“Would you like to ride in my Chinese spy balloon….”

I have read that the US was able to interfere with the balloon's transmissions when desired. And of course, a basic part of security is determining what you have the other guys wish to spy upon.

 

Right. That’s what I’ve been saying.

 

This will amount to a whole lot of nothing. US hawks will pound their chests and demand retribution, China apologists will cry "calm down, dear!" and invoke the Hainan Island spy plane incident of 2001, and opportunists on both sides will jump at the chance to denounce their opponents as "weak" (whatever that means at the moment). Very little will change, though, and Antony Blinken's trip to Beijing will go ahead once the media is sufficiently distracted by something shiny.

I prefer to dual-wield Occam and Hanlon's razors here -- this was a poorly thought-through operation that went awry and now China's leaders don't know how to extricate themselves from it without looking bad. Outside the paranoid and professionally outraged bemoaning the emergence of a "balloon gap", this will blow over in a couple news cycles.

 

I’m pretty sure there was at least one lopsided “dogfight” (as firing standoff weapons go) during the post 1991 No Fly Zone enforcement.

I’ll have to go do some digging around - I’ve seen videos about strike packages but I think they were 1991 instead of 2003.

 

Honestly, we should shoot down balloons with fighter jets every Saturday. It was fun to watch.

 

Now if someone would just shoot the Russian spy balloon in Florida …

 

That’s another question: what ordnance was used.

Gunfire or guided missile?

I suppose it might have been a Sidewinder.

But… if it was a missile, it might have been modified to not have a warhead go off (might have even just had ballast instead of explosives). Why?

You want to recover that payload and inspect the thing. Not blow it up or hit it with fragments.

The goal was to first make the balloon itself lose lift and descend, and then get that payload.

From the videos I’ve seen, I really haven’t seen a fireball from a missile detonating.

Overall, I suspect gunfire aimed eastward away from the coast.

The other problem with a missile launch is there are safety keep out zones for those in case the missile flight goes awry and the flight termination system fails, and they shot that balloon fairly close to the shoreline.

Plus gunfire is plain cheaper than a single missile.

Anyway, lots of little details that I hope we learn in the coming days.

 

Yep. Sidewinder.

Here’s a good article, which also suggests a possible inert warhead. (And setting that up can take a day to plan for sure.)

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...hinese-spy-balloon-off-carolinas-with-missile

After watching a few more videos, especially in that link, it definitely wasn’t gunfire.

But I have yet to see what looks like a warhead blast / fireball.