The Chinese Jet: How dangerous is it to deploy an Unarmed Reactor on China? A statement from the US Insights into the Dec. 28, 2018 Incident
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“Let me point out that for a long time, the US has frequently deployed aircraft and vessels for close-in reconnaissance on China, which poses a serious danger to China’s national security,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said.
Performing what the US military deemed an “unsafe maneuver,” a Chinese navy J-11 fighter jet flew within 20 feet of the nose of a US RC-135 Rivet Joint, an unarmed reconnaissance plane with about 30 people on board, forcing the US plane to take “evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision,” according to a statement from the US Indo-Pacific Command issued on December 28.
But while the incident itself was safely managed by the US pilots, experts agreed the small distance between the US and Chinese planes evident in the videos leaves little room for error.
“The 135 is an unarmed aircraft. Why does the PLAN consider it necessary to intercept carrying missiles when the intent was to visually identify the aircraft? Doing this is potentially dangerous and could lead to a major and tragic incident,” Layton said.
“There was no possible gain by the fighter flying so close except to create an incident – that was handily recorded on a high quality video camera the fighter’s crew just happened to have and be using. The incident seems to have been planned by the PLAN.
The Chinese response is so far removed from reality that it is not real. The airliner-sized aircraft does not turn into an armed fighter.
But Hopkins also said the US military risked blowing the incident out of proportion in saying the US jet had to take “evasive maneuvers,” a term he described as “overly dramatic.”
There is no difference between a driver adjusting her position to avoid another driver and a temporary lane incursion by another driver. “The US response is pure theater and needlessly creates an exaggerated sense of danger.”
“Flying aircraft close to each other at 500 miles per hour with unfriendly intentions is generally unsafe,” said Blake Herzinger, a nonresident fellow and Indo-Pacific defense policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute.
The 2001 April 1 hijacking incident in the South China Sea by a US and allied aircraft colliding with a Chinese jet: The first lesson learned from the secretary of state
“It’s worth remembering that the PLA has effectively wrecked any kind of hotlines or discussion forums for addressing potential incidents with the United States. If an intercept does go wrong, there are fewer options than ever for senior officers to limit potential escalation,” he said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said in its weekly press conference on Friday that the incident was part of a string of US provocations that threaten stability in the region.
The Southern Theater Command said that the US plane was flying near the southern coastline and the Paracels, where Beijing has built up military installations.
The US does not recognize these territorial claims and routinely conducts operations there, including freedom of navigation operations through the South China Sea.
The most memorable and instructive example dates back to the presidency of George W. Bush. Two Chinese fighter jets harassed a US Navy plane on April 1, 2001. One collided with the EP-3 and crashed. The pilot of the plane managed to regain control and make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. The 24 US crew members were held for 11 days and some of them were asked a number of questions before they were released.
After a string of incidents last year involving intercepts of US and allied aircraft by Chinese warplanes, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the PLA’s actions were escalating and “should worry us all.”
The case of the 2016 US-China naval hijacking of Subic Bay: a senior intelligence official’s equivalence assessment
The most informative interview I saw Monday was the one CNN’s John King conducted with former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Beth Sanner, who is now a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
The gross violation of US sovereignty occurred with the balloon over Montana. They are trying to see some sort of equivalency, but they are struggling to do that. I think they’re mostly signaling their own population to make sure they aren’t getting caught up in the contradiction of China’s position
The Chinese seized the US underwater vehicle in late 2016 in the international waters of the South China Sea just 50 nautical miles from a Philippine port and hundreds of miles from China. The largest US naval base in Asia, Subic Bay, was withdrawn from in 1992 because of disagreements over costs, but US sailors could return to it soon as a countermeasure. It was widely believed that the incident was a message to Donald Trump after he angered Beijing by taking a call from Taiwan’s president. Beijing agreed to return the craft three days later, but never apologized and accused the US of spying.
Jiang Zemin was the Chinese President at the time. Nearly two months elapsed before the two sides reached agreement for the return of the aircraft. Having removed and refused to return the plane’s hardware, software and communications equipment, the Chinese insisted the EP-3 be dismantled and transported by a third party at the US’s expense. The Bush Administration was willing to pay $1 million for costs associated with the incident and detaining the plane’s crew. Washington countered with an offer of some $34,000 it said was a “fair figure” — money China refused — and never apologized.
Your first reaction when you saw the Chinese balloon floating over Montana was probably the same as mine: ” Shoot it down, already!” My role as a senior intel official in the past was to focus on the facts, not the outrage, and to provide a clear-headed assessment of the intelligence community. In meetings probably held in the White House Situation Room multiple times over the past week, a senior intelligence official would have joined the US military, level-setting the discussion in this vein. I think the risk-benefit of waiting to shoot the balloon down until it floated over a large debris field was worth it.
Instead, let’s come up with a more strategic, measured plan to hold China accountable, but also allow room for needed dialogue. If we follow Beijing’s lead it will surely be a race to the bottom, making it harder to avoid what we all wish to avoid — military conflict with China.
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.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are of his own. You can have an opinion on CNN.
And it reminded me that when my father, Tom Bergen, was a lieutenant in the US Air Force in the mid-1950s, he worked on a program to help send balloons into 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. There are spy balloons from Turkey.
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.
The story of the F-35 flight hijacking: a spy satellite perspective on the U.S. Department of Interior and Defence Intelligence
After the balloon lifted off from Hainan, China last month, US officials monitored it as it made its way across the Pacific, sources said. After tracking the balloon for a little while, officials believed it would head towards Guam, where it would probably try to surveil military sites on the island.
Now the United States and its rivals have these new-fangled gizmos called “spy satellites,” which can take photos! They can do a full-motion video. They can take thermal imagery that detects individuals moving around at night! When the skies are clear, they can spy on pretty much anything, with a resolution of centimeters.
Satellite imagery is getting so cheap that you can purchase your own close-up images of a fight between Russians and Ukrainians. 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.
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.
Since Friday, U.S. forces have brought down three unidentified objects flying above the U.S. and Canada. American officials have refused to say what kinds of objects they received.
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. The F-35 theft report was called “nonsense” and China denied responsibility for the OPM hacking.
It’s still unclear, but it appears to be quite large. New information has come to light since news of the Chinese balloon that was floating over US airspace broke last week.
Roughly half a dozen of those flights have been within US airspace – although not necessarily over US territory, according to one official familiar with the intelligence.
A source with knowledge of the intelligence said that not all of the balloons were like the one shot down off the coast of South Carolina. These people said that there are multiple variations.
The link to the broader surveillance program, which was uncovered before the latest balloon was spotted last week, was first reported by the Washington Post.
The photos from Sunday show sailors from a Navy explosive disposal team pulling debris from the deflated balloon onto a boat. The debris recovered is being taken to an FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, for analysis as the US looks to understand the capabilities of the balloon.
Defense officials say that the US gleaned important clues to the answers of some of these questions while the balloon was transiting the United States.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry stated on February 3 that the airship deviated from its scheduled route due to the westerly wind and limited self-control ability. China regrets that the airship entered the United States. China will keep in contact with the US to properly handle the unexpected situation.
China did not provide any details of the alleged incursions of US balloons into its airspace – when and where they occurred, or whether it responded in any way at the time.
Why should the top intelligence officer in the US respond to a “balloon shootdown”? Sensitivities in Washington are increasing frustrated after the Beijing response to the balloon shootdown
The elite team consists of agents, analysts, engineers, and scientists who are responsible for analyzing those of the US’s adversaries.
OTD personnel, for example, construct surveillance devices used by FBI and intelligence community personnel targeting national security threats — but they also are responsible for managing court-authorized data collection and work to defeat efforts by foreign intelligence agencies to penetrate the US.
But, according to one member of the House Intelligence Committee, “there’s number of reasons why we wouldn’t do that. We want to collect off it, you want to see where it’s going and what it’s doing.
The US has procedures in place to protect sensitive locations from the overflight of satellites, similar to a kind of digital black out.
President Joe Biden claimed that the balloon shootdown did not affect relations with China, but China protested angrily, canceling the Secretary of State’s visit to Beijing and refusing to call the Secretary of Defense. New sanctions in response to the balloon would most likely make things worse.
The balloon’s appearance earlier this month also prompted the U.S. to shoot down other “unidentified objects” in the sky, and sparked a fresh wave of criticism in Washington, with Republicans accusing President Joe Biden of not acting quickly enough or providing enough transparency.
Biden administration officials have stressed that the meeting was not canceled, but instead delayed until a later date. The date has not yet been set.
The High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon as a Brazen Violation of U.S. Independence: The Alaska Air National Guard Response
The official said that based on China’s antics and public comments, it’s clear that they have been scrambling to explain why they violated US sovereignty.
Biden administration officials have maintained they were able to move quickly to mitigate any intelligence collection capacity of the balloon and have countered that they will end up benefiting from the ability to collect information about the balloon and Chinese intelligence capabilities, both during its flight and in the recovery of its wreckage from the Atlantic Ocean.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s office said the chamber will vote Thursday on a resolution “condemning the Chinese Communist Party’s use of a high-altitude surveillance balloon over United States territory as a brazen violation of United States sovereignty.”
When the balloon crossed over from Canada to the U.S., Biden wasn’t briefed until three days later. At that point, Biden asked the military to present options “immediately” to shoot the balloon down, officials said.
As the US warned China not to help Russia with its invasion of Ukraine, he pointed that out to the Chinese leader.
The US Navy released photos of the recovered Chinese spy balloon Tuesday, which was shot down by the US over the weekend.
The commander of the NORAD and US Northern Command had told reporters that a balloon was 200 feet tall and weighed over a couple of thousand pounds.
Take a picture of yourself with large debris weighing hundreds or thousands of pounds falling out of the sky. VanHerck said on Monday that it was really what they were talking about. “So glass off of solar panels, potentially hazardous material, such as material that is required for a batteries to operate in such an environment as this and even the potential for explosives to detonate and destroy the balloon that could have been present.”
It gave us the opportunity to assess what they really were doing, and I think you will see in the future that that time frame was well worth it.
Ultimately, the object was downed near the Canadian border and northeastern Alaska by a F-22 fighter jet out of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, equipped with an AIM-9X – the same aircraft and missile used to take down the surveillance balloon. The military waited to shoot it down during daylight hours to make it easier for pilots to spot it. The mission was supported by the Alaska Air National Guard.
“The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to force majeure – it was completely an accident,” another statement from the Foreign Ministry said.
The alternative would be for China not to make a decision about the US in the wake of the visit by the US Secretary of State.
China admitted ownership of the balloon on Monday, saying it was used for flight tests and had “seriously deviated” from its flight course “by mistake.”
“China is a responsible country,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Monday. We have always followed international law. We properly handled the situation, which did not pose any threats to any countries.
The developments in the region have been called a new front for militarization by Chinese military experts and an important field of competition for the world’s military powers.
Future joint combat operations that integrate outer space and the Earth’s atmosphere are likely to rely on a range of near-space flight vehicles.
One particular area of interest is surveillance. While China already deploys a sprawling satellite network for sophisticated long-range surveillance, Chinese military experts have highlighted the advantages of lighter-than-air vehicles.
The space for information confrontation is no longer limited to land, sea, and low altitude with the rapid development of modern technology. Near space has also become a new battlefield in modern warfare and an important part of the national security system,” read a 2018 article in the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Unlike rotating satellites or traveling aircraft, stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons “can hover over a fixed location for a long period of time” and are not easily detected by radar, wrote Shi Hong, the executive editor of Shipborne Weapons, a prominent military magazine published by a PLA-linked institute, in an article published in state media in 2022.
“They are cheap, provide long-term persistent stare for collection of imagery, communications and other information – including weather,” said Mulvaney, who authored a 2020 paper that detailed China’s interest in using lighter-than-air vehicles for “near-space reconnaissance.”
An example of advances China has made in this domain is the reported flight of a 100-meter-long (328 feet) unmanned dirigible-like airship known as “Cloud Chaser.” In a 2019 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, Wu Zhe, a professor at Beihang University, said the vehicle had transited across Asia, Africa and North America in an around-the-world flight at 20,000 meters (65, 616 feet) above the Earth.
Lighter-than-air vehicles have been boosted by the US. In 2021, the US Department of Defense contracted an American aerospace firm to work on using their stratospheric balloons as a means “to develop a more complete operating picture and apply effects to the battlefield,” according to a statement from the firm, Raven Aerostar, at the time.
The documentary did not provide a detailed explanation about the incident but a paper published last April stated air-drift balloons were spotted over China in 1997.
Schuster and the US DIA Insight into the Alaskan Tipper Offended by a State-Owned UAV on Saturday
Carl Schuster, who was a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command, says that understanding the atmospheric conditions up there is critical to programming the guidance software for missiles.
Both Taiwan and Japan have admitted similar incidents, though it is not clear if they are related to the US incident.
CASI’s Mulvaney said that whether the balloon itself is characterized as “dual use” or “state-owned,” data collected would have gone back to China, which is now receiving another kind of information from the incident.
The object brought down over Alaska was much smaller than the Chinese surveillance balloon downed over territorial waters on Saturday. The payload of the Chinese balloon downed last Saturday was described by US officials as approximately the size of three buses, whereas the object taken down on Friday has been described as a small car. The US has not attributed the second flying object to any country or entity.
The report – also known as a “tipper” – was disseminated through classified channels accessible across the US government. But it wasn’t flagged as an urgent warning and top defense and intelligence officials who saw it weren’t immediately alarmed by it, according to sources. Sources familiar with the report said that the White House was not made aware of the DIA report, and President Joe Biden was not briefed on it.
The US examined the object instead of treating it as a threat because it gave them a chance to look at and collect intel.
The Shotdown of the Chinese Airborne Blast-Blown by a Bose-Einstein Condensation on January 28
The balloon was shot down after being allowed to go airborne in the United States but not before Republicans criticized the administration of allowing the balloon to fly.
Defense officials say that when a balloon entered US airspace near Alaska on January 28, the NORAD fighter jets were sent up to make a positive identification.
It was argued by officials that gathering more intel on the balloon as it passed over US territory mitigated the risk of shooting it down.
Military officials said that it is not surprising that the president was not briefed until January 31 due to the expectations for the balloon at the time.
Congress has been interested in more information about theAdministration’s decision making on the balloon.
“There are still a lot of questions to be asked about Alaska,” a Senate Republican aide told CNN. “Alaska is still part of the United States – why is that okay to transit Alaska without telling anyone, but [the continental US] is different?”
One pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself, these officials said – an image that has already gained legendary status in both NORAD and the Pentagon.
The Biden administration has determined that the Chinese balloon was operating with electronic surveillance technology capable of monitoring US communications, according to the official.
Lawmakers were told Thursday that the order to send the balloon was dispatched without Chinese President Xi Jinping’s knowledge, sources familiar with the briefing said.
Democrat Rep. Jon Tester of Montana: The Navy’s Surveillance in the U.S. is Not a Military Threat
The officials said the US has collected only materials on the ocean’s surface and a small amount of electronics.
Glenn VanHerck, commander of US Northern Command and NORAD, stated that they weren’t sure if the situation presented a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in Chinese technical means.
The House briefing Thursday morning was tense, the sources said, with several Republicans railing against the administration, including GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who said that the Pentagon made the president – whom she noted she doesn’t like – look weak by their actions.
“The Pentagon was telling us they were able to mitigate in real-time as this was taking place and I believe that’s accurate,” Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, told CNN.”I believe the preeminent concern they had, as they expressed in real time, was the safety of US citizens.”
The administration, the president, our military and intelligence agencies acted with care, I believe. At the same time, their capabilities are extraordinarily impressive. Is everything done correctly? I can’t imagine that would be the case of almost anything we do. But I came away more confident,” Romney said Thursday.
Senators pushed defense officials at an Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday over the military’s assessment of the Chinese surveillance, with Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana telling officials that he did not know how they could unequivocally say it was not a military threat.
“You guys have to help me understand why this baby wasn’t taken out long before and because I am telling you that that this ain’t the last time. We’ve [seen] brief incursions, now we’ve seen a long incursion, what happens next?,” said Tester, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/09/politics/spy-balloon-technology/index.html
Investigation of a “Chinese Spy Balloon” and the Sensitivity to Its Sensitive Potential, Interpretation, and Operation
The balloon gathering intelligence over Alaska was not something that the Defense Department was worried about, according to officials at the hearing.
The Chinese balloon shot down off the South Carolina coast 10 days ago has been recovered by crews using salvage equipment.
It is not yet clear where the balloon’s parts were manufactured, the officials said. The officials said that there has not been a determination as to what the device could do and its intent because analysts haven’t examined the majority of the equipment.
Of the small portion they have examined, analysts have not identified any sort of explosive or “offensive material” that would pose a danger to the American public.
There was English writing on parts of the balloon that were found, one of the sources familiar with the congressional briefings said, though they were not high-tech components. The source declined to provide detail on what specific parts of the balloon contained English writing.
The official said they have no explanation for why the balloon violated the airspace of Central and South American countries. The program of the PRC will be harder to use because it will continue to be exposed.
As U.S. Navy crews continue to fish parts of the alleged Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic, a senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, gave reporters an update on Thursday on some of what has been learned so far.
One FBI official said that it was “very early” to think about what the intent was and how the device was operating.
First Flight of a High-Altitude Object Over US Airspace and Second Time United States F-22 Beam-and-Flight Mission
Mao said the narrative is part of the information and public opinion warfare the US has waged on China. “As to who is the world’s number one country of spying, eavesdropping and surveillance, that is plainly visible to the international community.”
The government is also making improvements. In the last year, China has launched a project that researchs materials that can be used to make balloons that will float higher.
President Joe Biden told CNN that the shoot down a “high-altitude object” hovering over Alaska on Friday “was a success,” shortly after American national security officials disclosed that the commander-in-chief gave the US military approval to take the action.
The incident marked the second time American fighter jets have taken down an object flying over US airspace in a little less than a week after a suspected Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina last Saturday.
The high-altitude object, Kirby said during a White House press briefing, was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and “posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight.”
Two attempts were made to evaluate the object as it flew. The first engagement occurred Thursday night and the second Friday morning. Kirby told reporters that both engagements yielded limited information.
“We were able to get some fighter aircrafts up and around it before the order to shoot it down, and the pilots assessment was this was not manned,” Kirby added.
On Saturday, a US F-22 warplane operating on the joint orders of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Biden fired a missile that took down an object flying at 40,000 feet over central Yukon in the far north of Canada. The Canadian Defense Minister referred to the object as smaller than the Chinese balloon.
The Alaska National Guard and units under US Northern Command, along with HC-130 Hercules, HH-60 Pave Hawk, and CH-47 Chinook are all participating in the effort to recover the object, Ryder said.
We have the best description for this object right now, and we called it an object. We don’t know who owns it – whether it’s state-owned or corporate-owned or privately-owned, we just don’t know,” Kirby said.
The object was first brought to the attention of the US government. Biden was first briefed Thursday night “as soon as the Pentagon had enough information,” Kirby said.
Xi’s mission to killhorse and the complexity of communication in the Chinese system, a view expressed by a senior US diplomat
It was much less predictable because it appeared that this thing did not appear to be self-maneuvering. The president just wasn’t willing to take that risk,” he said.
The FAA issued a flight restriction around Deadhorse as the military took action against an object.
“Given its size, which was much smaller, and the capabilities on the fighter aircraft themselves, the speed at which they were flying, it was difficult for the pilots to glean a whole lot of information,” he said.
CNN reported that the assessment was presented to American lawmakers in briefings Thursday, which could potentially point to a lack of coordination within the Chinese system at a fraught period of China-US relations.
It could imply that the possibility of the mission hurting the US and China’s relationship was underestimated by the president and his advisers, and that Beijing welcomed a visit by the most senior US diplomat in a long time to ease their strained ties.
Beijing, in a statement last weekend, appeared to link the device to “companies,” rather than the government or military – though in China the prominence of state-owned enterprises and a robust military-industrial complex blurs the line between the two.
Drew Thompson, a Singapore-based analyst, said that the situation could have been worsened by the level of control wielded by Xi, as he entered a precedent-breaking third term atop the Communist Party.
That means that lower-level officials who may have the capacity to more closely monitor such missions may not be empowered to do so, or not be equipped to make political judgments about their impact, he said. Power struggles between lower and higher ranking officials could also complicate communication, he said.
“There is a tension throughout the Chinese system – it’s a feature of Chinese governance, where lower levels fight for their own autonomy, and upper levels fight for greater control,” he said.
Reports of delays in reporting have been blamed for slowing the response to previous crises in China, such as the 2003 outbreak of the flu and the 2002-2003 outbreak of the respiratory syndrome coronatis, which were both seen by the public as having compounded the problem. Some blamed local officials that were used to a system of information flowing from top to bottom.
According to the political scientist at the University of Chicago, balloon launches can fall into a gap in operations if they are not managed in the same way as space missions.
In this case, entities launching balloons may have received little or no opposition from other countries, and often are seen as routine due to weather conditions and at modest costs.
“As a result, while the leaders of these programs have also become emboldened over time to test new routes, it was likely that they didn’t get top priority attention from the perspective of political risk,” he said.
China’s Foreign Ministry has not yet revealed the shooting of a suspected surveillance balloon over Alaska, and it is still assessing the impact of the incident
China’s Foreign Ministry appeared caught off-guard by the situation as it publicly unfolded over the past week – releasing its first explanation of the incident more than 12 hours after the Pentagon announced it was tracking a suspected surveillance balloon.
Alfred Wu, a professor at the NUS Lee Kuan Yew school of Public Policy, said that his personality made him want 100% control. I don’t think he will allow for that kind of independence.
The postponement of the talks might have been due in part to the US overreacting to the public’s frustration with the faltering economy after years of the zero-covid policy.
Washington may be trying to convey to Chinese President Hu Jintao that he did not know about the situation during a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the G20 summit in Indonesia.
The unidentified object that was shot down in Canadian airspace had been tracked since Friday evening, according to a statement from Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder.
The Canadian defense minister said that the object appears to be less than a Chinese balloon that was shot down.
The object was small and not sophisticated compared to the Chinese balloon shot, according to a US official.
The remnants of the balloons are still waiting to be collected by investigators, so the disclosures hoped to put to rest any ongoing speculation about their origin. Administration officials are now doubtful of their ability to fully recover the debris, given the tough conditions where they landed.
Ryder said on Friday that recovery teams have “mapped the debris field” and are “in the process of searching for and identifying debris on the ocean floor.”
When asked Friday if lessons learned about China’s balloon assisted in detecting the object shot down over Alaska, Ryder said it was “a little bit of apples and oranges.”
The Recovery of Unidentified Flight from a High-Altitude Object by a Flying, Low-Scale F-22
US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau both approved the shoot down on Saturday, according to a statement from the White House.
Ryder’s statement said that while Canadian authorities conduct recovery operations, the FBI will be “working closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”
Pilots gave different accounts of what they observed after coming near the object, a source briefed on the intelligence told CNN; some pilots said it “interfered with their sensors,” but other pilots said they didn’t experience that.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs, Melissa Dalton told reporters on Sunday they were taken down out of an “abundance of caution.”
Dalton said that high-altitude objects can be used by a range of companies, countries, and research organizations for “purposes that are not nefarious, including legitimate research.”
On Friday, an F-22 shot down another unidentified craft over Alaskan airspace . The object did not appear to be carrying any equipment and the US pilots were able to get around it before it was shot down.
Canada’s chief of defense staff, Gen. Wayne Eyre, also made mention of a “balloon” when describing instructions given to the team that worked to take down the object.
The objects shot down on Friday and Saturday weren’t close to the PRC balloon according to the deputy Pentagon press secretary. We have more for you when we can recover the debris.
The findings have allowed the US to develop a consistent technical method for the first time, which they have used to track the balloons in near-real time across the globe, the sources said.
NORAD and the Snippet Correlations after the December 11, 2016 Chinese Balloon Crisis: What Do Officials Really Want to Know About New Observations?
Officials are working to understand the sequence of events as new speculation and criticism could be premature. The filters that NORAD uses to sift data have been adjusted to focus on spotting objects that move fast below a certain altitude. Early warning filters had previously been set to avoid picking up other objects, including birds and weather balloons, a source briefed on the matter said.
If the latter situation is the case, is NORAD now picking up more objects that are potentially hostile given a state of heightened alert after the Chinese balloon crisis? Are there sudden increases in flights with suspicious objects or is it normal for such objects to fly with no repercussions in the past? There is already an increased threat to aircraft from drones, does this a new problem need to worry the aviation industry?
An F-16 shot down an object high up in the air over Lake Huron, which lies between Michigan and Ontario. The object was not assessed as a military threat but a flight hazard according to the Pentagon. But it did connect the craft to a radar signal picked up earlier over Montana, the home to US intercontinental missile silos and other sensitive sites.
The Department of Defense called Slotkin, saying the US military had an eye on a strange object above Lake Huron.
Lawmakers want to know what is going on. Politicians on both sides of the aisle reacted Sunday to news of more objects being shot down.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner told CNN that the Biden administration does appear “somewhat trigger-happy, although this is certainly preferable to the permissive environment that they showed when the Chinese spy balloon was coming over some of our most sensitive sites.”
“What I think this shows, which is probably more important to our policy discussion here, is that we really have to declare that we’re going to defend our airspace. And then we need to invest,” added Turner. Some of the problems and gaps that we have are shown in this. We need to fill those as soon as possible because we certainly now ascertain there is a threat.”
Turner’s Democratic counterpart on the Intelligence panel, Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he had “real concerns about why the administration is not being more forthcoming with everything that it knows,” before adding, “My guess is that there’s just not a lot of information out there to share.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, said Congress needs to investigate why it took so long for the US to catch on to the Chinese government’s use of spy balloons.
Three days in a row, US fighter jets were scrambled to shoot down three aerial objects over the North American continental shelf, threatening a political storm.
With China becoming more hostile and the US leading the way in the proxy war against Russia inUkraine, the intrigue is unfolding against a tense global situation.
“What’s gone on in the last two weeks or so, 10 days, has been nothing short of craziness,” Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS, hours before an airborne object was shot down over Lake Huron.
In fact, NORAD commander Gen. Glen VanHerck said recent objects shot down were likely the first “kinetic action” that NORAD or the US Northern Command had taken against an airborne object over US airspace.
Biden and the latest unidentified objects leaders-response investigations: What has the government learned about a black-tie event?
It is possible that the government may not know what it is talking about in a very fast paced situation. But the piecemeal emergence of details is adding to the confusion. The administration has found it difficult to control the media narrative on some issues such as the discovery of Biden’s home and office.
The lack of specificity is not likely to quell political activity in Washington. At the start of a new presidential election cycle and in a polarized political age when social media magnifies conspiracy theories, this odd series of incidents is heaping fresh pressure on Biden following recriminations after his decision to wait until the Chinese balloon had crossed the country before shooting it down over water.
Premature speculation may be the case. Biden has changed his tolerance for unknown aerial objects because of the debate over the balloon.
Biden, who didn’t address the new intrusions at a black-tie event with state governors on Saturday, has yet to speak to Americans in person about the trio of incidents over the weekend.
“They are getting lots of positives that they did not get before. Kayyem was a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.
We can not answer if it is part of something that is organized to gather information on everyone in the world or if it is a smaller agency that picks up things that don’t make much of a difference.
There was more confusion on Sunday. Schumer said on the ABC show that the two objects shot down were balloons, but smaller than the Chinese intruders, after saying that he had heard of Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser.
It’s possible that a direct link has been made between the Chinese balloon and the latest objects, if there’s any confirmation at all.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/politics/unknown-objects-leaders-response/index.html
How the White House’s response to the recent aerial take-downs has affected the identification of three UAPs in the heart of the United States
“It doesn’t give me much safe feelings knowing that these devices are smaller,” he said. I am concerned with the amount of data being collected. … I need some answers, and the American people need answers.”
“There is no – again, no — indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent take-downs…. I wanted to make sure that the American people knew that, all of you knew that, and it was important for us to say that from here because we’ve been hearing a lot about it.
The White House press secretary told reporters on Monday that there would be no calls for the show to come back.
This particular action, sending the surveillance balloon over the heart of the United States was an irresponsible act and, of course, a violation of our sovereignty and of international law. That’s critical. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that we are committed to finding ways to responsibly manage it, to engage.”
We haven’t noticed them because they have been going on before. There have been detections where our radars have picked up various phenomenon. We haven’t been able to clearly define what it was that they detected because, quite frankly, the equipment is not that refined. It cannot discern down to an exquisite level of detail what an anomaly in the air might be. Occasionally we will pick up weather phenomena which will indicate that there is an aircraft or balloon in the sky. It turns out to be a weather phenomenon just in the atmosphere. And again, some of this could be corrected with newer technologies.”
The military is learning that UAPs will be found in the US skies if you look for them.
The administration hopes to recover the debris and find out how the three objects came to be shot down, in hopes that they will shed light on their nature.
I do not think the American people need to worry about aliens. Period. There’s nothing more to be said on that,” said John Kirby, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, at a White House briefing Monday.
He said the downed objects posed no immediate threat and did not send communications signals, have any propulsion capabilities or be manned.
Sullivan Observations: UAPs and Lunar Explosions in the 2021-27 High-Altitude Snowmass
Under scrutiny for President Joe Biden’s lack of public comment, the government is now working to appear engaged. Jake Sullivan, a national security adviser, will lead anagency team to assess UAPs.
Those intercepted over Alaska and northern Canada, she said, had balloon-like features with small cylindrical metal objects attached, and they were flying at around 40,000 feet.
The filters were only readjusted and broadened in the past week, the source said, after a high-altitude, suspected Chinese spy balloon transited the US and ignited a debate over the United States’ ability to detect and defend against any potentially threatening objects entering its airspace.
The majority of the total are labeled as balloon or balloon-like entities. Others have the same behavior as drones. And a few appear to be nothing more than “airborne debris like plastic bags.”
SANNER: There was a lot of discussion when we first started looking at this in 2021, that these were aliens. And I think that since then, people have kind of pulled back and said, you know, most of these things probably can be explained. But to me, the stories come together.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/politics/us-mystery-objects-in-sky-what-matters/index.html
The US Mysteries in Space – What Happens When Pilots See Its Face – The Threats That We Know Are Identified
Because the things that pilots have been seeing – and many times were discouraged from talking about, there was a stigma with that – they could very well be spy or other kinds of threats. So it’s important to get these things out there.
Sanner is a man. These things aren’t that hard to do. This is not the most technologically advanced technology. It makes us vulnerable, really. … The defense of the continental United States has been neglected for decades because of the cruise missile threat.
We invested in missile defense, but not in this. And so, that might be a secret to all of us, but it’s not to the US military, and the Biden administration actually put money into the budget this year to start looking at this.
But we have a big gap. We have a gap geographically – we’re really only focused toward anything coming over the North Pole. If something comes in south of Alaska, we won’t see it.
And then we have this technology gap, in terms of most of our radars are from the 1980s. And so, that’s when the filtering – it’s because our processors, literally the ones that are attached to the radars – don’t have the capability to look through that much material. We had to identify threats that looked like they were threats.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/politics/us-mystery-objects-in-sky-what-matters/index.html
What-aboutism in the air: Why China’s latest tactic is so big and so small, compared to the U.S.
There is a man named Sanner. We’re in a liar, liar, pants on fire moment here. You know, I think that the Chinese are going to make up things in order to cover their own tracks.
Andrew McCabe said it could take a while to figure out what the objects were.
Some of them are coming down in harder to reach places than others. There are materials that have to be taken back to Virginia.
The right partners, whether they are international partners or researchers from the US, have to be assembled to participate in the exploitation of that technology.
It takes time. I have no doubt that we will understand the full scope of what these things are, and what they are capable of, but it might not be quickly.”
While there has been plenty of criticism of the Biden administration for not communicating about these incidents more effectively, there is bipartisan support for shooting the objects down.
“I would prefer them to be trigger-happy than to be permissive, but we’re going to have to see whether or not this is just the administration trying to change headlines,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” before Sunday’s shoot-down took place.
While China’s increasingly hardline stance plays to its domestic audience, it’s also served to expose the inconsistencies and inherent contradictions in Beijing’s messaging – severely damaging its credibility, analysts say.
While China and the U.S. have differing opinions about aerial surveillance, they both are distrusting and hostile towards each other.
Drew Thompson, a senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, called China’s latest tactic “a large case of what-aboutism.”
“And it’s been quite contradictory. It is largely directed towards the domestic audience which is why it does not have credibility with the other countries.
It does not justify China’s intrusion in other countries’ airspace. He said how countries conduct intelligence matters, just as respect for international law and the Law of the Sea.
A country’s sovereign airspace is the portion of the atmosphere that sits above its territory, including its territorial waters that extend 12 nautical miles from its land. Above the ocean beyond the 12 nautical mile limit is considered international airspace, where commercial and military aircraft – including balloons – are allowed to engage in overflight without seeking permission, said Donald Rothwell, a professor of international law at Australian National University.
He said that the Chinese military has often challenged foreign military activities in the international airspace in a way that resembled the country’s national airspace.
“In recent years, the Chinese military has also been challenging foreign military aerial activities over the Spratlys, including those run by the Filipinos when they flew close to the Chinese-occupied outposts,” he said.
On the Extensibility of Airspace and the Mission to Recovery of Extraordinary Objects from the Concorde Aircraft Disaster in South Carolina
In practice, it often extends to the maximum height at which military and commercial aircraft operate. Concorde, a retired Franco-British supersonic airliner, operated at 60,000 feet (18,300 meters), setting a precedent for how high national airspace may extend to, he said.
“The intelligence community’s considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” John Kirby, the strategic communication coordinator at the National Security Council, said Tuesday.
On Capitol Hill, senators emerging from a classified briefing on the objects said they were reassured after hearing from administration officials that the objects posed no threat to the American people.
“There are a lot of these things that are up in the air from time to time, some commercial, some government and maybe there’s some things we don’t know,” said Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, adding he wasn’t worried “in the slightest” that the objects themselves pose a threat to the American people.
It would be of huge value to us if we could look at the debris and find out what it was and what its purpose was. So we’re going to continue those intensive recovery efforts because they’re important,” Kirby said.
He said the efforts have been hampered by tough conditions and that they had problems with the geographic challenges of Lake Huron and on the sea ice north of Alaska.
“Pretty tough weather conditions, let alone just geographically, just tough time of year,” Kirby said, noting that the Chinese spy balloon debris recovery off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month was also hampered by high seas in the Atlantic Ocean due to the time of year.
Kirby said the government was relying instead on information and expertise from the Federal Aviation Administration and the intelligence community to glean what they could about the mysterious airborne devices.
Trudeau and the Whitehorse mission: Searching for debris from a shot down UFO with the Canada Air Force Observatory
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday the search area in Yukon was a “fairly large area” in dense wilderness. Canadian officials were candid Monday about the challenge of recovering debris from high-altitude objects shot down.
“We are working very hard to locate them, but there’s no guarantee that we will. The terrain in the Whitehorse area is rather difficult at the moment, so it could pose some significant challenges to our efforts in recovering from the tragedy, similar to what is occurring in Lake Huron.
Officials also disclosed that the object that was shot down over Lake Huron was first detected in Southern Alberta. Canadian officials added that out of an abundance of caution, they have deployed investigators with explosives, chemical, biological and radiological expertise.
But in the briefing filled with unanswered questions, one statement from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was as definitive as anything else: The US military had not shot down any UFOs from outer space.
Officials have been particularly sensitive to the inherently mysterious nature of the airborne objects, and how ripe the recent series of events was for conspiracy theories.
One official conceded that the lack of information posed a risk to the group, but they still wanted answers.
A determination was made that even in the absence of much concrete information that could be shared with the public about the three recently downed objects, it would be prudent to publicly rule out – as quickly as possible – the possibility of extraterrestrial activity, sources said.
Administration officials say they want to provide as much information as possible about the objects, but the circumstances are not ideal for effective communication.
The president has acknowledged that without a full picture of what objects were, he cannot communicate on them, according to officials, but he has expressed a desire to be as transparent as possible.
CNN quoted a lawmaker from the Foreign Affairs Committee who said it would be wise for Biden to speak to the public since the situation was ripe for conspiracy theories.
The Aerial Flight Rescue of the U.S. Emily: From Capitol Hill to the Munich Security Conference, and a Meeting Between the United States and China
The recovery operation has included the use of a crane to bring up large pieces of the airship, which was kept aloft by a balloon estimated to be up to 200 feet tall.
The US blew the balloon out of the sky in February after it had soared over most of the United States.
Even before the shootdown, analysts advised the Biden administration not to let the craft go back to China because they were worried that they wouldn’t get the data they would need.
As for how the U.S. will handle cases of unidentified aerial objects objects in the future, Kirby said on Tuesday that the National Security Council likely will present new guidance by the end of the week.
The U.S. informs the international community about the Chinese balloon that was shot down. On Capitol Hill, both chambers of Congress receive classified briefings on the incident. The House passes a unanimous resolution condemning China’s alleged surveillance of the U.S.
Emily reported from Taiwan. Lexie Schapitl reported from Washington, D.C. Vincent Ni and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.
Blinken and Wang will both attend the Munich Security Conference this weekend. US officials said a meeting between the two is not currently planned but have not fully ruled out the possibility.
Chinese Balloons: Can They Manoeuvre? A Pentagon X-ray Spectacular Commander Pat McGean’s Question
The Pentagon’s press secretary was asked if the Chinese government was controlling the movement of the balloon or if it was just floating with air streams. Pat refused to talk about it in detail.
“I’m not going to go into any specific intelligence that we may have,” he said. We know that this is a Chinese balloon and that it has an ability to maneuver, but I will leave it at that.