Why did they blow up the balloons instead of trying to capture them in one piece and perhaps study them? What if they had something dangerous on board that could spread everywhere in the air upon getting blown to pieces?!
I don't think there's a way to capture a balloon at 80 000 ft of elevation. Also, balloons would be just about the worst way to reliably deliver a payload without risk of it coming back to you. And there's also the fact that it's a scenario that has never happened, and there's nothing that would lead us to believe it has any chance of happening.
Easy, you use another balloon to grapple it, reduce lift, and therefore bring it down in a controlled manner. Of course this takes engineering and thought versus using a missile we can readily reorder.
Wonder how much time and money it would take to create a maneuverable balloon that could rise 80k feet and precisely make contact with another balloon (that may also have some maneuvering controls).
It's not about thought and engineering. If it was actually useful to do that, the military would've had no problem developing a solution like that. In fact, air to air missiles are infinitely more complex and engineered than any grappling balloon could ever be.
It's just that it makes no sense to build something that is completely useless, for a scenario that won't happen.
The point isn't to trick you into thinking it's real. It doesn't matter if you know it's all a bunch of bullshit. The administration literally conducted an act of war the week before. The theatrics are done to cover everything up. To make this bullshit the forefront of your mind rather then the blowing up of nord streams 1 and 2.
They are not that competent. At best you could say they spend most of their time tricking themselves. But that's an American speciality not confined to the military.
Blowing stuff up is just another means of communication
Looking at that train derailment incident with the chemical spill and fire that recently took place in Ohio, it seems to me that the established order is rather willing to take the exact type of risk you describe
The F-22 costs more than $50,000 per flying hour to operate. The USAF flew the F-22 for approximately 28,000 hours in FY2021; but that $1.4bn expense is less than 1% of their annual budget.
Well, rather than poring over armed forces budgets, most of us are checking our W-2s around this time of year, and I tell you what: I can hardly afford the Secret Service bullets.
They didn't recover the object...so they wouldn't be able to answer either way. I'm surprised they couldn't do a visual inspection and say yep...it's a pico balloon. And if it was, I'm pretty impressed a missile can hone in on something like that.
The Cuban Missile Crisis had backdoor communication to resolve the urgent problem of the day. That object in a spy thriller movie could be a backdoor object.
If you find you're angry about a large government wasting half a million dollars, then you'll be really angry when you find out how much it actually wastes.
And then when you find out that government waste is a fraction of the waste in private enterprises, well, you probably won't be angry about that at all.
Because the personality that rages at public waste never seems to be all that concerned with the much greater level of private waste.
you're wrong about the private waste, I'm angry about it also but I can't do anything about that. But as a tax payer in the top 2% in the US I am justified in my anger towards the US govt wasting tax payer dollars shooting AIM-9x in F-22s to blow up balloons.
If a balloon really is operated by someone attempting to spy on sensitive military installations, it makes financial sense to shoot it down. It's cheaper to spend 400k on a missile than to have your adversary learn something they shouldn't.
If the federal budget is $2T and if you paid $100K of that in taxes, your contribution to a $400k wasted missile is two cents. I might suggest that two cents does not justify very much anger.
probably because in many enterprises people are incentivized to optimize for personal profit (pay grade, promotion, increasing team size, launching new (often unnecessary) features/products etc) which leads to waste and bureaucracies... iow optimizing in the small which leads to the opposite in the large.
Both zerohedge and Snowden are sources that you should basically never be listening to. They are intensely unreliable and Snowden’s essentially a state mouthpiece for the Russian government at this point.
This is how American military was defeated with absolute humiliation by Talebans and Vietnamese. The opponents simply overwhelm your expensive toys with cheap counter measures. Even American soldiers like Deltas and Rangers couldnt afford to get slaughtered by untrained enemy combatants in the hundreds of thousands. Imagine China flood American skys with a million balloons with fentanyl powders. How effective is American patriots and THAAD and F35 going to defend against that? No wonder American was defeated in Afghanistan after spending 10T ISD and 20 years there. This obsessions with wonder weapon is one of the reason how Hitler loss to Stalin Russia. Guess Americans have to relearn that lesson.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadIt's just that it makes no sense to build something that is completely useless, for a scenario that won't happen.
Pentagon money well spent, bang for the buck, if those factored in.
The point isn't to trick you into thinking it's real. It doesn't matter if you know it's all a bunch of bullshit. The administration literally conducted an act of war the week before. The theatrics are done to cover everything up. To make this bullshit the forefront of your mind rather then the blowing up of nord streams 1 and 2.
Looking at that train derailment incident with the chemical spill and fire that recently took place in Ohio, it seems to me that the established order is rather willing to take the exact type of risk you describe
We're talking about a $400K missile so much, why?
And then when you find out that government waste is a fraction of the waste in private enterprises, well, you probably won't be angry about that at all.
Because the personality that rages at public waste never seems to be all that concerned with the much greater level of private waste.
I read the story about the F-18 shooting down a balloon with its gun, but it's also expensive to fly and maintain such a jet.
Must have been one of those old icky missiles that desperately needed replacement anyway.
U.S. defense spending will OBVIOUSLY have to go up:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/16/ukraine-w...
Military spending as percentage of GDP:
1 United States 801.0 3.2 38%2 China 293.0 1.7 14%
3 India 76.6 2.4 3.6%
4 United Kingdom 68.4 2.1 3.2%
5 Russia Russia 65.9 3.1 3.1%
I mean, we're only spending 1/3 of all the money spent on military in the world!! How lame is that?
We need to shoot down those weather baloons with $1M missiles!!!