it was hide your strength bide your time.
Different than threatening war with US. Edit and yes, it stepped up in 2012 when Xi took over. Started with Japan and has migrated to aggression against US and allies.
Edit: Taiwan crisis wasn't great, but it ended when the US sailed an aircraft carrier through Strait of Taiwan. So while it wasn't great, it wasn't like they were threatening war against US.
Some of the propaganda videos people are posting on douyin (OG tiktok) are hilarious (even if the historical events they're inspired by are very serious). It's interesting to compare foreign propaganda about the US military to US propaganda about foreign militaries.
> Minihan said in the memo that because both Taiwan and the U.S. will have presidential elections in 2024, the U.S. will be “distracted,” and Chinese President Xi Jinping will have an opportunity to move on Taiwan.
You need to read the full memo, sent out as an email and watch his prior speeches. The memo appears to have been admonished by actual national security experts. Irregardless of the accuracy, there are better ways to handle these things, and he doesn't seem to have proper authority to make those statements.
Parent is presumably talking about recent comments by Gen. Mike Minihan (Air Mobility Command).
IMHO, people/news are blowing it out of proportion.
If the boss of FedEx said we're going to end up in a war with China, how much does that say about what defense contractors are doing?
What it was probably actually about was shocking the troops assigned to AMC, establishing an important mission and raising morale, and declaring business as usual was no longer acceptable.
Gotta be creative to make people excited about moving supplies.
See also: every ridiculous statement by every startup CEO in a bubble, ever
I'd say it feels like a return to the era of cold war tensions but I wouldn't know, I was born around when the Berlin Wall fell. What say you older HNers, is this what it was like?
The Cold War had expectations, guardrails, rules. Those don't exist in the current setup. China didn't even pick up the emergency hotline in the first balloon crisis.
Honestly, I've been watching this unfold since 2012 and the point where we are now is pretty bleak. Unless something intervenes to change the course of where things are going, we're headed for a bad place. It's bleak to the point where experts on both sides (Chinese and US) seem resigned to conflict.
In the 80s, I resided on a US Military base in West Germany. Currently, I feel like the world is getting closer to World War III, which is the closest experience I have had in my lifetime. There is ongoing conflict in Europe involving a country that possesses nuclear weapons.
Additionally, tensions are escalating with China and the economy seems unstable. I sincerely hope that reasonable minds will be able to prevent any further escalation of these conflicts, but there is always the possibility of an unintentional incident that could lead to an expansion of these wars.
The Cold War wasn't uniform of course, there were periods of greatly increased tension and periods of relative relaxation (e.g. Détente.) What we have now is somewhere in the middle, I'd say on the peaceful/Détente side of the scale.
From first approximation, there are 2 major questions to initiating a conflict.
1. Will I be able to stay in power? (Related: Will my populace support this war? Will my economy keep functioning?)
2. Will I end the conflict with more power / prestige / resources? (Related: How expensive will the conflict be in blood and treasure?)
Most of the things the West are doing over Ukraine are to make the "Related" answers less palatable. Very few people are calculating enough to climb to power, then risk everything on a gamble with bad odds.
If China gets serious about Kinmen and Matsu, then everyone should start worrying.
What say you older HNers, is this what it was like?
The Cold War was a lot scarier than what we have now. In the back of your mind, every day you thought that today could be the day we all get wiped out.
I'm not too worried about Russia or China starting anything nuclear these days. Russia invade Scandinavia? Sure. China invade Taiwan? Absolutely. But I'm not worried that they'll nuke someone else from a distance.
It feels to me like things are just starting to spool up. Unlike during my youth, I think the playing field is much more tilted in the United States favor.
I had lots of nightmares about seeing a bright orange flash in the window back in my youth. I've had a few recently.
If they decide to take out the Steel Works in Gary, I'll be toast. If not, fallout is something that can be avoided by staying inside, away from exterior walls and the roof, and waiting it out for at least a week.
I've had Potassium Iodide in stock for my child's use since the Fukushima meltdown... I bought a new bottle when Ukraine kicked off.
I would say the tensions seem similar, but the consequences seem different.
In the 80s, it felt like you might find yourself vaporized or living in a nuclear apocalypse hellscape at any moment, likely due to a misunderstanding or malfunction.
These days it seems like we're more likely to just be in a long-term adversarial position with likely proxy wars.
I feel like the WWII and Cold War eras were more about existence, whereas these days the aggression is more about how much more bounty do we want. Look at the Chinese land grabs around disputed islands versus Japan. They don't need them, but it would be nice to have them.
The whole thing just seems like a bunch of unnecessary, ego-driven B.S. on every side.
I was a teenager in the 80s. It’s hard to say how similar these events are, at least to me.
Information and and disinformation travels so much faster and so much more thoroughly these days that it’s hard to compare.
For example, in the 80s, I couldn’t even tell you what Russia looked like through photographs. there was just very little available information.
There was a big gray outline of the Soviet union on my high school history class wall, and that was about it. I had seen a few pictures of the Kremlin …the onion domes and what not. And maybe I had seen one photo of Brezhnev shown every so often on the news, but that was about it.
It’s amazing how much things have changed as far as the wealth of information is concerned.
So I’m not really answering your question, but the sheer magnitude of the lack of information … let’s say about four decades ago… is something that I really don’t see pointed out much so I thought you might find it interesting.
So in the 80s, the Soviet union was worrisome for the most part. But mostly it was just the blackest of black boxes to me.
I could tell you the Curiosity rover is 2.9m × 2.7m × 2.2m and 899kg, but it's far more immediately evocative to say it's about the size and mass of a typical sedan.
Apparently, America is the only country on earth where mass media describes things in familiar terms to make them readily intelligible to a wide audience.
Even if typical sedan is something that is quite common I still prefer actual measurements so I can reference it to something that I am personally more familiar with. I know that one can fit typical sedan inside 2.5m x 5m parallel parking spot but so does SUV and Fiat Punto.
To you, perhaps. I really like getting the dimensional information; my dig was at the way news media preemptively goes for the lowest common denominator every time, and frequently omits the accurate information altogether. I think this contributes to innumeracy.
it isn't precisely a light nanosecond either, it's about 5mm off. today the standard foot as used in the USA is ironically just defined as 0.3048 meters
Agreed. There’s this weird idea we should have the same UX for everything. In practicality we need different scales. I don’t describe the distance between myself and my neighbor in light years.
Exactly! In fact, it would be wonderful if you had some standard way of producing different units at different scales for a given magnitude, upwards or downwards, so you could use the best in a given context. Perhaps you could even randomly chose a fixed easy multiplier to automatically produce these derived units from the fundamental unit, and then use the same factor for every magnitude. You only need to chose some base unit for every magnitude and then, boom, you get a full family of units at different scales to chose from depending on your context.
How cool would that be? I'd suggest to use a factor that is the easiest to multiply by, in order to simplify operations. I guess the optimal factor would be 10. What is easier to multiply or divide by than 10, right?
I think I need to patent this bright idea. It's amazing nobody has thought about it before.
Sure, the definition of a meter may be a little bit arbitrary. But the advantage of metric for measuring distances is that the units are all factors of 10.
10 mm = 1 cm
10 cm = 1 dm
10 dm = 1 m
1000 m = 1 km
Makes math and scaling up and down a lot easier than having to remember that
Funny story: I was in Spain several years ago and was talking to a guy I met about sailboats. I mentioned I had a boat, and he asked how big. I thought for a second and said "7 meters" so as not to be an ignorant American. He thought for a second and said "huh, 21 feet".
If you carry a calculator in your pocket, but if you're just casually converting, 3 feet per meter is pretty good. 100 square meters is about 1000 square feet as well. Not legal for tax purposes, but good enough to understand how big a place is.
I'm not sure what the situation is in other European countries, but in the UK we use different units depending on the use so most people are use to working with both imperial and metric.
Perhaps with the exception of fahrenheit most people here will know what you mean if you use units like feet and will often even prefer thinking in feet over metres for certain things. Personally I default to feet for something like height or a floorplan, although I can think in metres quite easily too.
And knots. Speed limits at sea in Norway (in harbours and other places with much traffic and little room for maneuvering) are always in knots. But we measure water depth in meters, not fathoms.
…which is why the French Navy (who originally defined the unit) switched it to be SI derived in 1906 and the international standard was updated in 1929.
Funnily enough, about ~15 years ago TVs were still in cm, but somehow when flat screens came along (and people generally bought much bigger TVs) we switched to using inches. Computer screens have always been inches afaict.
Measuring boats in feet is a tradition. Also, these numbers are bigger. 50 feet is a big boat. Compare with mere 15 meters. BTW, docking price lists are still in meters.
As a European I still don't know how their football fields compare to our football fields. I mentally assume they are the same to have a frame of comparison.
They are pretty much similar, though an actual football (soccer pitch) field is not fixed measures, 90-120 m in length and 45-90 m in width.
In this the american football field seems more "reliable" as a unit of measure, seemingly fixed to 91.44 x 48.8 m or 100 yards x 160 feet + the borders that may vary.
it's ironic because as a little kid in the US in the late 1970s we all learned the metric system, but we see the "imperial" system everywhere still....like the conversion just never got around to happening. it's confusing.
look at the stupidest congressman of your choice (party doens't matter) that who you have to convince to convert the US over to the metric system. that is why we still use imperial
I think it just comes down to preference since the government never mandated it.
Science and engineering all use metric in the US. Automative all moved to metric voluntarily. I know construction is still imperial.
Its mostly consumer facing things that still imperial. And if you go to Canada its pretty common to see $/lb printed along side $/kg. People often talk about height in feet and inches, weight in pounds.
The US was an original signatory of the Meter Convention. Our customary units have been based on metric units since 1893. Our food packaging features metric units. Our scientists use metric units. Our school children learn the metric system. Our military uses the metric system. Our cars are built with metric fasteners.
Changing informal habits takes decades and has questionable benefit. Canada tried it in the 70s and is going to take another generation at least to fully convert for informal use.
Speaking as a Canadian, I’d be surprised if we ever fully culturally metrify, specifically when it comes to height and weight. We just consume too much American media which uses convenient imperial bars like 6’ or 200lbs to ever change, I think.
I actually think we’re somewhat lucky in that most of us can immediately grok a measurement in either system when we see one online.
I don't think you can blame American media. Canada can trace its usage of Imperial units to the British Empire. The United States of America as an independent nation has never at any point in its history used Imperial units. US Customary units share some of the names but it is a different system. This refinement of units continued globally and with international collaboration became the metric (si) system. The US historically had closer ties to France than Britain so the systems diverged literally centuries ago.
Canadian metrication follows the rest of the British empire which was centuries behind the rest of the world (including the US) in metrication.
Thanks. It's also half as wide as it is long and 2 meters deep. That still is not a useful comparison if the audience has never seen one. It's a comparison without a useful reference. I always thought it funny and nearly worthless for an author or announcer to describe the volume of something in terms of Olympic swimming pools as if everyone listening or reading had a useful frame of reference in that comparison.
People who’ve never seen one still understand that an Olympic-sized swimming pool is “quite big”. Which is the general impression people are trying to get across when they use that phrase.
People in the Olympics are the best athletes in the world. And I bet world class athletes need a big pool to compete in.
That gives you a pretty decent sense of the scale of an Olympic sized swimming pool without ever having seen one.
I agree that most people will decide that Olympic sized pools must be big but it doesn't give a layman any clue to just how large a volume they contain in some contexts where you find the comparison used.
For example, I made a comment about a similar comparison in a post here on HN a while ago because their example was simply ridiculous [0]. The author in that article referenced the volume of a large body of water as being "about 240 billion Olympic sized pools". I believe that they could've used almost anything else that most people would identify as being very large as a reference but instead they chose a large swimming pool. If an item is used as a reference the scale of the reference and the object should be chosen such that the reader could quickly understand that while one may be big, the other is bigger by some easily pictured amount.
The funny thing about Olympic-sized swimming pools is that they are so big that they are nearly useless except for the relatively rare elite swimming competition. So they are actually far more uncommon than you might expect, and are usually built with configurable “walls” so that they can be made smaller for everyday use!
That seems like hyperbole. They are certainly not a place where you can (easily) have fun playing around in the water, nor a place for beginners to learn to swim. However, they are still exactly right for anyone who can swim and wants to do some plain swimming.
The local 50 meter pool here is always filled with people young and old (and on no way elite) that just swim. You don’t need to be very fit to be able to swim 50 meters without a break.
It‘s a different kind of swimming compared to just hanging around and having fun, sure, but it always seems to be quite in demand when I see pools like that.
(The swimming complex close to me has two Olympic size swimming pools and one of those is open to the public, the other is used by actual elite athletes but also kids who are learning to swim. There is also a small 12.5 meter pool with adjustable depth to learn swimming and for aqua fitness courses.)
If you are in the US, you are lucky to live near such a complex. They are not common.
The NCAA only started to “recommend” that universities, when building new facilities, to make their competition pools Olympic sized in 1996.
Remember that Olympic pools are deep - usually a minimum of 2.15 meters - and don’t usually have ledges for assisting with egress. They are really dangerous. A person that gets into distress, especially near the middle, will find it nearly impossible to self-rescue. Without attentive guards/coaches/onlookers they are nearly certain to drown.
Olympic pools are amazing for casual swimming! The water has quite different dynamics, compared to a regular pool. Unfortunately they are expensive to build and operate, due to their size, so they are quite rare.
I treat myself to an Olympic swim every now and then, even though it means driving to the next city and expensive parking. Highly recommend it!
Downvoted because someone doesn't think that fruit is commonly used as a definition of size? We often say things are the size of a grape, or an apple, or a grapefruit.
I don't see much difference between Chinese routers having back-doors and what Cisco has peddled to its customers all these years either willfully or just incompetence.
Yeah... I would say a large part of why I'm skeptical of Chinese made computing devices is because I understand what the US has been doing with ours over the last 50 years.
That said... from a national security perspective - it is still the right call to be wary of devices that are likely compromised by another nation. You should just be assuming that if you didn't make them locally (as in under your own territorial control) they are compromised during production. For everyone. Everyone should be acting with that as the default.
Nokia was sold to Microsoft, then they sold it to HMD Global Oy
/FoxConn and now they make most of their goods in China, almost to the point of being white labelled. Ericsson is a small company compared to what it once was. Sure, technically European (again) but a shell of their former selves.
Nokia the phones are completely distinct from Nokia the telecoms infrastructure provider. HMD licenses the Nokia name from the telecoms equipment manufacturer.
3 big deals happened at Nokia. They sold the devices business to MS. They acquired the Siemens half of Nokia Siemens Networks. They acquired Alcatel Lucent (French Alcatel and American descendant of Bell Lucent) and merged it with what was NSN. They sell every component of the modern networking stack from 5g antennas to undersea cables.
Outside China, though, Ericsson now claims to serve more operators than just about any other vendor. Ekholm today put Ericsson's share of the market for radio access network (RAN) products at 39%, excluding China, telling analysts it has grown from just 33% when he took over in 2017. Fifty percent of 5G traffic outside China runs over Ericsson, he said, while 16 of the world's top 20 operators are using its 5G core.
Your own government has a much higher ability to affect your life than China does, so what you're saying is completely irrational. Not that it's OK for the Chinese to spy on us, mind you, or to claim that they don't have nefarious purposes.
We will see. Interesting things happening in congress this week. I'm too jaded to let myself get very hopeful about outcomes. But it does look like a dent was made with McCarthy's concessions to get confirmed as speaker.
Assuming you ever find out.
I don't doubt Western governments have the ability to spy on their citizens as needed, and it's likely at some point most of us have been spied on in some minor way, but unless we happened to be doing something particularly nefarious at the point it happened, very unlikely they'd bother acting on it*. Whereas I very much doubt China could see much advantage in trying to spy on an average citizen from another country at all.
* unless perhaps you were applying for military clearance
By the same logic, the chinese government can't do anything to you, but your own government can arrest you, persecute you, execute you, etc. You'd have to be insane to prefer to be spied on by your own government rather than china.
I'd rather be spied on by a western democracy than China. Our intelligence agencies are out of control but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them in than China.
What mechanisms do you recommend for reining in, say, the NSA or GHCQ? Were either reined in at all after the Snowden leaks, or was it business as usual after things calmed down a bit?
I think we have to accept that these intelligence agencies are effectively untouchable and here to stay. With that in mind I think it boils down to: who can do the most harm by spying on you:
- a country thousands of miles away which you probably have no connection to and don't visit
- the country you live in
I said in another comment but it bears repeating - I don't want anyone spying on me, but I am losing no sleep over Chinese intelligence, I am an extremely uninteresting target for them. If a Chinese agent is watching me die repeatedly in Elden Ring, looking at webcam footage of me gawping at my monitor while I scroll HN, or checking the stupid FB messages I send to my friends they'll realise pretty quickly I'm not worth the bandwidth or the storage space. A local agency might be interested in those FB messages, especially if I was politically active, vocally against the government and I was trying to organize protests or strike action.
They are 'touchable', there is oversight, and their powers are very limited.
Give me an example of Americans who have been materially harmed by those agencies? And what was the damage?
Have Americans been oppressed, slandered for political gain, wrongly imprisoned, illegally targeted by police because of NSA activity?
I think it's doubtful for anything other than a few incidents; the proportionality of these tradeoffs does matter as these agencies do actually go after bad people. Like people selling sanctioned gear to Russia, money laundering, sex trafficking, etc. you know - 'bad things'.
I don't see professors disappearing because they said something on campus Biden didn't like.
Something funny about the people who are less worried about US spying because there is “oversight” and they are ultimately “democratically controlled”: they seem to be the same people who have very high faith in them working correctly and not against them. So they are certainly not going to be the ones who keep them in check.
The 'problematic people' are those who do not have the capacity to realize the difference between authoritarian regimes and their internal apparatus, vs the need state security with oversight.
These people are usually naively driven by some kind of decontextualized political mindset, where the equate the arbitrary actions of some state far away, in same context as local governance, and a big dose of ultra liberal (classical) utopianism.
'The NSA is like Xi because they can spy on me'.
It's like saying 'Biden is as bad as Xi because ultimately the Police in the USA could arrest me and put me in prison for 70 years'.
It's barely theoretically true and it makes little sense to compare systems that have oversight and independent judiciary with those controlled by a Dictator.
It's good that the US has the ability to know which Russian stooges are giving money to would-be US presidents, or heading his presidential campaign. And good that the US can trace large sums of money floating out of FTX's Bahamian bank account into the hands of whoever, especially politicians.
If a student protester dissappears in the night because they made an online post critical of the governor - well, all of us will hear about it a few hours later.
You’re the one who brought up the strawman of good/bad and morality, buddy. People weren’t talking about which regime was better or worse. They were only talking about rational self-interest based on where they are located in the world.
(And also bringing up how no state actor only does bad things to bad people in order to dispute the typical “if you’ve got nothing to hide/have done no wrong then you have nothing to worry about”.)
ISIS is worse than a mall cop with a bully streak, but it makes more sense for me to worry about that mall cop while shopping at the mall than to worry about ISIS.
Naively, one might say "ah but that ended in 1971!" - but let me put it this way: if you spotted a cockroach in your house, you'd be a fool to think that was the only one.
Also: the oversight/limits you're protected by could disappear some day, they're imaginary and socially constructed. Sure, you trust our current government to handle these powers responsibly, (though you really shouldn't, see above), but why are you so confident you can trust _tomorrow's_ government?
Hey look I'm really trying to engage earnestly here. I did provide specific examples, but they were in the wiki article I linked and you didn't look at them (which is fair, no one likes being tossed a link like that). Let me summarize COINTELPRO:
# Covert & 'illegal' projects by FBI aimed at infiltrating, influencing, disrupting, and discrediting various political organizations
# Existence of the program was discovered after activists stole documents from an FBI office and leaked them to media
# Targets included: antiwar activists, feminist organizations, civil rights activists (ie MLK), environmentalists, animal rights activists, communist party, KKK, American Indian activists, far right groups
# Methods included:
* Breaking into homes, violent beatings, vandalism
* Assassination
* Smear campaigns
* Fabricating evidence, false testimony (leading to wrongful imprisonment and activist intimidation)
* Fabricating letters to discredit/humiliate people or erode their relationships, or cause conflict (leading to death in many cases)
I don't actually need to talk about hypotheticals, the US government has already abused these things to squish people or ideas it didn't like. The point about creeping authoritarianism is a secondary argument. My point is that sometimes it's better for certain tools/institutions not to exist at all.
I think we ought to treat surveillance technologies with the same type of reverence we treat nuclear tech (though maybe not to the same magnitude). Nuclear technology isn't intrinsically a bad thing: the problem is that, combined with human tendencies (tribalism, territorialism, etc), a conflict that previously would've resulted in a mere x deaths could now result in x^y deaths, or even total annihilation.
You agree that creeping authoritarianism is a general problem. Do you think it might just be in the nature of human societies? If so, wouldn't it be prudent to carefully consider what tools and institutions we leave lying around, in case the worst happens? We all accept this with nukes - there was some kind of effort at nuclear disarmament (though not enough). We should do the same for surveillance.
I'm only trying to convince you that we need to be very cautious, skeptical, and distrustful of things like the NSA, because the US govt cannot be trusted with it now, and it might get even worse in the future. What hypothetical evidence would someone have to show you, to change your mind?
While I might have been in some ways sympathetic, the Panthers were a violent, armed, (Marxist-Lenninist) Communist radical group that had ambitions to overthrow some parts of governance, they got into shootouts with and killed police officers, voter indimidation etc..
You do understand it'd be very appropriate for the FBI to infiltrate such groups, as they indicating they are currently doing now with 'far right' and other radical groups, especially those with wepaons.
Your characterization of 'assasination' is problematic. I wouldn't say Fred Hampton was so much assassinated. He and his buddies were involved in a shooting which killed police, very shortly thereafter the cops planned the raid to arrest them and two Panthers were killed. It seems that Fred was killed in cold blood. While this is obviously 'very illegal' - this is not the US Justice Department targetting someone, this is local Chicago/Oakland cops form of extra-judicial retribution for the gang killing of their colleagues. Again, not right, but something totally different what might be implied from 'assassination'. They killed cops, the cops got out of line and got revenge.
Very notably - these acts caused national attention and there was an enormous reaction. Information was made public, there was public and political furor, transparency etc..
All of this is some time ago, when central oversight was harder, when the violence was much higher, and where groups of various kinds (aka local cops, local Panther groups) would act independently from central control.
And in the grand scheme of 300 Million poeple, it's relatively small stuff.
Also, it's a good reason for not having a single power like J Edgar Hoover in charge of anything.
Finally, it should be noted that this was the start of the cold war, and the Soviets were absolutely funding totalitarian uprising around the world. Stalin direclty controlled 17% of the Bundestag during the Weimar. While obvoiusly not sufficient to cause 'The Big Bad Man' to rise, without it, 'The Big Bad Man' likely would have never existed. Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua ... so much of the world ... was perturbed by very real, direct intervention from Soviet backed 'Marxist-Lenninist' groups. The 'Red Scare' was not a fantasty. It might have been overstated on some level, but it was a material 'existential' problem.
The same, continued tactics by Russians have landed us in an 'almost war' for the West in Ukraine today. Russian spies are all over Germany, Putin has corrupted so many people in Europe including literally former German Chancellors, Austrian, Hungarian leaders - the FBI exists so that this does not happen so brazenly in the the US and allied nations.
The FBI will step out of line again, just like all groups do, and there should be constant vigilance, but given the total independence of other branches, I'm not worried at all. There will always be whistleblowers, eventual transparency etc..
> What mechanisms do you recommend for reining in, say, the NSA or GHCQ?
Democracy. Vote. Free expression. Tell the people what is happening and why privacy is important.
> Were either reined in at all after the Snowden leaks,
Yes.
> or was it business as usual after things calmed down a bit?
No.
> I think we have to accept that these intelligence agencies are effectively untouchable and here to stay.
We do not. They are not. Apathy is toxic. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good to do nothing.
> With that in mind I think it boils down to: who can do the most harm by spying on you:
- a country thousands of miles away which you probably have no connection to and don't visit
- the country you live in
China is our single greatest geopolitical adversary. Psyops are real. The ability to influence the public opinion of a geopolitical adversary supports the Chinese salami slicer strategy. It’s reinforced by understanding their adversaries electorate.
> I said in another comment but it bears repeating - I don't want anyone spying on me,
Same.
> but I am losing no sleep over Chinese intelligence,
You probably should be.
> I am an extremely uninteresting target for them.
We are all interesting targets. They may not assassinate, extort, or disappear you in the middle of the night but they can change your opinions without you even noticing.
> If a Chinese agent is watching me die repeatedly in Elden Ring, looking at webcam footage of me gawping at my monitor while I scroll HN, or checking the stupid FB messages I send to my friends they'll realise pretty quickly I'm not worth the bandwidth or the storage space.
Why would an individual agent need to look at anything? People aren’t interesting. We’re all basically the same. But if they know you play Elden Ring and browse HN they can tailor an effective message to you and everyone like you.
> A local agency might be interested in those FB messages, especially if I was politically active, vocally against the government and I was trying to organize protests or strike action.
Yes and that’s an illegal abuse of power. One that can be remedied in a court of law.
Hey I'm not saying "give up, hand over your passwords and keys to the NSA, don't ever vote or write to your representatives" but we're in a discussion over who you should be worried about spying on you more - non-specific "China" or some domestic intelligence services (or an alliance of a few "friendly" countries). I think your comment is rooted in a sort of common belief that America is, for all its faults, just plain more decent and just than those scary foreign places - along the lines of American Exceptionalism. You even mention they can "change your opinions without you even noticing" - this is basically the Korean War propaganda about communist "brainwashing" techniques. The sad reality is both USA and China are willing spy on people, if you're based in the USA you should really care more about the USA's attempts at surveillance than China's.
edit: you deleted your reply before I could post mine. It seemed like I pissed you off a bit so I was trying to clarify and apologise a bit. Here's what I wrote:
> You did though
Well I said that they're untouchable and was then trying to clarify that we should still be pretty pissed off about it. I wrote the original at half-past midnight, it was a little clumsily worded. But you do have to accept that they are currently nearly untouchable and effectively operate outside the law and that right now you can do very little at all about what data is being collected on you.
> I don’t think that is a favorable interpretation
I don't think it is unfavourable at all, the only thing you've really stated there about why you'd be worried about any Chinese intelligence is that they can manipulate your beliefs without your knowing. You have to admit that there's at least a bit of a similarity with the hysteria around communist brainwashing.
I'm sorry for causing any offence, I know it's not nice to feel like someone's accusing you of being a fervent nationalist (not my intent) but as an outsider your last couple of comments do have that air of "America is just ... better" and contained a slightly naive belief that you'd have any kind of hope taking on NSA or any other big TLA. I'll grant that what China would do with the data it collects on its citizens is likely far more severe than what the USA would (e.g. I don't think you're gonna be locked up for posting a an anti-Biden meme in USA, but sharing Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh in China will get you in a lot of hot water) so if that's what you meant then fair enough. I still don't think Chinese spying should be higher up on your list of worries than NSA spying - and in the grand scheme of things there are things you can worry about that you can actually change.
> I'd rather be spied on by a western democracy than China.
Why? What has china done that's worse? Did they nuke a country? Wipe out entire races of people? Did those nasty chinese invade dozens of countries? There is nothing inherent in a western democracy that makes it good.
> Our intelligence agencies are out of control but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them in than China.
There are no mechanisms for controlling any intelligence agencies. All intelligence agencies around the world are state actors. No law applies to them. Ask the people the intelligence agencies murdered, drugged, experimented on, etc.
Unless you are chinese, you are far better off being "spied on" by the chinese than a western democracy because the chinese don't have any jurisdiction over you. This is all common sense. China isn't going to arrest you and put you in jail. A western democracy will though.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Flamewar and personal attack aren't allowed here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We asked you before not to do nationalistic flamewar on this site, regardless of which country you have a problem with. You've reverted here to doing exactly what we asked you not do to. We ban accounts that keep doing this, so please don't do it again.
Moral relativism between US and China is unfathomable. They are not remotely comparable on the whole.
China has a Dictator, a total absence of a Justice System, total surveillance and censorship, and large swaths of the population of some regions in concentration camps, a large number of individual dedicated to holding in place that apparatus.
Meanwhile you're free to walk down the street and tell the US President he's an idiot and you're not going anywhere without the entire US media knowing about it if they want to put public eyes on it for the sake of your own rights. There are laws, all sorts of controls, Judicial oversight, yada yada.
No such comparison was being made. The issue is whether or not the US or Chinese government affect our lives more, and since there's no danger of China trying to invade the US anytime soon, it's obviously the former. The Chinese don't care about watching the average person.
> The Chinese don't care about watching the average person.
Citation needed. How much value does intimate knowledge of individual preference and habit have for psyops? How much of an advantage does China gain when they convince a democratic electorate that their actions are no big deal?
The CCP monitors everyone (including you and I), and we live in an interconnected world, this idea of 'they're not about to invade' is not really the point.
If China had it's way, they would not 'invade' Taiwan either, we would wake up one day and realize the process happened over 20 years and that Taiwan is under CCP control.
And that Vietnam, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, Korea are also subject to arbitrary power of the CCP a little bit like Lukashenko in Belarus is a stooge of Putin.
I had no such intention, I had hoped I made that clear. China is a terrible dictatorship, and the US, for all its faults, is a democracy with a mostly working justice system.
However, in whatever state you live in, your local government is far and away the most likely to care about your habits, to want to convince you to vote against your interests, to accuse you based on flimsy evidence etc. A foreign country poses nowhere near the same risk, even if it's the worse regime in history and you live in the best.
Why, though? Your own government has far more power over you and far more reason to be interested in you than China ever would (unless you're a prominent critic of China, politically connected, or involved in military intelligence or something like that).
I mean I don't want anyone spying on me, but I'm less worried about China targetting me than the Czech government (where I live) or the UK one (where I'm from).
Because in a democracy I have the ability to control my government. Far more so than if I lived under a dictatorship.
> far more reason to be interested in you than China ever would
I think this is naive. Psyops are real and are made more effective with knowledge of personal preference and habits. It is likely that Chinese intelligence has targeted literally everyone on the Internet in some way.
The difference is huawei routers in the west are gathering intelligence on and setting up network to disable, western infrastructure.
But Cisco in China is gathering intelligence on and setting up network to disable, chinese infrastructure.
I live in the west and happen to like our infrastructure. So while I don't think Cisco should be doing what its doing, I would completely ban Chinese gear from the infrastructure be it backbone or consumer level.
While RSA isn't a state-funded technology company, they did accept a $10M payment from the NSA to make their BSafe security product default to use the DUAL_EC_DRBG cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. Which the NSA had designed and backdoored...
Are the primary sources on this story from the Snowden leaks available somewhere? Even the article here points to another Reuters article which isn't available any more, and I've never been able to find out which documents people were referencing about this?
I still remember an article on here of a person trying to get access to their Huawei router with a JTAG or something, and once inside after looking around they said en passant "weird, there is a user here with a preconfigured ssh authorized_keys file. LOL must be a backdoor, am I right?" and just moved on with no further mention of this, as did the HN comments. I still think about it.
Indeed. If you charted those it'd be likely show as a breakout event vs. relevant moving averages at this point.
So from that POV, one may start to think about a quick buildup of momentum in the general direction of F-22s shooting things down, or air combat, or just combat, etc.
Not so much to predict the future, as to ideate and prepare frames of mind for potential changes in circumstance.
Why are they calling it an object. It seems like a huge deal what kind of "object" this was. Was it another balloon? Missile? Private plane? How could they not know, and if they do know, why would they not say?
Edit - this video isn't loading for me, but I've just watched what I assume is the same briefing on Twitter. They have a pilot assessment that the object was unmanned - but they can't tell us balloon, missile, drone? I'm not understanding how a pilot could see the thing, communicate ("I'm looking at an unmanned object, should I shoot?") and somehow not convey what the object was. I appreciate the speed of this briefing, but I would prefer they wait at least until they know what they are saying. In the briefing below the guy says NORAD has been tracking it for a day - and they still don't know what it is? I guess that rules out missile, at least.
"Object was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight" and "Object the size of a small car" [1] according to General Ryder
No details beyond this yet due to classification restrictions.
"Heat seeking" is a bit of a misnomer. It uses thermal imaging to determine contrast against the background and then heads to the center of the detected object. No engine required. This is the same missile they used last week.
Maybe it was a balloon but Kirby is being curmudgeonly and thinks it should be called an "Unmanned Buoyant Aircraft (UBA)" or something like that. These national security types love wordy terms and acronyms. Maybe he thinks calling a balloon a balloon makes it sound too trivial or something.
Spying happens all the time, even between allies. From what I read/understood about past spying incidents, it's only when someone starts mentioning it to the press that they want the rest of the population to be up an arms about it. Why that might be true: there are probably tons of Chinese spy events (and American spy events on China) that never made it. Was the balloon the first? Come on.
If the above hypothesis is true, it means the U.S. is trying to rile up / ready / etc. the population to view China as a threat.
Kind of ironic given the intense scrutiny and fears prior to Trump getting elected that he would trigger a depression or war because of his isolationist attitude about China specifically.
But more importantly what does that mean now? Will it justify laws passed to further isolate China?
In your comment, you say "it means the US is trying to rile up / ready /etc" the population. That's not the only plausible (or even most likely) scenario though.
The publishing of this info could indeed be for that purpose. Or it could be for something else, such as to influence the currently-ongoing negotiations with other players (eg European) at a critical time.
Or it could be for some other purpose again, that's neither of those. :)
You mean influence the population of European allies or their leaders?
The hypothesis above is roughly connected to this wider idea about international relations that the 'big ideas' happen behind closed doors, and there is a second 'public' face. Here the balloon type incidents leak to the public strategically while other incidents go unmentioned except in private or in some esoteric place.
If true, why would the US press and mainstream media be headlining it when of course it'll enrage the population. It was a choice to publicize it and a choice for our political parties to point fingers at each other over it, as part of the typical spin cycle.
The thing was visible to the naked eye, and so was its demise. I don’t see any reason to believe there was some agenda at play on the US side. They couldn’t have covered it up if they wanted to.
According to CNN that’s because they weren’t noticed by anyone at the time. The US discovered them by examining retrospective satellite data for signals we found emanating from a recent (2021) balloon. Presumably that one didn’t travel over populated areas or it would have been noticed by the public as well. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/politics/us-balloon-tracking-...
Really? It's all over the press. I didn't happen to notice the balloon floating in the sky. We don't all have one collective eye. The press and politicians platformed the story.
The government makes statements to the press, leaks to the press and when politicians throw barbs at each other over an issue, the press reports their statements about the issue and the issue.
My point is, even if you didn't personally see the balloon, some people did, and so it was reported in the press (as is their job). The government didn't have any control over that, but once it happened, they had to address it.
> If the above hypothesis is true, it means the U.S. is trying to rile up / ready / etc. the population to view China as a threat.
If so, the previous balloon was a pretty fuckin' stupid way to do that, since letting it wander all over the US was obviously going to be used by political adversaries to attack the administration (justly or unjustly, doesn't matter).
Political adversaries will always attack the administration, that's par for the course.
But regardless of what the actual facts on the ground (er, in the sky) might be, or what party A says about party B, the media and online commentariat are framing them within a narrative of aggressive threats from China, and of war being imminent, possibly even necessary. Our consent is clearly being manufactured for something.
We need a cheaper way to down these spy balloons. The sidewinder missile + F-22 flight time costs are an order of magnitude greater than the total cost of launching one balloon. Send over the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler (HELIOS) to protect the west coast.
I've read about those but I'm more referring to the cost comment. In eve it is common to hedge a loss as "ISK Positive" if the value of the ammo that blew you up costed more than your ship, as tallied up on the killmail.
I can't not shake my head reading comments like this.
Seriously, the concept of weighing the cost of an action vs the cost of inaction was not... exactly invented by Eve Online players. The entire point of warfare is to make waging war more expensive to your opponent than to yourself, whether in terms of men, materiel, dollars, or popular support. And the concept of a Pyrrhic victory is likely as old as war itself – even our very term for it derives from a battle fought 2300 years ago!
HN happens to be one of the rare places on the modern internet where just flapping your figurative mouth pieces for the sake of flapping your figurative mouth pieces is not looked upon favorably. The attitude of "have something to say or shut the fuck up" is very refreshing.
And if you think that I didn't say anything… I suggest re-reading my comment.
The rest was important context, IMO. It was less “this already has a name” and more “this is the very essence of warfare”. And has been for tens of thousands of years.
It's conjecture for me to presume the sky is blue without looking out of my window, but it's a safe bet on days with good weather.
Unless this balloon -- or whatever it was -- was diamond-bedazzled and platinum-plated and filled with alien technology it's a safe bet that it was a fair amount cheaper to produce/launch/maintain than sortieing one of the most expensive and exclusive modern aircraft in the world and shooting off a missile that costs 600k/ea -- and that's not even considering collateral costs associated to the action.
Right, but presumably F-22s need to fly and pilots need to shoot down things with live ammo occasionally anyways to stay in shape? And logistics needs to know how to supply, and intelligence needs to know how to scramble them etc.
This seems like what amounts to a training program to me, unless a lot more start coming.
I don’t think that’s really such a good bet. The first one was supposedly the size of multiple buses. That is a bunch of computer hardware held up by a balloon rather than “just a balloon”. The price of such a thing could easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware, let alone any associated R&D costs.
That’s all before bringing up that the person I quoted claimed off-hand that it’s an order of magnitude difference. They’re probably rather similar in cost.
Anything needing bus-sized solar array gonna have some fancy equipment on board. All of that needs engineering to not fail at the temperature range up above and code to make it do what is needed
The balloon last week could have easily been an order of magnitude more expensive than the AIM-9X. It was hundreds of feet in diameter with a suspended gantry with a multi-kw solar array. You don't put that much solar on to power nothing, so presumably there was a ton of military grade comms equipment on it.
We need to base the number of occurances against our average training flight time/ammo expenditure. Currently we train a hell of a lot more than we actively shoot down targets so the expenditure is practically nothing. Now if a lot more show up that's a different equation.
Don’t necessarily disagree and I don’t know sufficient details to form a responsible opinion, but I imagine there’s expenditure for training, whether they hit actual stuff or not?
What keeps a cannon from working? That would already reduce the costs by a lot, and from the visual identification it seems that 40,000 feet is well within the flight ceiling of fighter jets
The closure rate thing reminds me of a great scene in The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob steals the Wright Flyer and they scramble jets to get him. After blowing by the Flyer too fast, the pilots get out and walk after it.
Balloons and airships aren't easily downed by gunfire- the holes create slow leaks that can take days or weeks to deflate the balloon. Fighter jets' guns are mostly an air-to-ground weapon these days.
> the holes create slow leaks that can take days or weeks to deflate the balloon
I've seen this claim often, but I'm still finding it hard to picture. I realize it's not going to "pop like a balloon", but days or weeks seems incredibly long. The weight of the payload causes at least some pressure on at least the top of the balloon, right?
Is the issue just the size of the hole versus total volume? Or maybe it's that the bouyancy increases as it starts to descend? Do you have a link that would make this clearer? I searched a little, but what I found were just assertions of fact.
I did find the 1998 story of the failed Canadian attempt to shoot down a balloon with fighter jets firing bullets (https://apnews.com/article/268893fddde785d029d5a51b136951eb). This makes me inclined to believe the conclusion, but it's still not intuitive to me.
That’s definitely not their limit since they can shoot down satellites at the altitude of the International Space Station. And that’s the stuff we’re allowed to know about.
The SM-3, which is launched from ships for ballistic missile defense, can be used as anti-satellite missile. Its ceiling is supposed to be 1000 km. Which means could reach ISS.
It was tested in 2008 to destroy failed recon satellite.
This calculation is for a ballistic projectile without air resistance. For a missile with a rocket engine, there is no minimum velocity, but you can compute the fuel energy required for the change of altitude. Delta-v isn’t important for a sub-orbital intersection trajectory, although you’ll obviously want your interceptor missile to get there fairly quickly (which will end up being more fuel efficient than a slow climb).
The shootdowns did not involve using airplane guns/cannons. Those are less accurate, especially at the engagement range (the aircraft were at 40,000 ft., IIRC, and shooting at 60,000 ft. balloons), and would have likely damaged the payload.
The shoot-downs used AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles (per TFA). We also don’t know the ceiling altitude of the F-22 since it’s classified.
However, the F-22 can carry the AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile (AMRAAM) which has a disclosed engagement altitude of 70,000 feet - capable of engaging even higher altitude balloons than these. As I understand it, the Extended Range AMRAAM-ER is believed to have an engagement ceiling of 85,000 feet.
Meanwhile, the US also has the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system, an air defense system capable of engaging targets at very high altitude. While its capabilities are classified, its max engagement altitude is at least 490,000 ft. or 93 miles … though using it to attack a balloon is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. THAAD is mobile and could be deployed in response to a high altitude balloon threat (some of which can fly 120,000 ft.)
True, but the max effective range of the F-22’s 20mm M61A2 Vulcan cannon is about 2000 feet (600m), which isn’t nearly enough to engage these balloons — assuming an F-22 is flying at 40,000 ft. vs. a balloon at 60,000 ft.
Even if the ceiling of the F-22 is substantially higher than 40,000 ft. (which I think is plausible), and is close enough to effectively engage these balloons, then I doubt that the Air Force would choose to make the tradeoff of disclosing the F-22’s performance capabilities to adversaries in order to save the cost of an AIM-9; the F-22’s performance is a secret and classified.
If we were faced with defending against a large number of high-flying objects then the reasoning might be different.
The USAF "fact sheet" page on the F-22[1] states "above 50,000 ft" flight ceiling. Wikipedia lists 65,000 ft but provides no easily verifiable citation (none of the citations for the section that I could retrieve online list that figure).
You may what to change up your definition of a 20mm round against a balloon. The statistics you reference is about accuracy and penetration. Take a look at distance until subsonic.
I'm going to ask what might seem like a naive question - but how do you get a sidewinder to lock onto the balloon part of the balloon and not hit the payload?
What would be ideal would be some kind of anti-balloon weaponry/recovery system.
Some kind of balloon-based counter-balloon technology that could take control of the balloon and bring it to the ground intact. Would be a fun project to say the least.
A "sidewinder missile + F-22 flight time costs" are a rounding error in the national security budget. The experience and lessons learnt from using it are valuable to all layers of the military and administration, significantly more so than the financial cost.
(I'm British and so not a US tax payer, just a spectator, but would argue the same here)
Yes, because some people apparently think there is a lesson here. The "it can be spy, shoot it down" is sound reasoning but "we need to test whether F-22 can shoot down balloons" does sound like clown speak.
Absolutely. The value of F-22s actually launching some $400k AIM-9Xs not at training targets with a 100% success rate would be far, far greater than those unit costs.
It's a crying shame the F-22 production line was shut down, so it's great to see it performing well.
(Speaking as a DCS sim pilot with a long time interest in military aviation).
Oh yes the useful and oh so important lesson that F-22 is indeed capable of disposing of not only maneuverable airborne crafts but also non-maneuverable ones!
Clearly a baloon is so hard to dispose target that making sure the aircraft indeed can be up to this task is worth any money!
The IR signature/target profile of a balloon contraption is very different to that of a jet exhaust, for one. Far less friction heat of movement etc + no engine.
Although the X is an all aspect missile, the parameters would still be quite different.
I think this is would all be firmly in the "not public domain" bucket of details though, as I haven't seen much of this modelled in DCS.
(I suppose they could also have used eg a radar guided AIM-120, but they are primarily for BVR, more expensive at ~$1.1, and far, far more scope for erroneous target locking, so why risk it when the 9X obviously gets the job done. Again, from the point of view of an armchair - or a rig to be precise - sim pilot. I claim no credentials beyond this interest).
DCS World is a multi and single player combat simulator platform for the PC made by Eagle Dynamics, which features modules such as the A-10C, F-16, F/A-18 and the F-14. The platform is free, the modules' pricing is reflective of the development work gone in to them - and requires a lot of time to learn. Great fun.
the problem is as long as the target you send up are cheaper for you to produce than the countermeasure used against them you can spam your opponent and bleed them financially while having a minimal impact on your own budget.
Air to air missiles cost on the order of $300,000.00 weather balloons cost and order of magnitude less.
If someone starts sending thousands or tens of thousands of balloons into American airspace to make the cost of shooting them down "significant", won't your congress consider that an act of war? It's quite a leap from the odd stray weather balloon to send them en masse.
We'll all have bigger problems if that day comes than the pesky billion or two it will cost from the US $773B DoD budget.
The balloon shot down last week was likely order of magnitude more expensive than the Sidewinder that shot it down. Someone posted link to similar sized NASA balloon that cost $1 million for just the balloon and maybe platform but not the payload.
It might be possible to shoot down balloons with unguided rockets. It depends on how close the fighter can get and how accurate the rockets are. Rockets are super cheap.
Yeah, but that’s a NASA balloon which adds one or more “0” to the price tag just so it can source components from, and support jobs in, all 50 states. (Ok, being sarcastic, but I’m curious on the actual cost.)
If this became a frequent occurrence. Infrequently does it cost much more?
The airforce would have thousands of missiles. Assuming they have some FIFO system they would use missiles heading for expiry.
Not sure how pilot training goes but would assume they have training hours requirement. If a mission covers those hours all the better for more real experience on what they would be flying anyway.
Anyway I don't know this as an expert, but logically seems costs are largely sunk regardless of an infrequent balloon incident.
The YAL-1 747 Airborne Laser had a megawatt class chemical oxygen-iodine laser. In an unclassified presentation I was at they claimed a hubcap-sized (30cm-ish?) spot diameter firing from Seattle to Wenatchee (~200 km) with the capability to melt thru an aluminum ICBM skin in just a few millisecond pulses. I think we could pop that balloon.
At those altitudes the combination of a very high closing speed (air is thin) and the short range of the gun creates a real risk of flying into the target you're trying to hit.
The high speed is necessary so the plane doesn’t fall out of the sky. A bullet is going to have a different friction coefficient than a plane so is not as affected by the altitude.
It's not that the bullets won't fly a long ways. It's that the range where the gun is accurate is fairly small. Sure you could theoretically shoot it from 20 miles away as long as you're 15 miles above the target and can successfully plot the ballistic arc, windage, etc. But fighter jets aren't flying artillery pieces so their computers don't do that kind of targeting.
There is always stock that has to be used up before they go bad and the pilots and machines need flying time no matter what. It's not as bad as it sounds and the rockets have their warheads removed.
Unlike previous Sidewinder iterations with a single-sensor thermal seeker, the AIM-9X has a thermal imaging seeker - it was used to shoot down the much larger balloon last week.
If it was not a drone, and "not a balloon", what could it be?
Assuming this was a drone, the "car-sized", "unmanned", "not a balloon", "not maneuverable" (!?), the operating altitude (40k feet / 13 km), and use of AIM9X (IR/heat seeking) should narrow down the possible drones.
Also, one thing I pondered: why F22 instead of F35 to shoot it down? Maybe a question of availability. But, at least publically the F35 operating ceiling is lower than F22, so I was thinking whether the object was in reality higher than the publically known F35 operating ceiling.
The F22 is America's superiority fighter, still beating the F35 in stealth and capability for anti flying things action. The F22 will probably be the default in most intercept circumstances.
> If it was not a drone, and "not a balloon", what could it be?
It could be an unmanned glider with some solar power.
Several companies make those. Including Google, which was considering them as data relays back around 2016.
> Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, told reporters Friday that an F-22 fighter aircraft based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson shot down the object using the same type of missile used to take down the balloon nearly a week ago.[0]
It's considered a "system-guided" missile, not heat-seeking. It's much more advanced than the original heat-seeking concept and integrates additional optical technology in the fuse.
That's an interesting catch. Still, it's known that the previous object was a balloon, so I'd say it makes more sense to expect those words are shorthand for "previous object (which was a balloon)". This new object may still be a balloon, but those words aren't admission of that.
Fair point; I doubt it's anything like a bottle rocket or whatever else. I guess it doesn't really matter either way since it's likely to be revealed what it was.
I think the main issue of an object being really high up in the air is the lack of air density which, to achieve equilibrium, will get pulled apart (think: the opposite of being smashed). It's also extremely cold.
I assume a weather balloon can handle those issues though. [0]
No, it is just as likely to be a reporter's garbled understanding of an explanation. In mysterious matters wait until you have 2 or 3 datapoints before using a heuristic.
Jeez imagine if a country decided to launch the first nuclear strikes using their national carriers passenger air planes masquerading as civilian aircraft.
My favorite of those is a former press secretary Jen Psaki tried to retort a perfectly good question from a reporter asking if the White House will send much needed coronavirus tests to American households:
"Should we just send one to every American?" Psaki shot back, her voice dripping with sarcasm. [0]
Twitter dragged her so hard it was/wasn't even funny, and the next day the White House did just that. Thanks lady!
I wondered about this too. But even balloons are maneuverable in some sense, by changing their altitude. So maybe the meaning is more like "didn't maneuver in response to our presence".
You can use propellers to move up and down too. The buoyancy of a fixed amount of helium doesn't drop/rise much with altitude changes. It isnt like submarines. The needed vertical thrust to move a few thousand feet is minimal.
John Kirby called it an object today during the White House press briefing. He also said it was the size of a small car, unlike the balloon from China that was the size of 2-3 buses. Finally, Kirby said that the object could not direct its own propulsion or direction and was at the whim of the wind.
Weather balloons are disposable, they rise and expand in the process until they burst - the maximum size is somewhere between 5 and 10 meters, between a large car and a white van. The payload tends to have a parachute and a phone number (the ones from the Weather Service do).
There was something about fear being the mind-killer. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam to the Red Telephone please - paging the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam!
Hopefully this isn't on that kind of hair-trigger that shoots down civilian airliners by mistake. It's happened literally dozens of times [0], so it's hard to believe any kind of blanket "this can't possibly happen because..." logic.
Seems to be particularly likely to happen in panicky situations, or when someone has something to prove. E.g., the Soviet-American tensions surrounding an American spy plane, a RC-135, were a factor in the Soviets shooting down KAL-007 (they thought it was the RC-135) [1].
Protocol is to visually identify the target. In the case of an airliner, they try to make visual contact with the pilots if they don’t respond by radio. There are visual verification methods commercial pilots are trained on.
And airliners have transponders and flight plans. If a civilian plane stopped talking to ATC, the Air Force is likely already involved.
Additionally, we’re not on a high-alert war footing like during the Cold War. As far as I know, we don’t have hostile military aircraft routinely flying with transponders off on our coasts.
Even if we did, I’m pretty sure the larger military radar systems that would be used to track this stuff can read transponders and separate out which plane is which.
Can you elaborate on this? My understanding of the Mauna Kea lasers is that they are used to adjust the mirrors for atmospheric conditions in real time.
Yes, those originating from (around) the telescopes. But just recently Subaru telescope captured laser beams originating from space scanning Mauna Kea in regular intervals that looked like satellite mapping.
They're unmanned and ambient, yet are clearly a provocation and give China an information advantage over where it would be without the balloons, and in a geopolitical sense it asserts Chinese ascendency. At the same time, it's hard for the US or other powers to figure out an appropriate response. Very similar to Russian/NK/Chinese/Israeli/American state-sponsored hacking groups--it continually forces the adversary to ask "where do we draw a line, and what consequences do we give for crossing it?"
It sounds similar in goals to the Regan-era PSYOP described by Peter Schweizer
> "It really got to them," recalls Dr. William Schneider, [former] undersecretary of state for military assistance and technology, who saw classified "after-action reports" that indicated U.S. flight activity. "They didn't know what it all meant. A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace, and other radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and return home."[1]
Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union
If I were Russia (which is not far from Alaska) I would launch these at random intervals with junk COTS electronics just to confuse matters. The cost of each launch can probably be denominated in thousands.
Quite possibly. Minor provocations that by themselves are too inconsequential to warrant a response, nothing to start a war over, but incrementally provokes the target into lashing out in some way that is advantageous for China.
Probe detection & response times for various approaches and altitudes, sigint for radio chatter that doesn't reach past the US, similar for active radar targeting high altitudes, wasting more US money than they cost China by a long shot, trial-run for a mass launch of these with potentially more interesting payloads than these sacrificial trial ones are carrying (even just as a kind of attention- and resource-wasting chaff during, say, an attack on Taiwan), radio-signal mapping for some crazy new passive guidance system. Lots of possibilities.
It could be to gradually increase reaction expectations so it would not be surprising if China shot down one of the USA's drones. Or perhaps escalate by using their previously demonstrated ability to blow up satellites. The balloon was a very public microaggression that forced the USA to respond in a very public way. China tried the public "oops it was a weather balloon" to give the USA a chance to back off the public response (but know that China was still provoking them). But it was too brazen to accept.
The USA is already on their doorsteps by having bases in almost all the neighboring countries, and conducting operational freedom exercises by flying and sailing through disputed areas.
Wouldn’t it be prudent in this situation for China to just not send these balloons over the US mainland if they didn’t want to offer the US an excuse to fear monger them?
America is forcing China to send balloons towards America so that America can raise tensions with China?
Unfortunately, tensions are already quite high in China, due to state media being the only source of propaganda. The state and most tv-watchers have therefore decided that America is the cause of all their problems.
From what I have read these 3 were just recently 'discovered' and weren't known prior to Biden coming into office. How this can be true, I have no clue. Either way, I don't remember people posting balloon pictures a few years ago. I have a feeling that if they had transited during the previous administration, and people knew, they would have nailed this criticism to Trump too.
It's a boogeyman, a harmless prop hyped up by the GOP in an effort to heighten tensions with China and criticize a tepid response by the administration.
The Biden White House seems happy to play along, justifying more equipment from top donors Raytheon and Boeing.
The balloon panic helpfully distracts from the massive freight derailment chemical disaster currently spewing vinyl chloride into the atmosphere over Ohio.
A government that spends more money on their military than the rest of the world combined isn't at risk of bankruptcy from firing a couple missiles.
We're at risk of bankruptcy because our debt is 31 trillion dollars and in June we won't even be able to issue securities to continue bullshitting ourselves out of cutting spending. Welcome to America, we're broke because we spent all our money on guns rather than infrastructure, healthcare and education.
We spend more on Healthcare and education per capital than almost any other country. Don't let people bullshit you on the amount spent. Now results on dollars spent is a different question with a different answer.
We spend more per capita just in public money than some peer states do to provide universal healthcare, while ours isn't universal.
It makes more sense when you consider how many programs we have—a pretty high percentage of our population is covered by public spending, and—crucially—the ones who are are in some cases among the most expensive to care for.
1) Medicare (old or disabled)
2) Medicaid (poor)
3) Tricare or whatever they call it now, since I think the name changed (active and IIRC retired-with-full-benefits military and their spouses and kids, at least for the active-duty ones, can't recall if that part carries over in retirement)
4) VA (military veterans, including those with short terms of service)
5) Federal employees
6) State employees
7) County employees
8) City employees
9) Cops and firefighters and such, if not covered under any of the above.
10) School district employees (there are lots of these)
Not all of these are cases in which all the spending is covered by public money, but some of them are, and in other cases a great deal of it is. Also I've probably missed some programs.
[EDIT] Oh and that's not counting public money that goes to private companies but ends up paying for healthcare for those companies' employees and families, who are employed expressly to work on those publicly-funded projects—I can see arguments either way for counting that, depends on what you're trying to understand.
The 80's were much, much worse. If we were ever going to go bankrupt, it was in the early Clinton administration due to the Reagan/Bush spending boom. We got through just fine. Those bonds were all paid off decades ago.
Be very very very cautious any time someone comes at you with this kind of hyperbole about federal debt. They're selling you something.
> Welcome to America, we're broke because we spent all our money on guns rather than infrastructure, healthcare and education.
This sentiment is completely untrue. Defense is approximately 12% of US government spending, healthcare approximately 24%, education approximately 15%, and social security roughly 20%. Infrastructure is harder to categorize, but the truth is that the US government spends at least 4x more on healthcare, education and welfare (combined) than defense.
The fact that this 12% of government spending amounts to the largest military on earth is in large part a consequence of the fact that the US is really, enormously wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world, has a fairly large population, and still has a larger GDP per capita than any other large or even medium-sized country.
Yes, and that's why we should oppose more tax increases and more government spending, and focus instead on how to make government more efficient and get more value for the money we do spend.
The bag of helium isn’t the expensive part I consider. I’m wondering how much computer hardware “the size of multiple buses” costs. I’m sure much of that is casing but much of it also is not. How much effort went into designing these things? There’s probably a significant price tag on these bags of helium all things considered.
Yeah, these balloons that can hold small car to school bus sized payloads are not like a commercially available thing. It seems like they'd require truckloads of helium, which is a hard gas to store and not always available in massive quantities (seems like it should be prioritized for keeping MRI scanners cool instead of balloons). The balloons are probably really hard to produce, not made in great numbers, and require specialized equipment and processes to launch without puncturing. Not quite an airplane's cost but this isn't the send-a-gopro-to-100,000ft type of trick that relied entirely on products available to consumers.
It's also possible whomever is running this operation doesn't care about their staff at all and they just use hydrogen.
They shot down a couple of balloons using whatever they had. If balloons were a common target, they'd design something more suitable. Maybe a monkey throwing darts.
The USAF pops off live missiles while training from time to time, so these could just come from that supply, and not really cost anything. Shooting down balloons is a good enough training exercise.
Pot calling kettle black. The US has been sending armed drones into several countries without coordination with local ATC or consent of the local government. Soleimani and a number of Iraqi military officers were taken out by a US drone.
Sure, but that was still a violation of sovreign airspace. It would be like having a foreign drone targeting George W.Bush. Both are war criminals, but I'm not sure it suddenly makes violating foreign countries ok.
It needs to be said; the list of Iranian terrorist attacks against America is very short. The list of Iranian terrorist attacks in America is even shorter. Most of the antagonism against Iran in America is motivated by Iran's relationship with other countries (Israel), not things they've done to America. I can't say that I feel any personal animosity towards Iran, I wish America would let Israelis handle Israeli affairs and stop getting into grudge matches with other countries on their behalf.
> There were seven attacks in May, as many attacks that month as February, March and April combined, and there have been a total of 29 since October without a kinetic U.S. response.
We interdict Iranian missiles to terrorist groups about once a week.
Iran's stated goal is to forcibly convert the world to their preferred brand of theocratic rule - the "women are very literally property" kind of theocratic rule.
Not, in fact is bad, because what is good for the geese is good for the gander.
This increases the risk of being killed by a drone for everybody, even if is as collateral damage. If international laws can be so easily violated for free, why do we need them? Do we really want a world without rules?
U.S. adversaries realized they couldn't compete with the U.S. on spending. So they got creative and loaded the equivalent of Pringles cans up with a bunch of sensors, hooked them up to either a balloons or relatively cheap unmanned aircraft, and sent them through U.S. airspace to collect intelligence. They'd occasionally get caught (perhaps on purpose) and cause a base to scramble to intercept. The proposed theory on why they'd get caught on purpose was to gather up intelligence on what a response would be flying through the airspace.
It's possible they've been doing this for more than a decade and the military has gotten caught with egg on it's face having ignored the reports for so long.
Funny, though tbh it seems like there are cheaper ways to cause the US to spend gobs of cash. I even hesitate to mention some ideas that immediately come to mind that would be easier/more efficient to really nail than the Pringles can idea.
Plus many of the more prominent base-personnel sightings land quite a bit far from that particular ballpark. Take a look into the Rendlesham Forest incident for example.
The problem with "summing up UFO contact" is that the variety of encounters is absolutely insane. Compare Rendlesham to Varginha, etc.
It really starts to bring out the "inter" in the more colorful inter-dimensional contact theories.
If you know something about how the USAF responds to incidents, the idea of the deputy base commander and disaster preparedness running around in the middle of the night chasing UFO's is hilarious. It's obviously a practical joke that got out of hand.
Just watched some interviews. The guys claiming to have “downloaded” an alien signal by touching the craft.
The signal was transmitted in binary and just happened to be ASCII encoded English. Odd that a ship from 8100 transmitted data in an archaic dialect of an ancient language using an ancient encoding that just happened to match the language and encoding in widespread use during this guys lifetime.
Funny, though tbh it seems like there are cheaper ways
to cause the US to spend gobs of cash.
Yeah.
My best understanding based on watching a lot of retired military personnel is that isolated incidents cost the US almost exactly zero additional dollars.
The way an Air Force base works is this: there is a budget. This covers the (considerable) costs of the base itself, the personnel, the equipment, and so on.
Active-duty fighter pilots must fly a certain number of hours per month to remain on active status. Just like any other demanding activity (sports, competitive gaming, whatever) their skills require constant maintenance. These flying hours are of course budgeted. (This will be true of literally any air force; it's not specifically a USAF thing)
Things like these incident responses, and even things like flyovers before sporting events, come out of those predetermined budgeted flying hours that they were going to fly anyway. So isolated incidents like these don't really increase USAF expenses in a meaningful way. Those $400K/ea missiles will presumably need to be replenished but this must be compared to the USAF's total budget of $180 billion.
To put any strain whatsoever on the US's capabilities our foes would need to start sending large amounts of drones: essentially, a saturation attack. More than we can comfortably respond to. Which is of course... extremely possible.
But as long as these remain isolated incidents we can surmise that our adversary's goal is not "cost the US a bunch of money."
A potential flaw in this plan: while everything you say may be true, it is not broadly known. If China (or whoever) was to keep floating these things our way and we kept shooting them down at a don't worry about it, we're pot committed rate of ~$400k per incident, maybe people's blind faith in the military and politicians might be replaced with some rare curiosity, and maybe even displeasure! (Though: it's not like they have an alternative to vote for, but that too is not immutable, it only seems that way.)
Keeping people immersed in a complex narrative is a lot easier than one would think, but it is also a very tricky balancing act that can get upset by the weirdest things.
Personally, I'm all for it - anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my books, plus it makes for good entertainment.
while everything you say may be true, it is not broadly known
It's readily available public information. As far as "widely known," I guess that's true. Most people haven't really nerded out on the details of how pilots maintain combat readiness and how budgets work, but uh, your point?
anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western
public from their dream state is a good thing in my books
I'm not exactly the biggest fan of any government, but what specifically are you talking about here?
What is the "dream state" that these incursions might shatter?
> It's readily available public information. As far as "widely known," I guess that's true.
It's even worse: even when people do ingest available information, they very often do it erroneously, forming a misunderstanding (without realizing it).
> Most people haven't really nerded out on the details of how pilots maintain combat readiness and how budgets work, but uh, your point?
Broadly: humanity runs mostly on untrue stories, and does not realize it (actually, there's a "it's even worse' here too).
>> anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my books
> I'm not exactly the biggest fan of any government, but what specifically are you talking about here?
Simplistically: people's understanding and trust in their government (abstract and concrete), and what is going on in general is highly erroneous, and not only do they not realize this, they believe the opposite. I consider this to be an extremely dangerous state of affairs, despite it having always been the case and "we're doing ok" nonetheless. Things often go "ok" for a very long time, and then suddenly start going "not ok", often without an obvious trigger.
> What is the "dream state" that these incursions might shatter?
The phenomena resulting from the combination of consciousness + culture + time, both individually and collectively.
You might be best served by filing this under "woo woo" though...but then again, you also might not - there's only one way to (possibly) find out!
> it seems like there are cheaper ways to cause the US to spend gobs of cash.
Yeah, the Mig-25 / F-15 thing comes to mind. Soviets develop a super secret jet, very big, very fast.. it must be very impressive fighter jet! America is spooked so tons of resources are poured into the F-15 to make the absolute best possible air superiority fighter jet they can, to counter this new Soviet threat.
Except then it turns out that the Mig-25 was never a fighter jet, it was an interceptor that was very fast in a straight line but not much more. So the US built an incredible air superiority fighter to counter a phantom of a jet that never really existed in the way America thought.
Given the possibilities of an alien spacecraft observed on Earth violating the known laws of physics, or some error on the part of the observer, I'm going with the latter every time.
First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level. Then explain why our completely wrong models of physics still work as well as they do. Then explain the Fermi Paradox in light of the apparent existence of easy faster than light/antigravity technology and confirmation of the existence of other technologically advanced civilizations in the universe. Then I'll be willing to concede the still practically nil chance of any of those aliens actually being here given the vast size of the observable universe as being likely enough to consider.
Don't get me wrong, I want it to be true. I desperately want it to be true. I've been fascinated by UFOlogy and sightings and the related folklore for decades. I want some fate for humanity other than us slowly choking to death on our own poison, alone on this island in the midst of vast seas of infinity. It's just that the bar for proving any other possibility is higher than a third-hand account of someone seeing a light in the sky that moved really fast.
> Given the possibilities of an alien spacecraft observed on Earth violating the known laws of physics, or some error on the part of the observer, I'm going with the latter every time.
You know, it isn't (physically) necessary to choose anything.
> First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level.
Why does everything have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
> Don't get me wrong, I want it to be true.
I dunno man, the opposite seems to be the case - are you not at least suffering from motivated reasoning, to some degree?
> I want some fate for humanity other than us slowly choking to death on our own poison, alone on this island in the midst of vast seas of infinity.
Me too!! Consider this idea: our cultural tendency to form beliefs absent of proof (therefore: faith based, which is usually considered a big no no) causes substantial harm, and our tendency to write it off as "that's just people" or (begrudgingly) as "well, of course I'm only expressing my opinion, that's what everyone is always doing" are not proper common sense and reasonableness, but rather are emergent behaviors that cause humanity to be permanently stuck in a local maxima (on certain dimensions, while ongoing successes in specific domains like science, engineering, computing, etc make it appear like we have our shit substantially together comprehensively).
Of course, this is speculation - but what if it is actually true to a non-trivial degree?
>You know, it isn't (physically) necessary to choose anything.
Sure, but we're here on a discussion forum so not committing to any point of view seems counterproductive.
>Why does everything have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
Because the laws of physics as we understand them, even quantum mechanics, don't allow for things like antigravity or faster than light travel or propagation of information. Theoretical warp-drive models like the Alcubierre drive, or wormholes, or other solutions either require different spacetimes or exotic matter or negative energy or some kind of fudge factor that makes it not work within our universe. Special relativity says it's impossible. Quantum mechanics says it's impossible.
If it turns out that FTL travel is possible, it means we live in a universe without causality, where the relationship between cause and effect is arbitrary. If it turns out to be not only possible but also trivial, to the point that you can fit a warp drive onto something the size of a plane, Then E=MC^2 turns out to be meaningless. Since everything we observe about the universe, at every scale, suggests causality exists and that E=MC^2 holds, we can't be wrong about those without being wrong about everything.
But hey, maybe we are. Great. Show me some equations then. That's all I'm asking. Prove it's wrong, first. Show me a working anti-gravity drive or a warp drive, built by humans, or something that can be tested independently, peer reviewed and verified. Faster than light teleportation. Something.
But all I'm expected to hang my hat on is rumors, folklore and videos for which mundane explanations exist.
>I dunno man, the opposite seems to be the case - are you not at least suffering from motivated reasoning, to some degree?
Everyone suffers from motivated reasoning, that's how reason works. I'm just saying my personal bar for proof is higher than those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics as a prior to making the UFO argument semantically trivial.
Rather than believe that we're exactly as ignorant now - even though we can measure gravitational waves and the cosmic microwave background and use quantum tunneling in our microchips and GPS has to take relativistic time dilation into account - as we were thousands of years ago when we believed the stars were inscribed on crystal spheres, I believe our models of the universe have become more accurate over time, and that as a result, fundamental paradigm shifts become less and less likely.
That doesn't mean I don't want to believe, it just means I don't also believe in magical thinking. And I'm far from the only skeptic who wants to believe out there. Eyewitness testimony is interesting, video is interesting, but it isn't enough. At least not for me.
> Sure, but we're here on a discussion forum so not committing to any point of view seems counterproductive.
But if you think of it from the perspective of what is actually true, what do you come up with?
Also: assuming you're a programmer/techie type: is this the same epistemic methodology you use when writing code?
Given the possibilities of an alien spacecraft observed on Earth violating the known laws of physics, or some error on the part of the observer, I'm going with the latter every time.
>>> First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level.
>> Why does everything[!] have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
> Because the laws of physics as we understand them, even quantum mechanics, don't allow for things like antigravity or faster than light travel or propagation of information. Theoretical warp-drive models like the Alcubierre drive, or wormholes, or other solutions either require different spacetimes or exotic matter or negative energy or some kind of fudge factor that makes it not work within our universe. Special relativity says it's impossible.
Here you are only describing that some things that we believe would have to be incorrect, and you do not even attempt to substantiate the "irreconcilable" part, as far as I can tell.
> Quantum mechanics says it's impossible.
Saying something is true does not necessarily mean it is true, but it certainly often causes it to appear true.
> If it turns out that FTL travel is possible, it means we live in a universe without causality, where the relationship between cause and effect is arbitrary.
Why?
> If it turns out to be not only possible but also trivial, to the point that you can fit a warp drive onto something the size of a plane, Then E=MC^2 turns out to be meaningless. Since everything we observe about the universe, at every scale, suggests causality exists and that E=MC^2 holds, we can't be wrong about those without being wrong about everything.
Why (in general, and also specifically related to everything having to be wrong)?
> But hey, maybe we are. Great. Show me some equations then.
The burden of proof lies with the person making an assertion.
> Prove it's wrong, first. Show me a working anti-gravity drive or a warp drive, built by humans, or something that can be tested independently, peer reviewed and verified. Faster than light teleportation. Something.
First: prove to me, and yourself, that you are correct.
> But all I'm expected to hang my hat on is rumors, folklore and videos for which mundane explanations exist.
Who is it that is expecting you to do that here, and how did you acquire that knowledge?
> Everyone suffers from motivated reasoning...
Do all people suffer from it, always? And where people do suffer from it, do they suffer from it equally?
Also: where have you acquired this comprehensive knowledge?
> that's how reason works.
Not really.
> I'm just saying my personal bar for proof is higher than those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics as a prior to making the UFO argument semantically trivial.
To me, your personal bar for proof seems essentially/abstractly identical to most people's: if it seems true, it is true.
Also: how sure are you of "those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics"? (Emphasis mine.)
> Rather than believe that we're exactly as ignorant now - even though we can measure gravitational waves and the cosmic microwave background and use quantum tunneling in our microchips and GPS has to take relativistic time dilation into account - as we were thousands of years ago when we believed the stars were inscribed on crystal spheres, I believe our models of the universe have become more accurate over time, and that as a result, fundamental paradigm sh...
Making a high altitude balloon highly visible (eg, put lights inside it) and sitting back and waiting is actually a terrific tactic for finding out maximum operational ceiling of interceptors when the number is non-public.
Mission accomplished. The previously published ceiling of the F-22 was 50K feet. The Pentagon said it (edit: by "it" I mean the F-22) was flying at 58K feet when it shot down the first balloon. Guess it can do (at least) 58K.
This was probably not entirely groundbreaking news to anybody including China. Everybody knows that the published specs of military hardware are intentionally distorted in one direction or another.
The F-15's known ceiling is 65K feet for example. So it's not surprising that newer fighters can match that.
There's not really any reason the Pentagon needed to state the F-22 was at 58k if that was actually new information (I haven't investigated the previously admitted service ceiling). They could have just as easily have claimed it was at 50k when it fired.
EDIT: Wikipedia claims the service ceiling of the F-22 is 65k feet anyways.
Yeah, a $50k missile to save even a single unoccupied house is a missile that paid for itself. And if it saves a few human lives then it was positively cheap.
If bankrupting Israel by forcing them to expend Iron Dome interceptors is Hezbollah's plan, it obviously isn't working.
I wonder how much is going into location technology much like ShotSpotter but for rockets and mortar and all that sort of thing. They may already know the origins of fire but maybe can't fire back at that precise location or something?
Counter-battery radar that can track artillery shells or ballistic rockets back to their point of origin have been around for many years now; the Israelis surely know exactly where the rockets are being fired from. I think they (usually) avoid firing back because they know there would be civilian casualties and want to avoid some of that bad PR.
True. But they're unguided, almost none of them will cause real damage, but you have no choice but to take all of them out to prevent the losses from a lucky shot - at great expense. It's a great way to drain your enemies funds, great asymmetric warfare. Casualties are just icing on the cake.
Part of Iron Dome is trajectory analysis. If the profile of a target matches that of an unguided rocket and the CEP is in some unoccupied area, no interceptors are fired. If it looks like it'll land in a populated area, interceptors are fired. It doesn't just shoot everything in the sky.
That analog for a $50 Estes rocket can blow a family apart into little pieces. The discipline is sound - protect your citizens from external threats, no matter the cost. That's the purpose of government and by extension, its military.
That video helps explain one property one of the UFO videos (the rotation) but doesn't explain the rest. Doesn't explain the Tic Tac videos. It does not explain why these were observed on radar as well.
While some of the videos have explanation, I would kindly encourage you to look at this with more curiosity.
He covers the "Tic-Tac" and "Go Fast" videos too, just not in that specific video. Like in this one, where he explains how the "Go Fast" video isn't actually even a fast object zipping just above the water, but rather an object flying at roughly wind-speed at about 12000 feet.
> It does not explain why these were observed on radar as well.
The lens flare was caused by the camera looking at the ass end of another jet. The radar saw the other jet.
For even one of these videos to have a mundane explanation that should have been obvious to the Navy upon investigation, I think that discredits the lot. Either the Navy couldn't figure it out themselves (which seems highly improbable), or for some reason the Navy is deliberately misleading the public, or at the very least allowing some of their personnel to mislead the public and playing coy about it. I think this is what's happening.
> or for some reason the Navy is deliberately misleading the public, or at the very least allowing some of their personnel to mislead the public and playing coy about it
Maybe they think it's funny. Maybe it's to confuse their adversaries, or a ploy for more funding from Congress. Maybe they're allowing some pranksters to have their fun because they want to encourage an environment of open reporting where pilots aren't afraid to report strange things.
The Navy was directed by the Executive branch to release the videos. They released the videos and a non-statement about what the videos were.
My guess is that there's an internal report describing the FLIR system and how the FLIR system works and how the internal workings of the FLIR system caused the visual phenomena. But that's all classified.
So they did the absolute minimum the Executive branch required them to do and left it up to the White House Press Secretary to explain it to the American public.
To me it reeks of the brass not wanting to have any more of their time wasted. There's a great scene in The Wire where the metro police, the harbor police, the state police, and the county sheriff arguing that a string of murders don't fall under their jurisdiction; it's your problem you deal with it etc, subverting the trope of the local cops fighting with the federal/state police (usually the FBI) that "this is my jurisdiction" or whatever. I think this is the same. The Executive branch (I'm 80% sure it was Trump, coulda been Obama, too lazy to look it up) demanded that they do a thing they didn't want to do, and then they dragged their feet and did the bare minimum, and in the process made a mess that now the Office of the White House now needs to clean up. (which they didn't, because they don't want to explain a classified sensor system in a public briefing either)
> This preliminary report is provided by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in response to the provision in Senate Report 116-233, accompanying the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2021, that the DNI, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF), is to submit an intelligence assessment of the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the progress the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding this threat.
The tic tac looks exactly like any number of inflight videos of other inflight objects. The apparent speed is a function of the unusual perspectives created when two objects fly at different altitudes. Watch tactical footage from fighters on a regular basis and it won't even look odd.
Mick West's videos are so good, specifically because the analysis are based on what's actually shown in the interface in the videos. There's no big "like, comment, subscribe"-section either. Just a pure explanation of why the object shown isn't as mystical as it appears at first glance.
> Mick Wests videos on the topic have been thoroughly debunked by fighter pilots and experienced aviators.
I have never seen a counter-analysis. Can you explain why you think this? It's not common knowledge that the observations of Mick West has been "debunked"...at least not as commonly known or easy to find as the Mick West analysis or the source videos.
Regardless I think the simplest counter argument is that if that were really the case, you'd see these damn things on every flight facing the sun and people would know to ignore them. Lens flares also don't show up on radar and on pilot's eyes. No crazy analysis needed.
That's unnecessarily pejorative. Presenting something as evidence, requires some amount of rigor. This is why an in-depth analysis is valued. Presenting as strong a case as possible for either side, is the method by which we can best decide on what is known.
> Regardless I think the simplest counter argument is that if that were really the case, you'd see these damn things on every flight facing the sun and people would know to ignore them
I don't believe that's a counter-argument, as it applies to both conclusions. A unique coincidence does not imply it's common. ie If the gimbal video was a UFO, you'd see these damn things on every flight, etc.
> Lens flares also don't show up on radar and on pilot's eyes.
Mick West's analysis video does not contend that the object is only a lens flare, but an object with a lens flare (or lens artifact) overlaying it. There is no dispute that the pilots saw a group of objects with targeting information on a singular physical object from the video source.
I agree the videos are thoroughly debunked as being aliens, but there still are credible reports that navy/air force see craft observing them periodically. That doesn't have to be aliens for the reports to be true.
e.g. The video that got debunked as Bokeh (accurately) is still someone on that ship attempting to video a craft that they see nearby them. It's only viewers of the video who get confused and believe that the bokeh effect is what they are supposed to be seeing in the video.
why does every debunking focus on the footage and ignore the fact the objects were also confirmed on radar? Do they just assume the Navy is filled with morons who decided to report this through the chain of command based on nothing but footage and didn't consider a lens flare?
The Navy has a patent on creating fake UFOs that appear on radar and other sensors so that seems like a perfectly logical explanation. It would also explain why the Navy disproportionately sees the UFOs when compared to the Air Force.
We haven't been provided proof that anything was confirmed on radar, nor what "confirmation" means. This is the same military that has a history of using alien/UFO conspiracy theories to obfuscate sightings of classified aircraft. It's not a case of the Navy being morons, but whether or not the military is being truthful.
My assumption is that sensationalized UAPs are illusions, but the reason the military keeps putting out press releases about them is not because they're aliens. The first reason is that there are unidentified aircraft entering US airspace. They're likely cheap attempts at both intelligence collecting and psychological warfare on behalf of US adversaries. Drones are easily mass produced and a nation flying a handful of drones in US airspace can easily send hundreds/thousands/millions because of how cheap and easy they are to make and deploy.
Since drones can vary in size and be flown in a ton of different conditions/patterns/scenarios/etc, they might be hard to detect. The mainstreaming of the "UAP mystery" narrative encourages civilians to look for, record and massively platform adversarial drones should they be seen by people, but go undetected by systems that are looking for them. The narrative also neuters whatever attempt at intimidation or psyops adversaries are waging against the public/military/etc. "Our militaries can send whatever we want into your airspace and there's nothing you can do about it" can be a powerful message that was effectively neutered with "maybe they're aliens lol".
Isn’t it better to let people underestimate us? Especially any potential adversary.
Regardless, liminal warfare will continue to give rise to this kind of scenario so we should try not to outsmart ourselves in a desperate bid to be right
> Isn’t it better to let people underestimate us? Especially any potential adversary.
Depends on the domain. Underestimation could lead to perceptions of weakness and opportunity for attack. Even if you are prepared for attack, not getting attacked in the first place is better than getting attacked at all.
That was actually similar to a concern from CIA director Walter Bedell Smith:
>According to Smith, it was CIA’s responsibility by statute to coordinate the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts.
The proposed theory on why they'd get caught on
purpose was to gather up intelligence on what a
response would be flying through the airspace.
It's certainly the most likely explanation.
Accordingly, it seems highly possible that the countries targeted by such incursions (a) realize their response time is being tested (b) fuzz/delay their responses by some certain amount of time in order to frustrate such efforts.
This is a cat and mouse game that we've been playing for decades. USA has surveillance aircraft in the air at all times, especially near ADIZ. It also has at least one of two national command and control aircraft in the air at all times. The USA has been probed more times than can be counted, and we've probed other countries just as much. What's new is ignoring a threat while over territorial waters or sparsely populated areas and letting it glide across the country before deciding to shoot it down.
I don’t think that’s new based on the most recent incident. I recall the pentagon saying this has been going on for a few years. But if, by saying new you mean the last decade, that’s fair.
I was referring to the general surveillance of opposing forces by governments. Even still, balloons have been used for surveillance and attack for over one hundred years.
During the siege of Yorktown in 1862, Union General Fitz Porter decided to do some surveillance using only one rope on an observation balloon. The rope snapped and he drifted over enemy lines. Confederates tried to shoot him down but missed. Eventually the wind sent him back over Union lines.
Balloons were used in WW1 as observation posts (ushering in wide-spread use of parachutes) and in WW2 for both observation and area over-flight denial.
By May 1945, Japan sent almost 10,000 armed balloons across the pacific. They were largely ineffective, however, they did kill a pregnant mother and five children who discovered a downed balloon in Bly, Oregon. 285 Japanese balloons were recovered, one as far east as Texas.
Adversaries spend 100k for a military grade drone. What do shoot it down with? A 1M dollar Patriot? Whatever you choose will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone.
Israel’s Iron Dome has the same issue. It costs massively more for defense than attack.
It would be an air to air missile like a sidewinder which still costs $400k. Just scrambling a couple jets would cost tens of thousands on top of that I’m sure.
More than tens of thousands of dollars, military aircraft are incredibly expensive to operate and maintain. Beyond the obvious fuel costs, every hour of flight time is followed up by N hours of service.
If I remember correctly, the F-22 Raptor is the champ in terms of highest ratio of service required per hour of flight (40:1).
The F-35 clocks in at 4-8 hours of service per hour flown (6:1).
One example from the article linked below:
USMIL budgeted $39m dollars for the blue angels to fly 69 days in one year. It's up to 11 F/A-18 Hornets at once, but in my experience they only fly for a couple of minutes for a show.
Plus, who knows what kind of math games the military plays in terms of budget reporting. Operating commercial aircraft is already
very expensive, and military craft are an order of magnitude moreso.
The planes are beautiful, though <3, and remain operationally effective.
Flight hours are flight hours, and it’s very rare to do any type of offensive air-to-air operation outside of an exercise, so I’m sure it was a great training opportunity.
Less thrilled about it as someone who happened to be on a flight transiting nearby airspace last night, and who is familiar with incidents like KAL 007.
Maybe not actually launching a missile, but 99% of the pilot job comes before the missile is launched. Going up to fight against other aircraft, doing everything up to actually launching a missile, is a daily thing at any fighter squadron. The great thing about not launching a missile is that you can practice dozens of engagements rather than the one or two oppertunities during a live fire event.
Military flying is way more complicated than man-hours per flight. For instance, ground servicing people also need to be trained. So double or triple the minimum man hours needed to accomidate those people being trained on the job. Military people also have a host of training/admin/command costs spread across the entire military complex. Then per-hour numbers dont accomidate the periodic maintenance not done at the home squadron but at a support facility elsewhere. Other costs are less a function of hours than duty cycles, paticularly engines. And aircraft like the f22 are irreplaceable, meaning their depretiation costs are more a matter of policy than simple math. Fighter squadrons are generally given a budget in dollars, but also airframe hours to accomidate fleet costs. Boiling everthing down to a per-hour budget is totally impractical.
Missiles have a finite lifespan. They use the older ones first. Firing one the day before it has to go back for refurbishment might save money. You won't have to ship it back. Fired missiles are also generally not replaced, under the assumption that a new stock of better missiles will likely be ordered in a few years anyway.
And the cost of the plane is also complex. This pilot/aircraft renewed some quals on this flight, reducing training needs. The aircraft was likely going flying that day anyway. So the net cost of the operation was likely minimal.
One of the oldest tricks in the (SIGINT) book is to trick the enemy into activating their radar and/or trigger a response to an incursion to collect all of the resulting signals intelligence.
Kind of have to wonder if after the last shootdown the PLA sent out a more specialized collection platform in the hopes that the US would take the bait yet again.
I’m sure that NORAD doesn’t use their most advanced sensor platforms in such a circumstance, but there could be all kinds of interesting close range data to collect on the aircraft and weapons systems used to respond.
I wouldn't be so sure that NORAD doesn't use their "most advanced" sensor platforms. How would they be able to determine whether or not the threat was "real" before turning on their sensors? Are you suggesting that they have two tiers of sensor networks, and hold the "good" ones back for "real" threats?
Absolutely. This is the primary reason those “UFO’s” AKA balloons and drones are concerning: Signals intelligence (and/or radar jamming in the same vein which the DOD reported has occurred off the coast of Virginia).
It’s alarming many leaped to suggest LEO satellites obviate the need for balloons/drones/spy planes because it really isn’t true; there are some things for which a proper resolution and capture is simply only possibly with proximity, at least more than a satellite has. In fact that’s why we still use U-2 spy planes (upgraded) and did for the balloon.
Given the number of unidentified drone/balloon incursions reported by the Pentagon in the last few years near ships and air force bases I do wonder what’s been exposed about our radars and or datalinks. It also doesn’t necessarily matter that the data is encrypted (a weird refrain I saw) because the operating frequencies and behavior of the emitters on our aircraft, ships is in and of itself valuable information.
> Most acronyms are ambiguous. How would I be sure the answer there is what OP was referring to?
Is that what happened in this case? Did you initially try Googling yourself, only to encounter multiple definitions of "UAP" which seemed irrelevant to the article? Given the search results that came up for me, as well as the extent to which UAPs have been in the news lately, that would be surprising.
> Rude. And ineffective.
My goal is not to be rude. But I put about as much effort into answering your question as you did into asking it. You would have gotten your answer faster, while creating less work for others, if you had simply typed your question into Google instead of the HN comments field.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can even answer your own question, and make that your comment. Something like "OP's comment was the first time I had encountered the acronym 'UAP'. After a Google search, I found it means 'unidentified aerial phenomena'. In case others were wondering."
I noticed some odd things while watching the press conference. Pat Ryder had a potential Freudian slip and said that it was taken down because it "posed a threat to civili..." and he enunciated the "li" as if he were going to say "civilization," but he then paused and corrected himself to say "civilian."
Another odd thing was when Pat Ryder answered a question about why the President's decision to take down the object was necessary. Pat mentioned something like, "Presidents usually make decisions when certain threats in our airspace pose a danger to civilians on the ground."
It's extremely odd to me that they were able to identify the object by sending our own airmen to visually confirm it, but if that's the case, wouldn't they be able to definitively conclude that it wasn't a balloon? Pat kept it ambiguous and kept insisting that it was some sort of object.
I've wondered if these incursions are intentional on the part of the Chinese to provoke a precedent setting response to airborne (and beyond) surveillance.
"They shoot down our surveillance balloons, giving us precedent to shoot down their high altitude drone planes or satellites in the future."
This is a very reasonable explanation for the otherwise mysterious question of why even use an (obvious, provocative) balloon in the first place, when China has perfectly good satellites.
It may not be exactly what they have in mind, but I think it's the right way to think about the question - they are engineering scenarios which work to their advantage no matter how the US responds. US shoots them down? Play outraged. US leaves them alone? US looks weak.
Not unsteerable if you have altitude control + a good model of wind patterns. This is what Project Loon[1] did and I think it's fair to assume the technology might be similar.
Maybe not. But honestly, they're so massive and slow and visible, and visibly loitering over sensitive sites, that they practically scream "shoot me down". There must be some advantage gleaned from it, because they can't reasonably have expected anything else to have happened.
We need to move past this whole "why use spy balloons when we have satellites" thing. Even Scott Manley repeated it.
The USA has what are likely the most capable surveillance satellites in the world yet the USA still employs spy planes.
For one thing, RF signals suffer from path loss over distance. The difference is >140km in distance. That's a lot of signal loss. Another factor is loiter time.
> why even use an (obvious, provocative) balloon in the first place, when China has perfectly good satellites.
The balloon floated about 100x closer to the surface than a satellite in low-Earth orbit and travelled much slower, making it potentially easier to collect signals/images.
That precedent already exists. Trespassing planes were shot down during the cold war, when they could be, and China knocked a US intelligence plane out of the sky over "contested" airspace (way south of China, near some of the islands they're claiming in a move to gain sovereignty over as much of the sea route via the Straight of Malacca, and sea routes to SE Asian states like Vietnam, as they can) in '01 (kinda by accident, probably, but that didn't stop them from claiming it was OK for them to do that and detaining the flight crew until an apology was issued)
> I've wondered if these incursions are intentional on the part of the Chinese to provoke a precedent setting response to airborne (and beyond) surveillance.
It's more likely a coordinated event to get people to talk about something other than covid and the last 3 disastrous years. Lets be honest here, neither china nor the US wants people asking uncomfortable questions about covid. Now that the covid era appears to be over, what better way to distract people than "war".
They did the same thing with 9/11. Uncomfortable questions about 9/11 was overshadowed by war and iraqi "wmds". Eventually people forget or move on.
Call me a cynic, but china ends covid lockdowns and all of a sudden we get "surveillance" balloons. And the entire media apparatus has us talking about silly balloons instead of wondering what the last 3 years of covid was about. My guess was a staged "terrorist" attack somewhere to transition us from the covid news cycle. Turns out we got balloons instead. Whatever works in the end.
>Lets be honest here, neither china nor the US wants people asking uncomfortable questions about covid
at least in the US, I don't think anyone is really interested in covid anymore enough to require any distraction. Maybe that argument makes sense in China.
What? Many want fauci, the pfizer ceo, etc arrested. People want answers to how covid started, the lockdowns, masks, etc. Everyone here is over covid as a pandemic, but that doesn't mean we don't have questions that we want answered.
No…you’ve been in a social media echo chamber and convinced yourself there are many others that think like that. The truth is that’s an illusion. Really, 99.99% of people don’t really care.
Or more directly, maybe they intend to start shooting down our balloons. There were stories last year that the US military was planning to deploy surveillance balloons over Russian and China. Have we indeed been doing so? Here's one of the stories: https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/07/06/us-military-balloo....
863 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadMy pull quotes:
> The Pentagon downed an unidentified object over Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden, according to U.S. officials.
> Mr. Kirby said the object was traveling at 40,000 feet. He said officials were describing it as an object because that was the best description they had of it.
> A recovery effort on the debris will be made, Mr. Kirby said. He said the object was “roughly the size of a small car” — much smaller than the spy balloon that had a payload the size of multiple buses.
- Drones can be the size of small cars
- 40K feet is not a problem for a drone
In such a case it'd be more about the class / properties of the drone...
https://lawstreetmedia.com/news/citing-new-evidence-survivin...
The wrongful death suit claims that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) evidence has "emerged proving that TWA 800’s explosion was not caused by any defect in the airplane, but instead by an errant United States missile fired at aerial target drones flying nearby."
I am curious to see how this turns out and how it is refuted.
The jets were scrambled in such a hurry to intercept Flight 93 that they weren’t loaded with ammunition. I’m afraid that the plan was to collide the fighters with the plane if necessary. It was a suicide mission. [1] However, we have plenty of evidence that the passengers resisted and in the course of that the plane crashed.
1. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/fighter-pilot-reflects-911-sui...
[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/were-the-onl...
But who knows really, maybe the US govt is better at hiding its secrets than I give it credit for.
"One of the most unusual military actions of World War II came in the form of Japanese balloon bombs, or “Fugos,” directed at the mainland United States. Starting in 1944, the Japanese military constructed and launched over 9,000 high-altitude balloons, each loaded with nearly 50 pounds of anti-personnel and incendiary explosives. Amazingly, these unmanned balloons originated from over 5,000 miles away in the Japanese home islands. After being launched, the specially designed hydrogen balloons would ascend to an altitude of 30,000 feet and ride the jet stream across the Pacific Ocean to the mainland United States. Their bombs were triggered to drop after the three-day journey was complete—hopefully over a city or wooded region that would catch fire.
Nearly 350 of the bombs actually made it across the Pacific, and several were intercepted or shot down by the U.S. military. From 1944 to 1945, balloon bombs were spotted in more than 15 states—some as far east as Michigan and Iowa. The only fatalities came from a single incident in Oregon, where a pregnant woman and five children were killed in an explosion after coming across one of the downed balloons. Their deaths are considered the only combat casualties to occur on U.S. soil during World War II."
https://www.history.com/news/5-attacks-on-u-s-soil-during-wo...
Much like this story, many Japanese planners did not appreciate the vast size of the American west. A hundred random firebombs were basically irrelevant compared to the many thousands of yearly lighting strikes that also regularly cause fires. Who knows how many Japanese balloons are out there hanging from some tree undiscovered.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Station_Kurt
German sub drops off a team in 1943 to install a weather station on Newfoundland.
Wasnt discovered until 35 years later only because some scholar found reference to it in the German archives.
Labrador, where’s the station was located, is a lot less densely populated than Newfoundland.
The airforce then bombed hydrogen generating facilities nearby the suspected launch sites.
Section offense and defense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
Or maybe the US government chooses to fund all areas of research, like mineral surveys, in the hopes they can call on a field of knowledge repository to use in a war machine.
I'd like to believe there is a soil library that staff were doing microscope slide searches late into the night.
Also wonder how effective it is. Especially nowadays in such an interconnected world where products, and especially sand, could be coming from the opposite side of the globe
Sand with a variety of both of those can look much more varied, under a microscope, than you might imagine.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/battle-of-attu-60-years.htm
Edit: some more info. 881 Aleuts were gathered up, endured slave labor, and 118 died from lack of food, warmth or medical care. All extremely preventable as is evidenced by the camp just 30 miles away of around 700 Nazi POWs. All 700 returned home alive and in good health. Historian Stan Cohen even wrote, "All in all, the German imprisonment in Alaska was quite pleasant."
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/21/516277507...
The last two paragraphs are a pathetic conclusion from the governement.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-sep-11-me-then1...
The site of the people that found the remains of the plane is online and has a nice old-times look (with frames):
https://www.thexhunters.com/
https://www.thexhunters.com/xpeditions/f6f-5k_accident.html
https://www.thexhunters.com/xpeditions/f6f-5k_hunt.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident
I've got a fanciful notion that the "foo fighters" are living creatures. The Air Force supposedly gave someone some of the excretions to examine and they found "unearthly isotopes" or some such.
I figure something that lives, say, a couple hundred miles down inside a planet might only even notice the surface phenomenon that are the most dense, energetic, and anomalous (certainly at first), and pay more attention to those things. How might such beings interact with us and could we discern their efforts as such if we wanted?
Working hypothese 2: The Chinese shaped the balloon as a d*ck so it appears blurred in all videos and nobody can figure out what is that, or describe its shape. Invisible ninja genius move.
And cannot belief statesman proclaiming that now everywhere :( War should always be seen as evitable, at least that belief needs to hold up til the last second.. and even further. But who am I...
Edit: Chinese propaganda video of attack on Guam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBOho1AOKYY
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36598/chinese-air-forc...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-builds-mockups-us-...
But maybe they were trying to solve the problem of aging population that way.
China imports 66%-75% of its oil. That would drop dramatically in a hot war, as oil imports via the South China Sea would likely be blocked. This would require any imports to sail around Australia, which would likely be stopped by the US.
Russia would happily sell China oil, but it doesn't produce nearly enough to cover the gap.
No oil, no military. No oil, no economy.
I do not think oil is such a big problem. China import is 10mln barrels while Russia exports is 5mln barrels, Kazakhstan is 1.2mln barrels. I am sure they can transport Iranian oil if needed. What will also happen is that Russia will buy oil on international market to resell to China. There is no infrastructure now to transport that much oil but it can be built surprisingly fast. Germany just demonstrated that it's possible to built LNG terminal in six months. If you ignore property rights and all enviromental regulation and enlist military you can built trans-asia pipeline in a few months. China can also import oil thru Vietnam.
> it took until the middle of the 2010s
Here's a Chinese general openly threatening war with Japan in 2012:
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/chinese-general-pre...
The Taiwan Strait crisis of the '90s was before my time but it'd be interesting to know how bellicose the rhetoric got back then.
Edit: Taiwan crisis wasn't great, but it ended when the US sailed an aircraft carrier through Strait of Taiwan. So while it wasn't great, it wasn't like they were threatening war against US.
https://www.douyin.com/video/6946497713223585028
https://www.douyin.com/video/7081571993102961958
> Minihan said in the memo that because both Taiwan and the U.S. will have presidential elections in 2024, the U.S. will be “distracted,” and Chinese President Xi Jinping will have an opportunity to move on Taiwan.
IMHO, people/news are blowing it out of proportion.
If the boss of FedEx said we're going to end up in a war with China, how much does that say about what defense contractors are doing?
What it was probably actually about was shocking the troops assigned to AMC, establishing an important mission and raising morale, and declaring business as usual was no longer acceptable.
Gotta be creative to make people excited about moving supplies.
See also: every ridiculous statement by every startup CEO in a bubble, ever
Xi has made it very clear he would like to invade Taiwan, and soon. If Ukraine was going well for Russia, he may have already invaded.
Additionally, tensions are escalating with China and the economy seems unstable. I sincerely hope that reasonable minds will be able to prevent any further escalation of these conflicts, but there is always the possibility of an unintentional incident that could lead to an expansion of these wars.
1. Will I be able to stay in power? (Related: Will my populace support this war? Will my economy keep functioning?)
2. Will I end the conflict with more power / prestige / resources? (Related: How expensive will the conflict be in blood and treasure?)
Most of the things the West are doing over Ukraine are to make the "Related" answers less palatable. Very few people are calculating enough to climb to power, then risk everything on a gamble with bad odds.
If China gets serious about Kinmen and Matsu, then everyone should start worrying.
The Cold War was a lot scarier than what we have now. In the back of your mind, every day you thought that today could be the day we all get wiped out.
I'm not too worried about Russia or China starting anything nuclear these days. Russia invade Scandinavia? Sure. China invade Taiwan? Absolutely. But I'm not worried that they'll nuke someone else from a distance.
I'd like to hear more about this perspective- is this based solely on the fact that they haven't done it before or something else?
I had lots of nightmares about seeing a bright orange flash in the window back in my youth. I've had a few recently.
If they decide to take out the Steel Works in Gary, I'll be toast. If not, fallout is something that can be avoided by staying inside, away from exterior walls and the roof, and waiting it out for at least a week.
I've had Potassium Iodide in stock for my child's use since the Fukushima meltdown... I bought a new bottle when Ukraine kicked off.
In the 80s, it felt like you might find yourself vaporized or living in a nuclear apocalypse hellscape at any moment, likely due to a misunderstanding or malfunction.
These days it seems like we're more likely to just be in a long-term adversarial position with likely proxy wars.
I feel like the WWII and Cold War eras were more about existence, whereas these days the aggression is more about how much more bounty do we want. Look at the Chinese land grabs around disputed islands versus Japan. They don't need them, but it would be nice to have them.
The whole thing just seems like a bunch of unnecessary, ego-driven B.S. on every side.
I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis — to borrow from Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie Wag the Dog, "This? THIS is NOTH-ing!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jR4gld-nUA
This is nothing.
Information and and disinformation travels so much faster and so much more thoroughly these days that it’s hard to compare.
For example, in the 80s, I couldn’t even tell you what Russia looked like through photographs. there was just very little available information.
There was a big gray outline of the Soviet union on my high school history class wall, and that was about it. I had seen a few pictures of the Kremlin …the onion domes and what not. And maybe I had seen one photo of Brezhnev shown every so often on the news, but that was about it.
It’s amazing how much things have changed as far as the wealth of information is concerned.
So I’m not really answering your question, but the sheer magnitude of the lack of information … let’s say about four decades ago… is something that I really don’t see pointed out much so I thought you might find it interesting.
So in the 80s, the Soviet union was worrisome for the most part. But mostly it was just the blackest of black boxes to me.
Edits: sorry… numerous typos…typing on treadmill.
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/36593/20220314/asteroi...
How cool would that be? I'd suggest to use a factor that is the easiest to multiply by, in order to simplify operations. I guess the optimal factor would be 10. What is easier to multiply or divide by than 10, right?
I think I need to patent this bright idea. It's amazing nobody has thought about it before.
10 mm = 1 cm
10 cm = 1 dm
10 dm = 1 m
1000 m = 1 km
Makes math and scaling up and down a lot easier than having to remember that
12 in = 1 ft
3 ft = 1 yd
5280 ft = 1 mi
1760 yd = 1 mi
At all other times, your incentive is to make the biggest lie you can get away with.
Perhaps with the exception of fahrenheit most people here will know what you mean if you use units like feet and will often even prefer thinking in feet over metres for certain things. Personally I default to feet for something like height or a floorplan, although I can think in metres quite easily too.
But sailboat length is traditionally measured in feet. Same for aircraft altitude.
So sailors and aviators are more likely to use feet (and nautical miles) as measurement.
It's now defined in reference to SI meter, but it originates as 1/60th of a degree of latitude.
So ... not even a fixed length but one that varies by latitude
(given the Earth is an oblate spheroid | rotated ellipsoid | flattened sphere)
that's something on the order of 20 metres of sloppiness by my reckoning.
…which is why the French Navy (who originally defined the unit) switched it to be SI derived in 1906 and the international standard was updated in 1929.
But I couldn't even tell you how many cm to an inch. I just know how big a 40" TV or a 28" bike is.
The main exception? MacBooks. Those will be labeled e.g. "14 inch" (14インチ).
In this the american football field seems more "reliable" as a unit of measure, seemingly fixed to 91.44 x 48.8 m or 100 yards x 160 feet + the borders that may vary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football_field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch
Personally I "convert" a "football field" to half an hectare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare
or 100 x 50 m.
Science and engineering all use metric in the US. Automative all moved to metric voluntarily. I know construction is still imperial.
Its mostly consumer facing things that still imperial. And if you go to Canada its pretty common to see $/lb printed along side $/kg. People often talk about height in feet and inches, weight in pounds.
Its really not that different.
Machinists still do a lot of work in inches.
Machines last for decades and can’t practically support multiple standards. There’s an enormous amount of inertia in such a system.
Similarly aviation uses feet for altitude in most countries.
The US was an original signatory of the Meter Convention. Our customary units have been based on metric units since 1893. Our food packaging features metric units. Our scientists use metric units. Our school children learn the metric system. Our military uses the metric system. Our cars are built with metric fasteners.
Changing informal habits takes decades and has questionable benefit. Canada tried it in the 70s and is going to take another generation at least to fully convert for informal use.
I actually think we’re somewhat lucky in that most of us can immediately grok a measurement in either system when we see one online.
Canadian metrication follows the rest of the British empire which was centuries behind the rest of the world (including the US) in metrication.
People in the Olympics are the best athletes in the world. And I bet world class athletes need a big pool to compete in.
That gives you a pretty decent sense of the scale of an Olympic sized swimming pool without ever having seen one.
For example, I made a comment about a similar comparison in a post here on HN a while ago because their example was simply ridiculous [0]. The author in that article referenced the volume of a large body of water as being "about 240 billion Olympic sized pools". I believe that they could've used almost anything else that most people would identify as being very large as a reference but instead they chose a large swimming pool. If an item is used as a reference the scale of the reference and the object should be chosen such that the reader could quickly understand that while one may be big, the other is bigger by some easily pictured amount.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29710752
The local 50 meter pool here is always filled with people young and old (and on no way elite) that just swim. You don’t need to be very fit to be able to swim 50 meters without a break.
It‘s a different kind of swimming compared to just hanging around and having fun, sure, but it always seems to be quite in demand when I see pools like that.
(The swimming complex close to me has two Olympic size swimming pools and one of those is open to the public, the other is used by actual elite athletes but also kids who are learning to swim. There is also a small 12.5 meter pool with adjustable depth to learn swimming and for aqua fitness courses.)
The NCAA only started to “recommend” that universities, when building new facilities, to make their competition pools Olympic sized in 1996.
Remember that Olympic pools are deep - usually a minimum of 2.15 meters - and don’t usually have ledges for assisting with egress. They are really dangerous. A person that gets into distress, especially near the middle, will find it nearly impossible to self-rescue. Without attentive guards/coaches/onlookers they are nearly certain to drown.
I treat myself to an Olympic swim every now and then, even though it means driving to the next city and expensive parking. Highly recommend it!
Weird thing to downvote folks
If that unit causes you any pain, @throwaway4good, here is a translator perhaps to more native units:
https://www.converttobananas.com/
1 car == about 26 bananas.
Improvement?
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103
That said... from a national security perspective - it is still the right call to be wary of devices that are likely compromised by another nation. You should just be assuming that if you didn't make them locally (as in under your own territorial control) they are compromised during production. For everyone. Everyone should be acting with that as the default.
3 big deals happened at Nokia. They sold the devices business to MS. They acquired the Siemens half of Nokia Siemens Networks. They acquired Alcatel Lucent (French Alcatel and American descendant of Bell Lucent) and merged it with what was NSN. They sell every component of the modern networking stack from 5g antennas to undersea cables.
Outside China, though, Ericsson now claims to serve more operators than just about any other vendor. Ekholm today put Ericsson's share of the market for radio access network (RAN) products at 39%, excluding China, telling analysts it has grown from just 33% when he took over in 2017. Fifty percent of 5G traffic outside China runs over Ericsson, he said, while 16 of the world's top 20 operators are using its 5G core.
Our government is so powerful, you can't even make a dent.
* unless perhaps you were applying for military clearance
https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/15/china_shenzhen_zhenhu...
I think we have to accept that these intelligence agencies are effectively untouchable and here to stay. With that in mind I think it boils down to: who can do the most harm by spying on you:
- a country thousands of miles away which you probably have no connection to and don't visit
- the country you live in
I said in another comment but it bears repeating - I don't want anyone spying on me, but I am losing no sleep over Chinese intelligence, I am an extremely uninteresting target for them. If a Chinese agent is watching me die repeatedly in Elden Ring, looking at webcam footage of me gawping at my monitor while I scroll HN, or checking the stupid FB messages I send to my friends they'll realise pretty quickly I'm not worth the bandwidth or the storage space. A local agency might be interested in those FB messages, especially if I was politically active, vocally against the government and I was trying to organize protests or strike action.
Give me an example of Americans who have been materially harmed by those agencies? And what was the damage?
Have Americans been oppressed, slandered for political gain, wrongly imprisoned, illegally targeted by police because of NSA activity?
I think it's doubtful for anything other than a few incidents; the proportionality of these tradeoffs does matter as these agencies do actually go after bad people. Like people selling sanctioned gear to Russia, money laundering, sex trafficking, etc. you know - 'bad things'.
I don't see professors disappearing because they said something on campus Biden didn't like.
These people are usually naively driven by some kind of decontextualized political mindset, where the equate the arbitrary actions of some state far away, in same context as local governance, and a big dose of ultra liberal (classical) utopianism.
'The NSA is like Xi because they can spy on me'.
It's like saying 'Biden is as bad as Xi because ultimately the Police in the USA could arrest me and put me in prison for 70 years'.
It's barely theoretically true and it makes little sense to compare systems that have oversight and independent judiciary with those controlled by a Dictator.
It's good that the US has the ability to know which Russian stooges are giving money to would-be US presidents, or heading his presidential campaign. And good that the US can trace large sums of money floating out of FTX's Bahamian bank account into the hands of whoever, especially politicians.
If a student protester dissappears in the night because they made an online post critical of the governor - well, all of us will hear about it a few hours later.
(And also bringing up how no state actor only does bad things to bad people in order to dispute the typical “if you’ve got nothing to hide/have done no wrong then you have nothing to worry about”.)
ISIS is worse than a mall cop with a bully streak, but it makes more sense for me to worry about that mall cop while shopping at the mall than to worry about ISIS.
Naively, one might say "ah but that ended in 1971!" - but let me put it this way: if you spotted a cockroach in your house, you'd be a fool to think that was the only one.
Also: the oversight/limits you're protected by could disappear some day, they're imaginary and socially constructed. Sure, you trust our current government to handle these powers responsibly, (though you really shouldn't, see above), but why are you so confident you can trust _tomorrow's_ government?
This is the straw man of all straw mans.
You could have a Totalitarian Overlord someday, after all it's all 'socially constructed'. You'd have a million other, worse problems on your hands.
That your making that argument and can't provide examples of specific harm despite widespread powers of the state is problematic.
Creeping authoritarianism is a general problem, not an NSA problem.
# Covert & 'illegal' projects by FBI aimed at infiltrating, influencing, disrupting, and discrediting various political organizations
# Existence of the program was discovered after activists stole documents from an FBI office and leaked them to media
# Targets included: antiwar activists, feminist organizations, civil rights activists (ie MLK), environmentalists, animal rights activists, communist party, KKK, American Indian activists, far right groups
# Methods included:
* Breaking into homes, violent beatings, vandalism
* Assassination
* Smear campaigns
* Fabricating evidence, false testimony (leading to wrongful imprisonment and activist intimidation)
* Fabricating letters to discredit/humiliate people or erode their relationships, or cause conflict (leading to death in many cases)
I don't actually need to talk about hypotheticals, the US government has already abused these things to squish people or ideas it didn't like. The point about creeping authoritarianism is a secondary argument. My point is that sometimes it's better for certain tools/institutions not to exist at all.
I think we ought to treat surveillance technologies with the same type of reverence we treat nuclear tech (though maybe not to the same magnitude). Nuclear technology isn't intrinsically a bad thing: the problem is that, combined with human tendencies (tribalism, territorialism, etc), a conflict that previously would've resulted in a mere x deaths could now result in x^y deaths, or even total annihilation.
You agree that creeping authoritarianism is a general problem. Do you think it might just be in the nature of human societies? If so, wouldn't it be prudent to carefully consider what tools and institutions we leave lying around, in case the worst happens? We all accept this with nukes - there was some kind of effort at nuclear disarmament (though not enough). We should do the same for surveillance.
I'm only trying to convince you that we need to be very cautious, skeptical, and distrustful of things like the NSA, because the US govt cannot be trusted with it now, and it might get even worse in the future. What hypothetical evidence would someone have to show you, to change your mind?
You do understand it'd be very appropriate for the FBI to infiltrate such groups, as they indicating they are currently doing now with 'far right' and other radical groups, especially those with wepaons.
Your characterization of 'assasination' is problematic. I wouldn't say Fred Hampton was so much assassinated. He and his buddies were involved in a shooting which killed police, very shortly thereafter the cops planned the raid to arrest them and two Panthers were killed. It seems that Fred was killed in cold blood. While this is obviously 'very illegal' - this is not the US Justice Department targetting someone, this is local Chicago/Oakland cops form of extra-judicial retribution for the gang killing of their colleagues. Again, not right, but something totally different what might be implied from 'assassination'. They killed cops, the cops got out of line and got revenge.
Very notably - these acts caused national attention and there was an enormous reaction. Information was made public, there was public and political furor, transparency etc..
All of this is some time ago, when central oversight was harder, when the violence was much higher, and where groups of various kinds (aka local cops, local Panther groups) would act independently from central control.
And in the grand scheme of 300 Million poeple, it's relatively small stuff.
Also, it's a good reason for not having a single power like J Edgar Hoover in charge of anything.
Finally, it should be noted that this was the start of the cold war, and the Soviets were absolutely funding totalitarian uprising around the world. Stalin direclty controlled 17% of the Bundestag during the Weimar. While obvoiusly not sufficient to cause 'The Big Bad Man' to rise, without it, 'The Big Bad Man' likely would have never existed. Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua ... so much of the world ... was perturbed by very real, direct intervention from Soviet backed 'Marxist-Lenninist' groups. The 'Red Scare' was not a fantasty. It might have been overstated on some level, but it was a material 'existential' problem.
The same, continued tactics by Russians have landed us in an 'almost war' for the West in Ukraine today. Russian spies are all over Germany, Putin has corrupted so many people in Europe including literally former German Chancellors, Austrian, Hungarian leaders - the FBI exists so that this does not happen so brazenly in the the US and allied nations.
The FBI will step out of line again, just like all groups do, and there should be constant vigilance, but given the total independence of other branches, I'm not worried at all. There will always be whistleblowers, eventual transparency etc..
~ Senator Chuck Schumer on why publicly criticizing the intelligence community is a poor choice for a politician
Democracy. Vote. Free expression. Tell the people what is happening and why privacy is important.
> Were either reined in at all after the Snowden leaks,
Yes.
> or was it business as usual after things calmed down a bit?
No.
> I think we have to accept that these intelligence agencies are effectively untouchable and here to stay.
We do not. They are not. Apathy is toxic. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good to do nothing.
> With that in mind I think it boils down to: who can do the most harm by spying on you: - a country thousands of miles away which you probably have no connection to and don't visit - the country you live in
China is our single greatest geopolitical adversary. Psyops are real. The ability to influence the public opinion of a geopolitical adversary supports the Chinese salami slicer strategy. It’s reinforced by understanding their adversaries electorate.
> I said in another comment but it bears repeating - I don't want anyone spying on me,
Same.
> but I am losing no sleep over Chinese intelligence,
You probably should be.
> I am an extremely uninteresting target for them.
We are all interesting targets. They may not assassinate, extort, or disappear you in the middle of the night but they can change your opinions without you even noticing.
> If a Chinese agent is watching me die repeatedly in Elden Ring, looking at webcam footage of me gawping at my monitor while I scroll HN, or checking the stupid FB messages I send to my friends they'll realise pretty quickly I'm not worth the bandwidth or the storage space.
Why would an individual agent need to look at anything? People aren’t interesting. We’re all basically the same. But if they know you play Elden Ring and browse HN they can tailor an effective message to you and everyone like you.
> A local agency might be interested in those FB messages, especially if I was politically active, vocally against the government and I was trying to organize protests or strike action.
Yes and that’s an illegal abuse of power. One that can be remedied in a court of law.
edit: you deleted your reply before I could post mine. It seemed like I pissed you off a bit so I was trying to clarify and apologise a bit. Here's what I wrote:
> You did though
Well I said that they're untouchable and was then trying to clarify that we should still be pretty pissed off about it. I wrote the original at half-past midnight, it was a little clumsily worded. But you do have to accept that they are currently nearly untouchable and effectively operate outside the law and that right now you can do very little at all about what data is being collected on you.
> I don’t think that is a favorable interpretation
I don't think it is unfavourable at all, the only thing you've really stated there about why you'd be worried about any Chinese intelligence is that they can manipulate your beliefs without your knowing. You have to admit that there's at least a bit of a similarity with the hysteria around communist brainwashing.
I'm sorry for causing any offence, I know it's not nice to feel like someone's accusing you of being a fervent nationalist (not my intent) but as an outsider your last couple of comments do have that air of "America is just ... better" and contained a slightly naive belief that you'd have any kind of hope taking on NSA or any other big TLA. I'll grant that what China would do with the data it collects on its citizens is likely far more severe than what the USA would (e.g. I don't think you're gonna be locked up for posting a an anti-Biden meme in USA, but sharing Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh in China will get you in a lot of hot water) so if that's what you meant then fair enough. I still don't think Chinese spying should be higher up on your list of worries than NSA spying - and in the grand scheme of things there are things you can worry about that you can actually change.
> but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them
If we learned anything from the last half-century, it's that this predicate is just comically wrong.
Why? What has china done that's worse? Did they nuke a country? Wipe out entire races of people? Did those nasty chinese invade dozens of countries? There is nothing inherent in a western democracy that makes it good.
> Our intelligence agencies are out of control but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them in than China.
There are no mechanisms for controlling any intelligence agencies. All intelligence agencies around the world are state actors. No law applies to them. Ask the people the intelligence agencies murdered, drugged, experimented on, etc.
Unless you are chinese, you are far better off being "spied on" by the chinese than a western democracy because the chinese don't have any jurisdiction over you. This is all common sense. China isn't going to arrest you and put you in jail. A western democracy will though.
Unless you’re Chinese. Now that we know China has secret police stations all round the world.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
China has a Dictator, a total absence of a Justice System, total surveillance and censorship, and large swaths of the population of some regions in concentration camps, a large number of individual dedicated to holding in place that apparatus.
Meanwhile you're free to walk down the street and tell the US President he's an idiot and you're not going anywhere without the entire US media knowing about it if they want to put public eyes on it for the sake of your own rights. There are laws, all sorts of controls, Judicial oversight, yada yada.
As if that even needs to be said.
Citation needed. How much value does intimate knowledge of individual preference and habit have for psyops? How much of an advantage does China gain when they convince a democratic electorate that their actions are no big deal?
If China had it's way, they would not 'invade' Taiwan either, we would wake up one day and realize the process happened over 20 years and that Taiwan is under CCP control.
And that Vietnam, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, Korea are also subject to arbitrary power of the CCP a little bit like Lukashenko in Belarus is a stooge of Putin.
That's what the surveillance is for.
However, in whatever state you live in, your local government is far and away the most likely to care about your habits, to want to convince you to vote against your interests, to accuse you based on flimsy evidence etc. A foreign country poses nowhere near the same risk, even if it's the worse regime in history and you live in the best.
I mean I don't want anyone spying on me, but I'm less worried about China targetting me than the Czech government (where I live) or the UK one (where I'm from).
> far more reason to be interested in you than China ever would
I think this is naive. Psyops are real and are made more effective with knowledge of personal preference and habits. It is likely that Chinese intelligence has targeted literally everyone on the Internet in some way.
But Cisco in China is gathering intelligence on and setting up network to disable, chinese infrastructure.
I live in the west and happen to like our infrastructure. So while I don't think Cisco should be doing what its doing, I would completely ban Chinese gear from the infrastructure be it backbone or consumer level.
Same way if i found out the UK was spying on me as an American. I wouldnt be happy, but its not the threat China is.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-mill...
EDIT: found my astonished comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22694150
So from that POV, one may start to think about a quick buildup of momentum in the general direction of F-22s shooting things down, or air combat, or just combat, etc.
Not so much to predict the future, as to ideate and prepare frames of mind for potential changes in circumstance.
Edit - this video isn't loading for me, but I've just watched what I assume is the same briefing on Twitter. They have a pilot assessment that the object was unmanned - but they can't tell us balloon, missile, drone? I'm not understanding how a pilot could see the thing, communicate ("I'm looking at an unmanned object, should I shoot?") and somehow not convey what the object was. I appreciate the speed of this briefing, but I would prefer they wait at least until they know what they are saying. In the briefing below the guy says NORAD has been tracking it for a day - and they still don't know what it is? I guess that rules out missile, at least.
No details beyond this yet due to classification restrictions.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=544hoprTeTw
If the above hypothesis is true, it means the U.S. is trying to rile up / ready / etc. the population to view China as a threat.
Kind of ironic given the intense scrutiny and fears prior to Trump getting elected that he would trigger a depression or war because of his isolationist attitude about China specifically.
But more importantly what does that mean now? Will it justify laws passed to further isolate China?
In your comment, you say "it means the US is trying to rile up / ready /etc" the population. That's not the only plausible (or even most likely) scenario though.
The publishing of this info could indeed be for that purpose. Or it could be for something else, such as to influence the currently-ongoing negotiations with other players (eg European) at a critical time.
Or it could be for some other purpose again, that's neither of those. :)
The hypothesis above is roughly connected to this wider idea about international relations that the 'big ideas' happen behind closed doors, and there is a second 'public' face. Here the balloon type incidents leak to the public strategically while other incidents go unmentioned except in private or in some esoteric place.
If true, why would the US press and mainstream media be headlining it when of course it'll enrage the population. It was a choice to publicize it and a choice for our political parties to point fingers at each other over it, as part of the typical spin cycle.
Their leaders, and the people representing them during negotiations.
> If true, why would the US press and mainstream media be headlining it when of course it'll enrage the population.
No idea. Possibly a side effect, maybe wanted, maybe not.
Potentially so "the population" gets onboard with whatever the outcome of the EU negotiations are.
No one said the press was being controlled.
If so, the previous balloon was a pretty fuckin' stupid way to do that, since letting it wander all over the US was obviously going to be used by political adversaries to attack the administration (justly or unjustly, doesn't matter).
But regardless of what the actual facts on the ground (er, in the sky) might be, or what party A says about party B, the media and online commentariat are framing them within a narrative of aggressive threats from China, and of war being imminent, possibly even necessary. Our consent is clearly being manufactured for something.
Seriously, the concept of weighing the cost of an action vs the cost of inaction was not... exactly invented by Eve Online players. The entire point of warfare is to make waging war more expensive to your opponent than to yourself, whether in terms of men, materiel, dollars, or popular support. And the concept of a Pyrrhic victory is likely as old as war itself – even our very term for it derives from a battle fought 2300 years ago!
And if you think that I didn't say anything… I suggest re-reading my comment.
This seems like conjecture. Is there any reliable data on how much said balloon cost?
It's conjecture for me to presume the sky is blue without looking out of my window, but it's a safe bet on days with good weather.
Unless this balloon -- or whatever it was -- was diamond-bedazzled and platinum-plated and filled with alien technology it's a safe bet that it was a fair amount cheaper to produce/launch/maintain than sortieing one of the most expensive and exclusive modern aircraft in the world and shooting off a missile that costs 600k/ea -- and that's not even considering collateral costs associated to the action.
This seems like what amounts to a training program to me, unless a lot more start coming.
That’s all before bringing up that the person I quoted claimed off-hand that it’s an order of magnitude difference. They’re probably rather similar in cost.
Anything needing bus-sized solar array gonna have some fancy equipment on board. All of that needs engineering to not fail at the temperature range up above and code to make it do what is needed
See also:
F-22 Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon Off Carolinas With Missile (Updated) https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-22-shoots-down-chine...
U-2 Spy Planes Snooped On Chinese Surveillance Balloon https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/u-2-spy-planes-snooped...
F-22 Shoots Down “Object” Flying High Over Alaskan Waters https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-22-shoots-down-new-o...
The Soviets Built Bespoke Balloon-Killer Planes During The Cold War https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-soviets-built-besp...
With a missile, the pilot can shoot from several miles out and never has to fly directly at the target. So, it's much safer.
I've seen this claim often, but I'm still finding it hard to picture. I realize it's not going to "pop like a balloon", but days or weeks seems incredibly long. The weight of the payload causes at least some pressure on at least the top of the balloon, right?
Is the issue just the size of the hole versus total volume? Or maybe it's that the bouyancy increases as it starts to descend? Do you have a link that would make this clearer? I searched a little, but what I found were just assertions of fact.
I did find the 1998 story of the failed Canadian attempt to shoot down a balloon with fighter jets firing bullets (https://apnews.com/article/268893fddde785d029d5a51b136951eb). This makes me inclined to believe the conclusion, but it's still not intuitive to me.
The problem is what can you fly that has a cannon and can reach those altitudes. Apparently only the F22 and F15 could, and that was their very limit.
It was tested in 2008 to destroy failed recon satellite.
Epotential = mgh = 420,000m * 9.8 m/s^2 * mass ~= 4,200,000 m^2/s^2 * mass
To reach that altitude, ignoring air resistance, you'd need kinetic energy, provided by the formula:
Ekinetic = (mv^2)/2
Solving for v, we get v = sqrt(8,400,000 m^2/s^2) ~= 2.900 m/s ~= Mach 9
That's the minimum muzzle velocity you need to send a projectile up into the ISS's path (Add a few more mach numbers due to air resistance).
It's certainly easier than getting into orbit, a single-stage missile could do it without any trouble.
The shoot-downs used AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles (per TFA). We also don’t know the ceiling altitude of the F-22 since it’s classified.
However, the F-22 can carry the AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile (AMRAAM) which has a disclosed engagement altitude of 70,000 feet - capable of engaging even higher altitude balloons than these. As I understand it, the Extended Range AMRAAM-ER is believed to have an engagement ceiling of 85,000 feet.
Meanwhile, the US also has the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system, an air defense system capable of engaging targets at very high altitude. While its capabilities are classified, its max engagement altitude is at least 490,000 ft. or 93 miles … though using it to attack a balloon is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. THAAD is mobile and could be deployed in response to a high altitude balloon threat (some of which can fly 120,000 ft.)
Even if the ceiling of the F-22 is substantially higher than 40,000 ft. (which I think is plausible), and is close enough to effectively engage these balloons, then I doubt that the Air Force would choose to make the tradeoff of disclosing the F-22’s performance capabilities to adversaries in order to save the cost of an AIM-9; the F-22’s performance is a secret and classified.
If we were faced with defending against a large number of high-flying objects then the reasoning might be different.
[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
600m is likely the default battle-zero, but it is nowhere near the maximum range of a 30mm round.
(I'm British and so not a US tax payer, just a spectator, but would argue the same here)
It's a crying shame the F-22 production line was shut down, so it's great to see it performing well.
(Speaking as a DCS sim pilot with a long time interest in military aviation).
Clearly a baloon is so hard to dispose target that making sure the aircraft indeed can be up to this task is worth any money!
Although the X is an all aspect missile, the parameters would still be quite different.
I think this is would all be firmly in the "not public domain" bucket of details though, as I haven't seen much of this modelled in DCS.
(I suppose they could also have used eg a radar guided AIM-120, but they are primarily for BVR, more expensive at ~$1.1, and far, far more scope for erroneous target locking, so why risk it when the 9X obviously gets the job done. Again, from the point of view of an armchair - or a rig to be precise - sim pilot. I claim no credentials beyond this interest).
Air to air missiles cost on the order of $300,000.00 weather balloons cost and order of magnitude less.
We'll all have bigger problems if that day comes than the pesky billion or two it will cost from the US $773B DoD budget.
It might be possible to shoot down balloons with unguided rockets. It depends on how close the fighter can get and how accurate the rockets are. Rockets are super cheap.
Probably fits nicely in the training budget.
The world will run out of helium before the US runs out of missiles.
The airforce would have thousands of missiles. Assuming they have some FIFO system they would use missiles heading for expiry.
Not sure how pilot training goes but would assume they have training hours requirement. If a mission covers those hours all the better for more real experience on what they would be flying anyway.
Anyway I don't know this as an expert, but logically seems costs are largely sunk regardless of an infrequent balloon incident.
What a waste if $200k, shooting Chinese baloons. These shold be zapped using lasers.
Using the same reasoning, a gun bullet should also be faster with higher altitude, hence have a longer range.
"Shot Down using an Aim9x"
That actually narrows it down a bit. Heat seeking warhead.
https://www.navair.navy.mil/product/AIM-9X-Sidewinder
Which I have to say is where we may start to see a tragic lack of creativity unfolding on China's part.
Assuming this was a drone, the "car-sized", "unmanned", "not a balloon", "not maneuverable" (!?), the operating altitude (40k feet / 13 km), and use of AIM9X (IR/heat seeking) should narrow down the possible drones.
Also, one thing I pondered: why F22 instead of F35 to shoot it down? Maybe a question of availability. But, at least publically the F35 operating ceiling is lower than F22, so I was thinking whether the object was in reality higher than the publically known F35 operating ceiling.
It could be an unmanned glider with some solar power. Several companies make those. Including Google, which was considering them as data relays back around 2016.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-shoots-down-unknown-flyi...
The AIM9 is the only use I'm aware of.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolleron
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfzj3rRIVU4
"Not maneuverable" and "previous balloon" so is it fair to assume that it's a balloon as well?
I assume a weather balloon can handle those issues though. [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/jaUgTwKu6vs
User dTal is on the same train of thought as I was regarding the "not maneuverable" part.
What other type of object exists which can fly and yet does not have the ability to maneuver?
Airplane on autopilot with dead/sleeping pilot
Control surface problem (e.g. 737 elevator jackscrew excursion scenario)
(Just thinking out loud/adding ideas, not contradicting).
Multiple cities all at once.
Hell, don't even tell airline about it and send it at cargo, it is only checked at departure port (AFAIK).
Same really with cargo containers by ship.
I haven’t seen info regarding detecting tracking unused nuclear weapons using sensors. Do you have a source?
"Should we just send one to every American?" Psaki shot back, her voice dripping with sarcasm. [0]
Twitter dragged her so hard it was/wasn't even funny, and the next day the White House did just that. Thanks lady!
[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/12/21/anger-jen-psaki-helped-a...
(Resident Alien)
Most balloons are not equipped to actively change their bouyancy.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/rHGWmyyb9nI?feature=share
There was something about fear being the mind-killer. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam to the Red Telephone please - paging the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam!
Seems to be particularly likely to happen in panicky situations, or when someone has something to prove. E.g., the Soviet-American tensions surrounding an American spy plane, a RC-135, were a factor in the Soviets shooting down KAL-007 (they thought it was the RC-135) [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
[0] https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-shoots-down-unknown-flyi...
And airliners have transponders and flight plans. If a civilian plane stopped talking to ATC, the Air Force is likely already involved.
Additionally, we’re not on a high-alert war footing like during the Cold War. As far as I know, we don’t have hostile military aircraft routinely flying with transponders off on our coasts.
Even if we did, I’m pretty sure the larger military radar systems that would be used to track this stuff can read transponders and separate out which plane is which.
https://www.newsweek.com/mysterious-green-lasers-hawaii-chin...
They're unmanned and ambient, yet are clearly a provocation and give China an information advantage over where it would be without the balloons, and in a geopolitical sense it asserts Chinese ascendency. At the same time, it's hard for the US or other powers to figure out an appropriate response. Very similar to Russian/NK/Chinese/Israeli/American state-sponsored hacking groups--it continually forces the adversary to ask "where do we draw a line, and what consequences do we give for crossing it?"
> "It really got to them," recalls Dr. William Schneider, [former] undersecretary of state for military assistance and technology, who saw classified "after-action reports" that indicated U.S. flight activity. "They didn't know what it all meant. A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace, and other radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and return home."[1]
Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23758/video-appears-to...
Sounds a lot like parenting a toddler.
Quite possibly. Minor provocations that by themselves are too inconsequential to warrant a response, nothing to start a war over, but incrementally provokes the target into lashing out in some way that is advantageous for China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_salami_slicing_strateg...
(Other countries do it too, of course..)
The USA is already on their doorsteps by having bases in almost all the neighboring countries, and conducting operational freedom exercises by flying and sailing through disputed areas.
Unfortunately, tensions are already quite high in China, due to state media being the only source of propaganda. The state and most tv-watchers have therefore decided that America is the cause of all their problems.
That last one getting noticed by the public probably had something to do with it.
Careful re-analysis of old radar data, perhaps.
The Biden White House seems happy to play along, justifying more equipment from top donors Raytheon and Boeing.
The balloon panic helpfully distracts from the massive freight derailment chemical disaster currently spewing vinyl chloride into the atmosphere over Ohio.
We're at risk of bankruptcy because our debt is 31 trillion dollars and in June we won't even be able to issue securities to continue bullshitting ourselves out of cutting spending. Welcome to America, we're broke because we spent all our money on guns rather than infrastructure, healthcare and education.
It makes more sense when you consider how many programs we have—a pretty high percentage of our population is covered by public spending, and—crucially—the ones who are are in some cases among the most expensive to care for.
1) Medicare (old or disabled)
2) Medicaid (poor)
3) Tricare or whatever they call it now, since I think the name changed (active and IIRC retired-with-full-benefits military and their spouses and kids, at least for the active-duty ones, can't recall if that part carries over in retirement)
4) VA (military veterans, including those with short terms of service)
5) Federal employees
6) State employees
7) County employees
8) City employees
9) Cops and firefighters and such, if not covered under any of the above.
10) School district employees (there are lots of these)
Not all of these are cases in which all the spending is covered by public money, but some of them are, and in other cases a great deal of it is. Also I've probably missed some programs.
[EDIT] Oh and that's not counting public money that goes to private companies but ends up paying for healthcare for those companies' employees and families, who are employed expressly to work on those publicly-funded projects—I can see arguments either way for counting that, depends on what you're trying to understand.
The 80's were much, much worse. If we were ever going to go bankrupt, it was in the early Clinton administration due to the Reagan/Bush spending boom. We got through just fine. Those bonds were all paid off decades ago.
Be very very very cautious any time someone comes at you with this kind of hyperbole about federal debt. They're selling you something.
This sentiment is completely untrue. Defense is approximately 12% of US government spending, healthcare approximately 24%, education approximately 15%, and social security roughly 20%. Infrastructure is harder to categorize, but the truth is that the US government spends at least 4x more on healthcare, education and welfare (combined) than defense.
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2023USrn_...
The fact that this 12% of government spending amounts to the largest military on earth is in large part a consequence of the fact that the US is really, enormously wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world, has a fairly large population, and still has a larger GDP per capita than any other large or even medium-sized country.
And we’re terrible at all three vs nations that spend fractions less…
I'm surprised this seems to be such a common point. Why is it believed that it was cheap?
It's also possible whomever is running this operation doesn't care about their staff at all and they just use hydrogen.
Good. Right?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/attacks-i...
We interdict Iranian missiles to terrorist groups about once a week.
Iran's stated goal is to forcibly convert the world to their preferred brand of theocratic rule - the "women are very literally property" kind of theocratic rule.
This increases the risk of being killed by a drone for everybody, even if is as collateral damage. If international laws can be so easily violated for free, why do we need them? Do we really want a world without rules?
The general premise is this:
U.S. adversaries realized they couldn't compete with the U.S. on spending. So they got creative and loaded the equivalent of Pringles cans up with a bunch of sensors, hooked them up to either a balloons or relatively cheap unmanned aircraft, and sent them through U.S. airspace to collect intelligence. They'd occasionally get caught (perhaps on purpose) and cause a base to scramble to intercept. The proposed theory on why they'd get caught on purpose was to gather up intelligence on what a response would be flying through the airspace.
It's possible they've been doing this for more than a decade and the military has gotten caught with egg on it's face having ignored the reports for so long.
Plus many of the more prominent base-personnel sightings land quite a bit far from that particular ballpark. Take a look into the Rendlesham Forest incident for example.
The problem with "summing up UFO contact" is that the variety of encounters is absolutely insane. Compare Rendlesham to Varginha, etc.
It really starts to bring out the "inter" in the more colorful inter-dimensional contact theories.
The signal was transmitted in binary and just happened to be ASCII encoded English. Odd that a ship from 8100 transmitted data in an archaic dialect of an ancient language using an ancient encoding that just happened to match the language and encoding in widespread use during this guys lifetime.
Having a hard time with this.
My best understanding based on watching a lot of retired military personnel is that isolated incidents cost the US almost exactly zero additional dollars.
The way an Air Force base works is this: there is a budget. This covers the (considerable) costs of the base itself, the personnel, the equipment, and so on.
Active-duty fighter pilots must fly a certain number of hours per month to remain on active status. Just like any other demanding activity (sports, competitive gaming, whatever) their skills require constant maintenance. These flying hours are of course budgeted. (This will be true of literally any air force; it's not specifically a USAF thing)
Things like these incident responses, and even things like flyovers before sporting events, come out of those predetermined budgeted flying hours that they were going to fly anyway. So isolated incidents like these don't really increase USAF expenses in a meaningful way. Those $400K/ea missiles will presumably need to be replenished but this must be compared to the USAF's total budget of $180 billion.
To put any strain whatsoever on the US's capabilities our foes would need to start sending large amounts of drones: essentially, a saturation attack. More than we can comfortably respond to. Which is of course... extremely possible.
But as long as these remain isolated incidents we can surmise that our adversary's goal is not "cost the US a bunch of money."
Keeping people immersed in a complex narrative is a lot easier than one would think, but it is also a very tricky balancing act that can get upset by the weirdest things.
Personally, I'm all for it - anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my books, plus it makes for good entertainment.
What is the "dream state" that these incursions might shatter?
It's even worse: even when people do ingest available information, they very often do it erroneously, forming a misunderstanding (without realizing it).
> Most people haven't really nerded out on the details of how pilots maintain combat readiness and how budgets work, but uh, your point?
Broadly: humanity runs mostly on untrue stories, and does not realize it (actually, there's a "it's even worse' here too).
>> anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my books
> I'm not exactly the biggest fan of any government, but what specifically are you talking about here?
Simplistically: people's understanding and trust in their government (abstract and concrete), and what is going on in general is highly erroneous, and not only do they not realize this, they believe the opposite. I consider this to be an extremely dangerous state of affairs, despite it having always been the case and "we're doing ok" nonetheless. Things often go "ok" for a very long time, and then suddenly start going "not ok", often without an obvious trigger.
> What is the "dream state" that these incursions might shatter?
The phenomena resulting from the combination of consciousness + culture + time, both individually and collectively.
You might be best served by filing this under "woo woo" though...but then again, you also might not - there's only one way to (possibly) find out!
Yeah, the Mig-25 / F-15 thing comes to mind. Soviets develop a super secret jet, very big, very fast.. it must be very impressive fighter jet! America is spooked so tons of resources are poured into the F-15 to make the absolute best possible air superiority fighter jet they can, to counter this new Soviet threat.
Except then it turns out that the Mig-25 was never a fighter jet, it was an interceptor that was very fast in a straight line but not much more. So the US built an incredible air superiority fighter to counter a phantom of a jet that never really existed in the way America thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle#F...
Come to think of it, maybe China is going low-tech with balloons to avoid this dynamic?
Are you sure that's what really happened, or did a group of people in the Air Force want an air superiority fighter and use the Mig-25 as the excuse?
First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level. Then explain why our completely wrong models of physics still work as well as they do. Then explain the Fermi Paradox in light of the apparent existence of easy faster than light/antigravity technology and confirmation of the existence of other technologically advanced civilizations in the universe. Then I'll be willing to concede the still practically nil chance of any of those aliens actually being here given the vast size of the observable universe as being likely enough to consider.
Don't get me wrong, I want it to be true. I desperately want it to be true. I've been fascinated by UFOlogy and sightings and the related folklore for decades. I want some fate for humanity other than us slowly choking to death on our own poison, alone on this island in the midst of vast seas of infinity. It's just that the bar for proving any other possibility is higher than a third-hand account of someone seeing a light in the sky that moved really fast.
You know, it isn't (physically) necessary to choose anything.
> First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level.
Why does everything have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
> Don't get me wrong, I want it to be true.
I dunno man, the opposite seems to be the case - are you not at least suffering from motivated reasoning, to some degree?
> I want some fate for humanity other than us slowly choking to death on our own poison, alone on this island in the midst of vast seas of infinity.
Me too!! Consider this idea: our cultural tendency to form beliefs absent of proof (therefore: faith based, which is usually considered a big no no) causes substantial harm, and our tendency to write it off as "that's just people" or (begrudgingly) as "well, of course I'm only expressing my opinion, that's what everyone is always doing" are not proper common sense and reasonableness, but rather are emergent behaviors that cause humanity to be permanently stuck in a local maxima (on certain dimensions, while ongoing successes in specific domains like science, engineering, computing, etc make it appear like we have our shit substantially together comprehensively).
Of course, this is speculation - but what if it is actually true to a non-trivial degree?
Sure, but we're here on a discussion forum so not committing to any point of view seems counterproductive.
>Why does everything have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
Because the laws of physics as we understand them, even quantum mechanics, don't allow for things like antigravity or faster than light travel or propagation of information. Theoretical warp-drive models like the Alcubierre drive, or wormholes, or other solutions either require different spacetimes or exotic matter or negative energy or some kind of fudge factor that makes it not work within our universe. Special relativity says it's impossible. Quantum mechanics says it's impossible.
If it turns out that FTL travel is possible, it means we live in a universe without causality, where the relationship between cause and effect is arbitrary. If it turns out to be not only possible but also trivial, to the point that you can fit a warp drive onto something the size of a plane, Then E=MC^2 turns out to be meaningless. Since everything we observe about the universe, at every scale, suggests causality exists and that E=MC^2 holds, we can't be wrong about those without being wrong about everything.
But hey, maybe we are. Great. Show me some equations then. That's all I'm asking. Prove it's wrong, first. Show me a working anti-gravity drive or a warp drive, built by humans, or something that can be tested independently, peer reviewed and verified. Faster than light teleportation. Something.
But all I'm expected to hang my hat on is rumors, folklore and videos for which mundane explanations exist.
>I dunno man, the opposite seems to be the case - are you not at least suffering from motivated reasoning, to some degree?
Everyone suffers from motivated reasoning, that's how reason works. I'm just saying my personal bar for proof is higher than those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics as a prior to making the UFO argument semantically trivial.
Rather than believe that we're exactly as ignorant now - even though we can measure gravitational waves and the cosmic microwave background and use quantum tunneling in our microchips and GPS has to take relativistic time dilation into account - as we were thousands of years ago when we believed the stars were inscribed on crystal spheres, I believe our models of the universe have become more accurate over time, and that as a result, fundamental paradigm shifts become less and less likely.
That doesn't mean I don't want to believe, it just means I don't also believe in magical thinking. And I'm far from the only skeptic who wants to believe out there. Eyewitness testimony is interesting, video is interesting, but it isn't enough. At least not for me.
But if you think of it from the perspective of what is actually true, what do you come up with?
Also: assuming you're a programmer/techie type: is this the same epistemic methodology you use when writing code?
Given the possibilities of an alien spacecraft observed on Earth violating the known laws of physics, or some error on the part of the observer, I'm going with the latter every time.
>>> First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level.
>> Why does everything[!] have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
> Because the laws of physics as we understand them, even quantum mechanics, don't allow for things like antigravity or faster than light travel or propagation of information. Theoretical warp-drive models like the Alcubierre drive, or wormholes, or other solutions either require different spacetimes or exotic matter or negative energy or some kind of fudge factor that makes it not work within our universe. Special relativity says it's impossible.
Here you are only describing that some things that we believe would have to be incorrect, and you do not even attempt to substantiate the "irreconcilable" part, as far as I can tell.
> Quantum mechanics says it's impossible.
Saying something is true does not necessarily mean it is true, but it certainly often causes it to appear true.
> If it turns out that FTL travel is possible, it means we live in a universe without causality, where the relationship between cause and effect is arbitrary.
Why?
> If it turns out to be not only possible but also trivial, to the point that you can fit a warp drive onto something the size of a plane, Then E=MC^2 turns out to be meaningless. Since everything we observe about the universe, at every scale, suggests causality exists and that E=MC^2 holds, we can't be wrong about those without being wrong about everything.
Why (in general, and also specifically related to everything having to be wrong)?
> But hey, maybe we are. Great. Show me some equations then.
The burden of proof lies with the person making an assertion.
> Prove it's wrong, first. Show me a working anti-gravity drive or a warp drive, built by humans, or something that can be tested independently, peer reviewed and verified. Faster than light teleportation. Something.
First: prove to me, and yourself, that you are correct.
> But all I'm expected to hang my hat on is rumors, folklore and videos for which mundane explanations exist.
Who is it that is expecting you to do that here, and how did you acquire that knowledge?
> Everyone suffers from motivated reasoning...
Do all people suffer from it, always? And where people do suffer from it, do they suffer from it equally?
Also: where have you acquired this comprehensive knowledge?
> that's how reason works.
Not really.
> I'm just saying my personal bar for proof is higher than those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics as a prior to making the UFO argument semantically trivial.
To me, your personal bar for proof seems essentially/abstractly identical to most people's: if it seems true, it is true.
Also: how sure are you of "those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics"? (Emphasis mine.)
> Rather than believe that we're exactly as ignorant now - even though we can measure gravitational waves and the cosmic microwave background and use quantum tunneling in our microchips and GPS has to take relativistic time dilation into account - as we were thousands of years ago when we believed the stars were inscribed on crystal spheres, I believe our models of the universe have become more accurate over time, and that as a result, fundamental paradigm sh...
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wireless-hacks/05960055...
This was probably not entirely groundbreaking news to anybody including China. Everybody knows that the published specs of military hardware are intentionally distorted in one direction or another.
The F-15's known ceiling is 65K feet for example. So it's not surprising that newer fighters can match that.
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/32...
Of course, that could be a lie too!
EDIT: Wikipedia claims the service ceiling of the F-22 is 65k feet anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lockheed_Martin_F...
If bankrupting Israel by forcing them to expend Iron Dome interceptors is Hezbollah's plan, it obviously isn't working.
One such system operated by Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EL/M-2084
Makes it a lot easier to get funding when requested too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
Turns out we like to spend gobs of money even when we're just chasing our shadow.
While some of the videos have explanation, I would kindly encourage you to look at this with more curiosity.
He covers the "Tic-Tac" and "Go Fast" videos too, just not in that specific video. Like in this one, where he explains how the "Go Fast" video isn't actually even a fast object zipping just above the water, but rather an object flying at roughly wind-speed at about 12000 feet.
https://youtu.be/PLyEO0jNt6M
The lens flare was caused by the camera looking at the ass end of another jet. The radar saw the other jet.
For even one of these videos to have a mundane explanation that should have been obvious to the Navy upon investigation, I think that discredits the lot. Either the Navy couldn't figure it out themselves (which seems highly improbable), or for some reason the Navy is deliberately misleading the public, or at the very least allowing some of their personnel to mislead the public and playing coy about it. I think this is what's happening.
But why?
My guess is that there's an internal report describing the FLIR system and how the FLIR system works and how the internal workings of the FLIR system caused the visual phenomena. But that's all classified.
So they did the absolute minimum the Executive branch required them to do and left it up to the White House Press Secretary to explain it to the American public.
To me it reeks of the brass not wanting to have any more of their time wasted. There's a great scene in The Wire where the metro police, the harbor police, the state police, and the county sheriff arguing that a string of murders don't fall under their jurisdiction; it's your problem you deal with it etc, subverting the trope of the local cops fighting with the federal/state police (usually the FBI) that "this is my jurisdiction" or whatever. I think this is the same. The Executive branch (I'm 80% sure it was Trump, coulda been Obama, too lazy to look it up) demanded that they do a thing they didn't want to do, and then they dragged their feet and did the bare minimum, and in the process made a mess that now the Office of the White House now needs to clean up. (which they didn't, because they don't want to explain a classified sensor system in a public briefing either)
As for the other reports/hearings, it seems like it’s driven more by Congress. For example: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelima...
> This preliminary report is provided by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in response to the provision in Senate Report 116-233, accompanying the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2021, that the DNI, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF), is to submit an intelligence assessment of the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the progress the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding this threat.
He also completely ignores the eyewitness testimony and radar data.
He’s one of the least credible debunkers you can find.
I have never seen a counter-analysis. Can you explain why you think this? It's not common knowledge that the observations of Mick West has been "debunked"...at least not as commonly known or easy to find as the Mick West analysis or the source videos.
Regardless I think the simplest counter argument is that if that were really the case, you'd see these damn things on every flight facing the sun and people would know to ignore them. Lens flares also don't show up on radar and on pilot's eyes. No crazy analysis needed.
That's unnecessarily pejorative. Presenting something as evidence, requires some amount of rigor. This is why an in-depth analysis is valued. Presenting as strong a case as possible for either side, is the method by which we can best decide on what is known.
> Regardless I think the simplest counter argument is that if that were really the case, you'd see these damn things on every flight facing the sun and people would know to ignore them
I don't believe that's a counter-argument, as it applies to both conclusions. A unique coincidence does not imply it's common. ie If the gimbal video was a UFO, you'd see these damn things on every flight, etc.
> Lens flares also don't show up on radar and on pilot's eyes.
Mick West's analysis video does not contend that the object is only a lens flare, but an object with a lens flare (or lens artifact) overlaying it. There is no dispute that the pilots saw a group of objects with targeting information on a singular physical object from the video source.
e.g. The video that got debunked as Bokeh (accurately) is still someone on that ship attempting to video a craft that they see nearby them. It's only viewers of the video who get confused and believe that the bokeh effect is what they are supposed to be seeing in the video.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/05/11/us-nav...
My assumption is that sensationalized UAPs are illusions, but the reason the military keeps putting out press releases about them is not because they're aliens. The first reason is that there are unidentified aircraft entering US airspace. They're likely cheap attempts at both intelligence collecting and psychological warfare on behalf of US adversaries. Drones are easily mass produced and a nation flying a handful of drones in US airspace can easily send hundreds/thousands/millions because of how cheap and easy they are to make and deploy.
Since drones can vary in size and be flown in a ton of different conditions/patterns/scenarios/etc, they might be hard to detect. The mainstreaming of the "UAP mystery" narrative encourages civilians to look for, record and massively platform adversarial drones should they be seen by people, but go undetected by systems that are looking for them. The narrative also neuters whatever attempt at intimidation or psyops adversaries are waging against the public/military/etc. "Our militaries can send whatever we want into your airspace and there's nothing you can do about it" can be a powerful message that was effectively neutered with "maybe they're aliens lol".
Regardless, liminal warfare will continue to give rise to this kind of scenario so we should try not to outsmart ourselves in a desperate bid to be right
Depends on the domain. Underestimation could lead to perceptions of weakness and opportunity for attack. Even if you are prepared for attack, not getting attacked in the first place is better than getting attacked at all.
Same goes for positioning in negotiation.
We don’t have the bandwidth to basically dog fight thousands of aircraft simultaneously!! We’ll go bankrupt!
The defense industry will go ritch, though
>According to Smith, it was CIA’s responsibility by statute to coordinate the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts.
https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cias-role-in-t...
Accordingly, it seems highly possible that the countries targeted by such incursions (a) realize their response time is being tested (b) fuzz/delay their responses by some certain amount of time in order to frustrate such efforts.
During the siege of Yorktown in 1862, Union General Fitz Porter decided to do some surveillance using only one rope on an observation balloon. The rope snapped and he drifted over enemy lines. Confederates tried to shoot him down but missed. Eventually the wind sent him back over Union lines.
Balloons were used in WW1 as observation posts (ushering in wide-spread use of parachutes) and in WW2 for both observation and area over-flight denial.
By May 1945, Japan sent almost 10,000 armed balloons across the pacific. They were largely ineffective, however, they did kill a pregnant mother and five children who discovered a downed balloon in Bly, Oregon. 285 Japanese balloons were recovered, one as far east as Texas.
Adversaries spend 100k for a military grade drone. What do shoot it down with? A 1M dollar Patriot? Whatever you choose will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone.
Israel’s Iron Dome has the same issue. It costs massively more for defense than attack.
If I remember correctly, the F-22 Raptor is the champ in terms of highest ratio of service required per hour of flight (40:1).
The F-35 clocks in at 4-8 hours of service per hour flown (6:1).
One example from the article linked below:
USMIL budgeted $39m dollars for the blue angels to fly 69 days in one year. It's up to 11 F/A-18 Hornets at once, but in my experience they only fly for a couple of minutes for a show.
Plus, who knows what kind of math games the military plays in terms of budget reporting. Operating commercial aircraft is already very expensive, and military craft are an order of magnitude moreso.
The planes are beautiful, though <3, and remain operationally effective.
https://www.inverse.com/article/33711-military-flyover-costs...
Edit: Good points @elif and sandworm101, thank you!
Less thrilled about it as someone who happened to be on a flight transiting nearby airspace last night, and who is familiar with incidents like KAL 007.
It's not like they leave their best toys in the toybox all year.
And the cost of the plane is also complex. This pilot/aircraft renewed some quals on this flight, reducing training needs. The aircraft was likely going flying that day anyway. So the net cost of the operation was likely minimal.
I’m sure that NORAD doesn’t use their most advanced sensor platforms in such a circumstance, but there could be all kinds of interesting close range data to collect on the aircraft and weapons systems used to respond.
It’s alarming many leaped to suggest LEO satellites obviate the need for balloons/drones/spy planes because it really isn’t true; there are some things for which a proper resolution and capture is simply only possibly with proximity, at least more than a satellite has. In fact that’s why we still use U-2 spy planes (upgraded) and did for the balloon.
Given the number of unidentified drone/balloon incursions reported by the Pentagon in the last few years near ships and air force bases I do wonder what’s been exposed about our radars and or datalinks. It also doesn’t necessarily matter that the data is encrypted (a weird refrain I saw) because the operating frequencies and behavior of the emitters on our aircraft, ships is in and of itself valuable information.
Is that what happened in this case? Did you initially try Googling yourself, only to encounter multiple definitions of "UAP" which seemed irrelevant to the article? Given the search results that came up for me, as well as the extent to which UAPs have been in the news lately, that would be surprising.
> Rude. And ineffective.
My goal is not to be rude. But I put about as much effort into answering your question as you did into asking it. You would have gotten your answer faster, while creating less work for others, if you had simply typed your question into Google instead of the HN comments field.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can even answer your own question, and make that your comment. Something like "OP's comment was the first time I had encountered the acronym 'UAP'. After a Google search, I found it means 'unidentified aerial phenomena'. In case others were wondering."
It's extremely odd to me that they were able to identify the object by sending our own airmen to visually confirm it, but if that's the case, wouldn't they be able to definitively conclude that it wasn't a balloon? Pat kept it ambiguous and kept insisting that it was some sort of object.
"They shoot down our surveillance balloons, giving us precedent to shoot down their high altitude drone planes or satellites in the future."
It may not be exactly what they have in mind, but I think it's the right way to think about the question - they are engineering scenarios which work to their advantage no matter how the US responds. US shoots them down? Play outraged. US leaves them alone? US looks weak.
I don't think we know enough about this "unknown object" to definitively say what it could and couldn't do.
[1]: https://x.company/projects/loon/
We need to move past this whole "why use spy balloons when we have satellites" thing. Even Scott Manley repeated it.
The USA has what are likely the most capable surveillance satellites in the world yet the USA still employs spy planes.
For one thing, RF signals suffer from path loss over distance. The difference is >140km in distance. That's a lot of signal loss. Another factor is loiter time.
The balloon floated about 100x closer to the surface than a satellite in low-Earth orbit and travelled much slower, making it potentially easier to collect signals/images.
It's more likely a coordinated event to get people to talk about something other than covid and the last 3 disastrous years. Lets be honest here, neither china nor the US wants people asking uncomfortable questions about covid. Now that the covid era appears to be over, what better way to distract people than "war".
They did the same thing with 9/11. Uncomfortable questions about 9/11 was overshadowed by war and iraqi "wmds". Eventually people forget or move on.
Call me a cynic, but china ends covid lockdowns and all of a sudden we get "surveillance" balloons. And the entire media apparatus has us talking about silly balloons instead of wondering what the last 3 years of covid was about. My guess was a staged "terrorist" attack somewhere to transition us from the covid news cycle. Turns out we got balloons instead. Whatever works in the end.
at least in the US, I don't think anyone is really interested in covid anymore enough to require any distraction. Maybe that argument makes sense in China.