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It is Very Unlikely the US Sent Espionage Balloons Over China [1]

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Date: 2023-02-13  

On February 12 China responded to the US balloon sightings and shoot-downs. China acused the US of sending ‘at least 10’ espionage balloons across China.

As someone a bit informed on the subject, I cry BS. Here’s why.

A cardinal principal in aeronautical espionage or electronic warfare is that you never deploy a system until you yourself have prepared adequate defenses against that system. A well-known example was the reluctance to deploy chaff to confuse German radar during WWII.

If the US had deployed balloons over China, I guarantee the US would have been prepared for balloons from China. We weren’t. And it probably would have been relatively easy to do. It likely involved just modifying computer filters in the programming of surveillance radars that keep false positives from triggering alerts. Slow moving balloons likely weren’t making it past the filters (probably meant to reject small aircraft and maybe even large birds.) I doubt any new hardware was deployed.

And, if there were 10 US balloons traversing China, show the world the evidence. It’s relatively easy to find the debris from a balloon you’ve shot down. And where were the diplomatic protests?

I note with amusement that China was likely the first nation in the world to deploy balloons (unmanned aerial vehicles) as a weapon. In the CRC Press book “Introduction to Unmanned Aircraft Systems” Jarnot writes “One early user of unmanned aircraft was the Chinese General Zhuge Liang (180-234 AD) who used paper balloons fitted with oil-burning lamps to heat the air; he then flew these over the enemy at night to make them think there was a divine force at work.”

Remarkably, something quite similar may have been used in this most recent example. With the exception that these were probably designed to observe and communicate signals intelligence and possibly details of significant facilities.

Kudos to the Chinese for devising such incredibly simple and inexpensive espionage platforms. But, politically speaking, this ingenious trick is offset by i ts extraordinarily poor timing.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/13/2152719/-It-is-Very-Unlikely-the-US-Sent-Espionage-Balloons-Over-China

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