Peter Bergen: The Cost of Chaos: The US Air Force, the Grand Unification, and the History of Spy Balloons
Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” His own views are expressed in this commentary. Don’t forget to check out more opinion on CNN.
It reminded me of when my father worked on a program in the US Air Force to help send balloons into the Soviet airspace.
In 1954 he was assigned to Headquarters Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. There he worked on the “Grand Union” project, which deployed balloons that carried cameras over the then-Soviet Union. Turkey launched the spy balloons.
My dad didn’t talk about this part of his career much, likely because the work was secret, but the program has long since been declassified since it happened around seven decades ago.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/07/opinions/spy-balloon-history-bergen/index.html
What Happened to F-35? The UFO Overflight by China’s Spy Balloon and a Report by the US Director of National Intelligence
Some really old technology is used by spy balloons. Using them is like bringing a well-sharpened ax to the Afghan War; maybe it could have done something, but a 2,000-pound bomb would likely have a larger effect on the enemy. (China has denied the balloon was used for spying.)
The United States and its competitors have gadgets called spy satellites that can take photos. They can do full-motion video! They can take thermal imagery that detects individuals moving around at night! They can see anything with a resolution of centimeters when the skies are clear.
Indeed, commercial satellite imagery is now getting so inexpensive that you can go out and buy your own close-up images of, say, a Russian battle group in Ukraine. Just ask Maxar Technologies; they have built up a rather profitable business on this model, which was just acquired two months ago for $6 billion by a private equity firm.
In other words, the overflight of US territory by China’s balloon is not a national security catastrophe as a bunch of hyperventilating Republican politicians from former President Donald Trump on downward have implied.
But it may help explain, at least in part, an element of a little-noticed report published by the US Office of Director of National Intelligence last month.
Some questions about the work done by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office have arisen, such as if some of the balloons they identified were from China. And could some of the 171 “unexplained sightings” of UFOs that they also assessed be Chinese balloons?
China has done worse than that. US officials have accused it of benefiting from the work of hackers who stole design data about the F-35 fighter aircraft as China builds its own new generation of fighters – and of sucking up much of the personal information of more than 20 million Americans who were current or former members of the US government when they reportedly got inside the computers of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2015. China called the F-35 theft report “baseless” and denied responsibility for the OPM hacking.
The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade notes that one of its small balloons is “missing in action” after reporting its location over Alaska on February 14
An Illinois-based club of amateur balloonists says one of its small balloons is “missing in action” after last reporting its location over Alaska on Saturday, the same day the US military shot down an unidentified object in the same region.
While the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) has not blamed the US government for taking out one of its 32-inch-wide “Pico Balloons,” the group of hobbyists notes in a post on its blog that its last transmission near a small island off the west coast of Alaska occurred after the balloon had been airborne for more than four months and circled the globe seven times.
“Pico Balloon K9YO last reported on February 11th at 00:48 zulu near Hagemeister Island after 123 days and 18 hours of flight,” the NIBBB blog post, dated February 14, states.
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) deferred questions to the National Security Council for identification of the objects and had no additional information, according to a spokeswoman for US Northern Command and NORAD.
The intelligence community believes the objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, Biden told the public earlier in the day.
“We send a small transmitter, with GPS tracking and antenna on a balloon filled with Hydrogen, rising to 47,000 feet, and travelling with the speed of the Jetstream,” the NIBBB website explains.
“Six ended up in trees (we found a fix for that). Six balloons never said hello (we think we have a fix for that). There were eight balloons in the United States. We had nine balloons that left the United States. We had three balloons that almost made it around the world. We have two balloons flying around the world,” the group said on its website.