"Shot Down using an Aim9x"
That actually narrows it down a bit. Heat seeking warhead.
The AIM9 is the only use I'm aware of.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-shoots-down-unknown-flyi...
Russia made some weird looking (but non-threatening) drone and mimicked some Chinese flight path. Thus, hoping to stoke a bit more drama between the US and China after the balloon affair.
What a waste if $200k, shooting Chinese baloons. These shold be zapped using lasers.
Oops.. minus 27 degrees Celsius. Yes, you might assume the `minus` applies to both, you only have to go up 17 degrees Fahrenheit for the signs not to match (better to be specific).
It's extremely odd to me that they were able to identify the object by sending our own airmen to visually confirm it, but if that's the case, wouldn't they be able to definitively conclude that it wasn't a balloon? Pat kept it ambiguous and kept insisting that it was some sort of object.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-balloon-carried-antenna...
tl;dr - nothing important in Alaska
----
Pentagon officials, in testimony to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense, said that the balloon wasn’t deemed to be a threat as it crossed Alaska where it didn’t pass over sensitive sites.
They added that no analysis had been done at that point on where the debris from the Chinese craft might fall. The risk to people on the ground was considerable, they said, given that the balloon was 200 feet tall and carried an equipment array the size of a small airplane.
Shooting down the balloon in the waters off Alaska would likely have made recovering it more difficult due to the depth and frigid ocean temperatures, said Melissa Dalton, a senior Pentagon official with responsibilities for homeland defense.
Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims II, director of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, cautioned that shooting down an intruding craft not seen as an imminent threat might encourage other nations to act hastily if Western planes approached their borders.
“Once you take a shot, you can’t get it back,” Gen. Sims said. “I think it’s important for us to remember that if we establish that precedent… we may meet the same precedent.”
“We may create something that is to our detriment,” he added.
The U.S. has conducted reconnaissance flights in international airspace close to China’s territorial limits, drawing frequent objections from Beijing. In December, a Chinese J-11 fighter flew within 20 feet of a U.S. RC-135 surveillance plane near South China Sea islands controlled by Beijing.
The Pentagon testimony didn’t assuage some lawmakers, particularly Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. Ms. Murkowski said that the Pentagon appeared to be treating potential threats to her state as a secondary concern.
“At what point do we say a surveillance balloon, a spy balloon coming from China is a threat to our sovereignty?” she said. “ It should be the minute it crosses the line, and that line is Alaska.
Because if they really wanted to they’d have issued a “everyone get the fuck indoors we gonna shoot some shit” order and done their best. Montana and those places aren’t heavily populated at all.
Working hypothese 2: The Chinese shaped the balloon as a d*ck so it appears blurred in all videos and nobody can figure out what is that, or describe its shape. Invisible ninja genius move.
Using the same reasoning, a gun bullet should also be faster with higher altitude, hence have a longer range.
Assuming this was a drone, the "car-sized", "unmanned", "not a balloon", "not maneuverable" (!?), the operating altitude (40k feet / 13 km), and use of AIM9X (IR/heat seeking) should narrow down the possible drones.
Also, one thing I pondered: why F22 instead of F35 to shoot it down? Maybe a question of availability. But, at least publically the F35 operating ceiling is lower than F22, so I was thinking whether the object was in reality higher than the publically known F35 operating ceiling.
It could be an unmanned glider with some solar power. Several companies make those. Including Google, which was considering them as data relays back around 2016.
Which I have to say is where we may start to see a tragic lack of creativity unfolding on China's part.
They're unmanned and ambient, yet are clearly a provocation and give China an information advantage over where it would be without the balloons, and in a geopolitical sense it asserts Chinese ascendency. At the same time, it's hard for the US or other powers to figure out an appropriate response. Very similar to Russian/NK/Chinese/Israeli/American state-sponsored hacking groups--it continually forces the adversary to ask "where do we draw a line, and what consequences do we give for crossing it?"
> "It really got to them," recalls Dr. William Schneider, [former] undersecretary of state for military assistance and technology, who saw classified "after-action reports" that indicated U.S. flight activity. "They didn't know what it all meant. A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace, and other radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and return home."[1]
Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23758/video-appears-to...
Sounds a lot like parenting a toddler.
The USA is already on their doorsteps by having bases in almost all the neighboring countries, and conducting operational freedom exercises by flying and sailing through disputed areas.
Quite possibly. Minor provocations that by themselves are too inconsequential to warrant a response, nothing to start a war over, but incrementally provokes the target into lashing out in some way that is advantageous for China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_salami_slicing_strateg...
(Other countries do it too, of course..)
That last one getting noticed by the public probably had something to do with it.
Unfortunately, tensions are already quite high in China, due to state media being the only source of propaganda. The state and most tv-watchers have therefore decided that America is the cause of all their problems.
The Biden White House seems happy to play along, justifying more equipment from top donors Raytheon and Boeing.
The balloon panic helpfully distracts from the massive freight derailment chemical disaster currently spewing vinyl chloride into the atmosphere over Ohio.
Like if they are watching the launch and then waiting 2 days, the adversary isn't learning the whole story.
The full capabilities of satellite and sonar are hidden, but they're easily past the "good enough" line for any relevant military activities.
Legal Eagle actually covers that detail a bit in their coverage of the prior balloon.
So can geosynchronous satellites, but they're much further away from earth.
If you knew that secret you'd understand what to look for in order to unveil the next secret.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident
I've got a fanciful notion that the "foo fighters" are living creatures. The Air Force supposedly gave someone some of the excretions to examine and they found "unearthly isotopes" or some such.
I figure something that lives, say, a couple hundred miles down inside a planet might only even notice the surface phenomenon that are the most dense, energetic, and anomalous (certainly at first), and pay more attention to those things. How might such beings interact with us and could we discern their efforts as such if we wanted?
Aren't civilian flights more a threat for the planet? Not suggesting to shoot them, just to stop them
from linked article https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government...
My pull quotes:
> The Pentagon downed an unidentified object over Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden, according to U.S. officials.
> Mr. Kirby said the object was traveling at 40,000 feet. He said officials were describing it as an object because that was the best description they had of it.
> A recovery effort on the debris will be made, Mr. Kirby said. He said the object was “roughly the size of a small car” — much smaller than the spy balloon that had a payload the size of multiple buses.
"They shoot down our surveillance balloons, giving us precedent to shoot down their high altitude drone planes or satellites in the future."
The general premise is this:
U.S. adversaries realized they couldn't compete with the U.S. on spending. So they got creative and loaded the equivalent of Pringles cans up with a bunch of sensors, hooked them up to either a balloons or relatively cheap unmanned aircraft, and sent them through U.S. airspace to collect intelligence. They'd occasionally get caught (perhaps on purpose) and cause a base to scramble to intercept. The proposed theory on why they'd get caught on purpose was to gather up intelligence on what a response would be flying through the airspace.
It's possible they've been doing this for more than a decade and the military has gotten caught with egg on it's face having ignored the reports for so long.
So from that POV, one may start to think about a quick buildup of momentum in the general direction of F-22s shooting things down, or air combat, or just combat, etc.
Not so much to predict the future, as to ideate and prepare frames of mind for potential changes in circumstance.
Seems to be particularly likely to happen in panicky situations, or when someone has something to prove. E.g., the Soviet-American tensions surrounding an American spy plane, a RC-135, were a factor in the Soviets shooting down KAL-007 (they thought it was the RC-135) [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
[0] https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-shoots-down-unknown-flyi...
And airliners have transponders and flight plans. If a civilian plane stopped talking to ATC, the Air Force is likely already involved.
Additionally, we’re not on a high-alert war footing like during the Cold War. As far as I know, we don’t have hostile military aircraft routinely flying with transponders off on our coasts.
Even if we did, I’m pretty sure the larger military radar systems that would be used to track this stuff can read transponders and separate out which plane is which.
On the first balloon we failed to acquire enough helium, and ended up "floating" the balloon in the upper atmosphere overnight. Our prediction system kept indicating it was going to land in Africa.
Funnily enough I just launched this competition about 2 hours ago so nobody has entered yet.
To get a free entry you need to get 5 likes on a post.
>According to the Pentagon, the object first moved into U.S. airspace late Thursday and was tracked by U.S. Northern Command as it moved over the skies of northeastern Alaska, staying consistently at about 12,000 meters (40,000 feet).
>Pentagon and White House officials said U.S. planes approached the object, said to be the size of a small car, and determined that no human was in it before one of two F-22 fighter jets sent on an intercept course shot it from the skies with an AIM-9x Sidewinder missile.
…
>"This was an object ... it wasn't an aircraft per se,” Ryder said, briefing Pentagon reporters. “We have no further details about the object at this time, including any description of its capabilities, purpose or origin.”
…
>“We do expect to be able to recover the debris since it fell on our territorial space but on what we believe is frozen water,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said during a separate White House briefing. “We’re hopeful that we’ll be successful and then we can learn a little bit more about it."
It may not be exactly what they have in mind, but I think it's the right way to think about the question - they are engineering scenarios which work to their advantage no matter how the US responds. US shoots them down? Play outraged. US leaves them alone? US looks weak.
We need to move past this whole "why use spy balloons when we have satellites" thing. Even Scott Manley repeated it.
The USA has what are likely the most capable surveillance satellites in the world yet the USA still employs spy planes.
For one thing, RF signals suffer from path loss over distance. The difference is >140km in distance. That's a lot of signal loss. Another factor is loiter time.
The balloon floated about 100x closer to the surface than a satellite in low-Earth orbit and travelled much slower, making it potentially easier to collect signals/images.
It's more likely a coordinated event to get people to talk about something other than covid and the last 3 disastrous years. Lets be honest here, neither china nor the US wants people asking uncomfortable questions about covid. Now that the covid era appears to be over, what better way to distract people than "war".
They did the same thing with 9/11. Uncomfortable questions about 9/11 was overshadowed by war and iraqi "wmds". Eventually people forget or move on.
Call me a cynic, but china ends covid lockdowns and all of a sudden we get "surveillance" balloons. And the entire media apparatus has us talking about silly balloons instead of wondering what the last 3 years of covid was about. My guess was a staged "terrorist" attack somewhere to transition us from the covid news cycle. Turns out we got balloons instead. Whatever works in the end.
at least in the US, I don't think anyone is really interested in covid anymore enough to require any distraction. Maybe that argument makes sense in China.
Adversaries spend 100k for a military grade drone. What do shoot it down with? A 1M dollar Patriot? Whatever you choose will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone.
Israel’s Iron Dome has the same issue. It costs massively more for defense than attack.
And the cost of the plane is also complex. This pilot/aircraft renewed some quals on this flight, reducing training needs. The aircraft was likely going flying that day anyway. So the net cost of the operation was likely minimal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
Turns out we like to spend gobs of money even when we're just chasing our shadow.
While some of the videos have explanation, I would kindly encourage you to look at this with more curiosity.
e.g. The video that got debunked as Bokeh (accurately) is still someone on that ship attempting to video a craft that they see nearby them. It's only viewers of the video who get confused and believe that the bokeh effect is what they are supposed to be seeing in the video.
He also completely ignores the eyewitness testimony and radar data.
He’s one of the least credible debunkers you can find.
Plus many of the more prominent base-personnel sightings land quite a bit far from that particular ballpark. Take a look into the Rendlesham Forest incident for example.
The problem with "summing up UFO contact" is that the variety of encounters is absolutely insane. Compare Rendlesham to Varginha, etc.
It really starts to bring out the "inter" in the more colorful inter-dimensional contact theories.
Funny, though tbh it seems like there are cheaper ways
to cause the US to spend gobs of cash.
My best understanding based on watching a lot of retired military personnel is that isolated incidents cost the US almost exactly zero additional dollars.
The way an Air Force base works is this: there is a budget. This covers the (considerable) costs of the base itself, the personnel, the equipment, and so on.
Active-duty fighter pilots must fly a certain number of hours per month to remain on active status. Just like any other demanding activity (sports, competitive gaming, whatever) their skills require constant maintenance. These flying hours are of course budgeted. (This will be true of literally any air force; it's not specifically a USAF thing)
Things like these incident responses, and even things like flyovers before sporting events, come out of those predetermined budgeted flying hours that they were going to fly anyway. So isolated incidents like these don't really increase USAF expenses in a meaningful way. Those $400K/ea missiles will presumably need to be replenished but this must be compared to the USAF's total budget of $180 billion.
To put any strain whatsoever on the US's capabilities our foes would need to start sending large amounts of drones: essentially, a saturation attack. More than we can comfortably respond to. Which is of course... extremely possible.
But as long as these remain isolated incidents we can surmise that our adversary's goal is not "cost the US a bunch of money."
Yeah, the Mig-25 / F-15 thing comes to mind. Soviets develop a super secret jet, very big, very fast.. it must be very impressive fighter jet! America is spooked so tons of resources are poured into the F-15 to make the absolute best possible air superiority fighter jet they can, to counter this new Soviet threat.
Except then it turns out that the Mig-25 was never a fighter jet, it was an interceptor that was very fast in a straight line but not much more. So the US built an incredible air superiority fighter to counter a phantom of a jet that never really existed in the way America thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle#F...
Come to think of it, maybe China is going low-tech with balloons to avoid this dynamic?
The proposed theory on why they'd get caught on
purpose was to gather up intelligence on what a
response would be flying through the airspace.
Accordingly, it seems highly possible that the countries targeted by such incursions (a) realize their response time is being tested (b) fuzz/delay their responses by some certain amount of time in order to frustrate such efforts.
This was probably not entirely groundbreaking news to anybody including China. Everybody knows that the published specs of military hardware are intentionally distorted in one direction or another.
The F-15's known ceiling is 65K feet for example. So it's not surprising that newer fighters can match that.
>According to Smith, it was CIA’s responsibility by statute to coordinate the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts.
https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cias-role-in-t...
First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level. Then explain why our completely wrong models of physics still work as well as they do. Then explain the Fermi Paradox in light of the apparent existence of easy faster than light/antigravity technology and confirmation of the existence of other technologically advanced civilizations in the universe. Then I'll be willing to concede the still practically nil chance of any of those aliens actually being here given the vast size of the observable universe as being likely enough to consider.
Don't get me wrong, I want it to be true. I desperately want it to be true. I've been fascinated by UFOlogy and sightings and the related folklore for decades. I want some fate for humanity other than us slowly choking to death on our own poison, alone on this island in the midst of vast seas of infinity. It's just that the bar for proving any other possibility is higher than a third-hand account of someone seeing a light in the sky that moved really fast.
We don’t have the bandwidth to basically dog fight thousands of aircraft simultaneously!! We’ll go bankrupt!
The defense industry will go ritch, though
We're at risk of bankruptcy because our debt is 31 trillion dollars and in June we won't even be able to issue securities to continue bullshitting ourselves out of cutting spending. Welcome to America, we're broke because we spent all our money on guns rather than infrastructure, healthcare and education.
This sentiment is completely untrue. Defense is approximately 12% of US government spending, healthcare approximately 24%, education approximately 15%, and social security roughly 20%. Infrastructure is harder to categorize, but the truth is that the US government spends at least 4x more on healthcare, education and welfare (combined) than defense.
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2023USrn_...
The fact that this 12% of government spending amounts to the largest military on earth is in large part a consequence of the fact that the US is really, enormously wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world, has a fairly large population, and still has a larger GDP per capita than any other large or even medium-sized country.
The 80's were much, much worse. If we were ever going to go bankrupt, it was in the early Clinton administration due to the Reagan/Bush spending boom. We got through just fine. Those bonds were all paid off decades ago.
Be very very very cautious any time someone comes at you with this kind of hyperbole about federal debt. They're selling you something.
I'm surprised this seems to be such a common point. Why is it believed that it was cheap?
It's also possible whomever is running this operation doesn't care about their staff at all and they just use hydrogen.
Edit: Chinese propaganda video of attack on Guam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBOho1AOKYY
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36598/chinese-air-forc...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-builds-mockups-us-...
Xi has made it very clear he would like to invade Taiwan, and soon. If Ukraine was going well for Russia, he may have already invaded.
And cannot belief statesman proclaiming that now everywhere :( War should always be seen as evitable, at least that belief needs to hold up til the last second.. and even further. But who am I...
In the 80s, it felt like you might find yourself vaporized or living in a nuclear apocalypse hellscape at any moment, likely due to a misunderstanding or malfunction.
These days it seems like we're more likely to just be in a long-term adversarial position with likely proxy wars.
I feel like the WWII and Cold War eras were more about existence, whereas these days the aggression is more about how much more bounty do we want. Look at the Chinese land grabs around disputed islands versus Japan. They don't need them, but it would be nice to have them.
The whole thing just seems like a bunch of unnecessary, ego-driven B.S. on every side.
I had lots of nightmares about seeing a bright orange flash in the window back in my youth. I've had a few recently.
If they decide to take out the Steel Works in Gary, I'll be toast. If not, fallout is something that can be avoided by staying inside, away from exterior walls and the roof, and waiting it out for at least a week.
I've had Potassium Iodide in stock for my child's use since the Fukushima meltdown... I bought a new bottle when Ukraine kicked off.
I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis — to borrow from Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie Wag the Dog, "This? THIS is NOTH-ing!"
The Cold War was a lot scarier than what we have now. In the back of your mind, every day you thought that today could be the day we all get wiped out.
I'm not too worried about Russia or China starting anything nuclear these days. Russia invade Scandinavia? Sure. China invade Taiwan? Absolutely. But I'm not worried that they'll nuke someone else from a distance.
Information and and disinformation travels so much faster and so much more thoroughly these days that it’s hard to compare.
For example, in the 80s, I couldn’t even tell you what Russia looked like through photographs. there was just very little available information.
There was a big gray outline of the Soviet union on my high school history class wall, and that was about it. I had seen a few pictures of the Kremlin …the onion domes and what not. And maybe I had seen one photo of Brezhnev shown every so often on the news, but that was about it.
It’s amazing how much things have changed as far as the wealth of information is concerned.
So I’m not really answering your question, but the sheer magnitude of the lack of information … let’s say about four decades ago… is something that I really don’t see pointed out much so I thought you might find it interesting.
So in the 80s, the Soviet union was worrisome for the most part. But mostly it was just the blackest of black boxes to me.
Edits: sorry… numerous typos…typing on treadmill.
This is nothing.
https://www.newsweek.com/mysterious-green-lasers-hawaii-chin...
I don't think we know enough about this "unknown object" to definitively say what it could and couldn't do.
The signal was transmitted in binary and just happened to be ASCII encoded English. Odd that a ship from 8100 transmitted data in an archaic dialect of an ancient language using an ancient encoding that just happened to match the language and encoding in widespread use during this guys lifetime.
Having a hard time with this.
During the siege of Yorktown in 1862, Union General Fitz Porter decided to do some surveillance using only one rope on an observation balloon. The rope snapped and he drifted over enemy lines. Confederates tried to shoot him down but missed. Eventually the wind sent him back over Union lines.
Balloons were used in WW1 as observation posts (ushering in wide-spread use of parachutes) and in WW2 for both observation and area over-flight denial.
By May 1945, Japan sent almost 10,000 armed balloons across the pacific. They were largely ineffective, however, they did kill a pregnant mother and five children who discovered a downed balloon in Bly, Oregon. 285 Japanese balloons were recovered, one as far east as Texas.
My assumption is that sensationalized UAPs are illusions, but the reason the military keeps putting out press releases about them is not because they're aliens. The first reason is that there are unidentified aircraft entering US airspace. They're likely cheap attempts at both intelligence collecting and psychological warfare on behalf of US adversaries. Drones are easily mass produced and a nation flying a handful of drones in US airspace can easily send hundreds/thousands/millions because of how cheap and easy they are to make and deploy.
Since drones can vary in size and be flown in a ton of different conditions/patterns/scenarios/etc, they might be hard to detect. The mainstreaming of the "UAP mystery" narrative encourages civilians to look for, record and massively platform adversarial drones should they be seen by people, but go undetected by systems that are looking for them. The narrative also neuters whatever attempt at intimidation or psyops adversaries are waging against the public/military/etc. "Our militaries can send whatever we want into your airspace and there's nothing you can do about it" can be a powerful message that was effectively neutered with "maybe they're aliens lol".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/05/11/us-nav...
Regardless, liminal warfare will continue to give rise to this kind of scenario so we should try not to outsmart ourselves in a desperate bid to be right
Depends on the domain. Underestimation could lead to perceptions of weakness and opportunity for attack. Even if you are prepared for attack, not getting attacked in the first place is better than getting attacked at all.
Same goes for positioning in negotiation.
Are you sure that's what really happened, or did a group of people in the Air Force want an air superiority fighter and use the Mig-25 as the excuse?
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wireless-hacks/05960055...
It makes more sense when you consider how many programs we have—a pretty high percentage of our population is covered by public spending, and—crucially—the ones who are are in some cases among the most expensive to care for.
1) Medicare (old or disabled)
2) Medicaid (poor)
3) Tricare or whatever they call it now, since I think the name changed (active and IIRC retired-with-full-benefits military and their spouses and kids, at least for the active-duty ones, can't recall if that part carries over in retirement)
4) VA (military veterans, including those with short terms of service)
5) Federal employees
6) State employees
7) County employees
8) City employees
9) Cops and firefighters and such, if not covered under any of the above.
10) School district employees (there are lots of these)
Not all of these are cases in which all the spending is covered by public money, but some of them are, and in other cases a great deal of it is. Also I've probably missed some programs.
[EDIT] Oh and that's not counting public money that goes to private companies but ends up paying for healthcare for those companies' employees and families, who are employed expressly to work on those publicly-funded projects—I can see arguments either way for counting that, depends on what you're trying to understand.
Keeping people immersed in a complex narrative is a lot easier than one would think, but it is also a very tricky balancing act that can get upset by the weirdest things.
Personally, I'm all for it - anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my books, plus it makes for good entertainment.
while everything you say may be true, it is not broadly known
anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western
public from their dream state is a good thing in my books
What is the "dream state" that these incursions might shatter?
It's even worse: even when people do ingest available information, they very often do it erroneously, forming a misunderstanding (without realizing it).
> Most people haven't really nerded out on the details of how pilots maintain combat readiness and how budgets work, but uh, your point?
Broadly: humanity runs mostly on untrue stories, and does not realize it (actually, there's a "it's even worse' here too).
>> anything that has the potential to wake up the American/Western public from their dream state is a good thing in my books
> I'm not exactly the biggest fan of any government, but what specifically are you talking about here?
Simplistically: people's understanding and trust in their government (abstract and concrete), and what is going on in general is highly erroneous, and not only do they not realize this, they believe the opposite. I consider this to be an extremely dangerous state of affairs, despite it having always been the case and "we're doing ok" nonetheless. Things often go "ok" for a very long time, and then suddenly start going "not ok", often without an obvious trigger.
> What is the "dream state" that these incursions might shatter?
The phenomena resulting from the combination of consciousness + culture + time, both individually and collectively.
You might be best served by filing this under "woo woo" though...but then again, you also might not - there's only one way to (possibly) find out!
I have never seen a counter-analysis. Can you explain why you think this? It's not common knowledge that the observations of Mick West has been "debunked"...at least not as commonly known or easy to find as the Mick West analysis or the source videos.
Regardless I think the simplest counter argument is that if that were really the case, you'd see these damn things on every flight facing the sun and people would know to ignore them. Lens flares also don't show up on radar and on pilot's eyes. No crazy analysis needed.
That's unnecessarily pejorative. Presenting something as evidence, requires some amount of rigor. This is why an in-depth analysis is valued. Presenting as strong a case as possible for either side, is the method by which we can best decide on what is known.
> Regardless I think the simplest counter argument is that if that were really the case, you'd see these damn things on every flight facing the sun and people would know to ignore them
I don't believe that's a counter-argument, as it applies to both conclusions. A unique coincidence does not imply it's common. ie If the gimbal video was a UFO, you'd see these damn things on every flight, etc.
> Lens flares also don't show up on radar and on pilot's eyes.
Mick West's analysis video does not contend that the object is only a lens flare, but an object with a lens flare (or lens artifact) overlaying it. There is no dispute that the pilots saw a group of objects with targeting information on a singular physical object from the video source.
You know, it isn't (physically) necessary to choose anything.
> First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level.
Why does everything have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
> Don't get me wrong, I want it to be true.
I dunno man, the opposite seems to be the case - are you not at least suffering from motivated reasoning, to some degree?
> I want some fate for humanity other than us slowly choking to death on our own poison, alone on this island in the midst of vast seas of infinity.
Me too!! Consider this idea: our cultural tendency to form beliefs absent of proof (therefore: faith based, which is usually considered a big no no) causes substantial harm, and our tendency to write it off as "that's just people" or (begrudgingly) as "well, of course I'm only expressing my opinion, that's what everyone is always doing" are not proper common sense and reasonableness, but rather are emergent behaviors that cause humanity to be permanently stuck in a local maxima (on certain dimensions, while ongoing successes in specific domains like science, engineering, computing, etc make it appear like we have our shit substantially together comprehensively).
Of course, this is speculation - but what if it is actually true to a non-trivial degree?
Sure, but we're here on a discussion forum so not committing to any point of view seems counterproductive.
>Why does everything have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
Because the laws of physics as we understand them, even quantum mechanics, don't allow for things like antigravity or faster than light travel or propagation of information. Theoretical warp-drive models like the Alcubierre drive, or wormholes, or other solutions either require different spacetimes or exotic matter or negative energy or some kind of fudge factor that makes it not work within our universe. Special relativity says it's impossible. Quantum mechanics says it's impossible.
If it turns out that FTL travel is possible, it means we live in a universe without causality, where the relationship between cause and effect is arbitrary. If it turns out to be not only possible but also trivial, to the point that you can fit a warp drive onto something the size of a plane, Then E=MC^2 turns out to be meaningless. Since everything we observe about the universe, at every scale, suggests causality exists and that E=MC^2 holds, we can't be wrong about those without being wrong about everything.
But hey, maybe we are. Great. Show me some equations then. That's all I'm asking. Prove it's wrong, first. Show me a working anti-gravity drive or a warp drive, built by humans, or something that can be tested independently, peer reviewed and verified. Faster than light teleportation. Something.
But all I'm expected to hang my hat on is rumors, folklore and videos for which mundane explanations exist.
>I dunno man, the opposite seems to be the case - are you not at least suffering from motivated reasoning, to some degree?
Everyone suffers from motivated reasoning, that's how reason works. I'm just saying my personal bar for proof is higher than those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics as a prior to making the UFO argument semantically trivial.
Rather than believe that we're exactly as ignorant now - even though we can measure gravitational waves and the cosmic microwave background and use quantum tunneling in our microchips and GPS has to take relativistic time dilation into account - as we were thousands of years ago when we believed the stars were inscribed on crystal spheres, I believe our models of the universe have become more accurate over time, and that as a result, fundamental paradigm shifts become less and less likely.
That doesn't mean I don't want to believe, it just means I don't also believe in magical thinking. And I'm far from the only skeptic who wants to believe out there. Eyewitness testimony is interesting, video is interesting, but it isn't enough. At least not for me.
But if you think of it from the perspective of what is actually true, what do you come up with?
Also: assuming you're a programmer/techie type: is this the same epistemic methodology you use when writing code?
Given the possibilities of an alien spacecraft observed on Earth violating the known laws of physics, or some error on the part of the observer, I'm going with the latter every time.
>>> First, prove that everything we know about physics is wrong at a fundamental, irreconcilable level.
>> Why does everything[!] have to be wrong, in an irreconcilable manner?
> Because the laws of physics as we understand them, even quantum mechanics, don't allow for things like antigravity or faster than light travel or propagation of information. Theoretical warp-drive models like the Alcubierre drive, or wormholes, or other solutions either require different spacetimes or exotic matter or negative energy or some kind of fudge factor that makes it not work within our universe. Special relativity says it's impossible.
Here you are only describing that some things that we believe would have to be incorrect, and you do not even attempt to substantiate the "irreconcilable" part, as far as I can tell.
> Quantum mechanics says it's impossible.
Saying something is true does not necessarily mean it is true, but it certainly often causes it to appear true.
> If it turns out that FTL travel is possible, it means we live in a universe without causality, where the relationship between cause and effect is arbitrary.
Why?
> If it turns out to be not only possible but also trivial, to the point that you can fit a warp drive onto something the size of a plane, Then E=MC^2 turns out to be meaningless. Since everything we observe about the universe, at every scale, suggests causality exists and that E=MC^2 holds, we can't be wrong about those without being wrong about everything.
Why (in general, and also specifically related to everything having to be wrong)?
> But hey, maybe we are. Great. Show me some equations then.
The burden of proof lies with the person making an assertion.
> Prove it's wrong, first. Show me a working anti-gravity drive or a warp drive, built by humans, or something that can be tested independently, peer reviewed and verified. Faster than light teleportation. Something.
First: prove to me, and yourself, that you are correct.
> But all I'm expected to hang my hat on is rumors, folklore and videos for which mundane explanations exist.
Who is it that is expecting you to do that here, and how did you acquire that knowledge?
> Everyone suffers from motivated reasoning...
Do all people suffer from it, always? And where people do suffer from it, do they suffer from it equally?
Also: where have you acquired this comprehensive knowledge?
> that's how reason works.
Not really.
> I'm just saying my personal bar for proof is higher than those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics as a prior to making the UFO argument semantically trivial.
To me, your personal bar for proof seems essentially/abstractly identical to most people's: if it seems true, it is true.
Also: how sure are you of "those willing to accept that we simply don't understand anything about physics"? (Emphasis mine.)
> Rather than believe that we're exactly as ignorant now - even though we can measure gravitational waves and the cosmic microwave background and use quantum tunneling in our microchips and GPS has to take relativistic time dilation into account - as we were thousands of years ago when we believed the stars were inscribed on crystal spheres, I believe our models of the universe have become more accurate over time, and that as a result, fundamental paradigm shifts become less and less likely.
How about a third option: the second option from your false dichotomy, combined with believing that despite our substantial accomplishments, we remain substantially ignorant. I mean, is this not fairly obvious if one just looks around at the world? Do you think that what we have going on is all that we could have accomplished, had we been paying closer attention and trying harder?
> That doesn't mean I don't want to believe, it just means I don't also believe in magical thinking.
Do you believe that not believing in magical thinking makes one invulnerable to it?
> And I'm far from the only skeptic who wants to believe out there. Eyewitness testimony is interesting, video is interesting, but it isn't enough. At least not for me.
Tautologically, what is enough for you (and everyone else) is what's enough. A way to think about it: are our individual and collective epistemic & logical standards adequate? I am extremely concerned that they are not, and for evidence I would open with climate change (as the first card I'd play, from a infinite deck).
To be fair though, I am kinda picking on you. You are surely a very nice and well-intentioned person, a product of the environment you were raised in. Though, conflating causality with justification is also a risky maneuver, especially when practiced at massive scale....but then, now I'm kinda doing it again lol. Also, I'm partially joking.
And we’re terrible at all three vs nations that spend fractions less…
IMHO, people/news are blowing it out of proportion.
If the boss of FedEx said we're going to end up in a war with China, how much does that say about what defense contractors are doing?
What it was probably actually about was shocking the troops assigned to AMC, establishing an important mission and raising morale, and declaring business as usual was no longer acceptable.
Gotta be creative to make people excited about moving supplies.
See also: every ridiculous statement by every startup CEO in a bubble, ever
> Minihan said in the memo that because both Taiwan and the U.S. will have presidential elections in 2024, the U.S. will be “distracted,” and Chinese President Xi Jinping will have an opportunity to move on Taiwan.
Careful re-analysis of old radar data, perhaps.
It’s alarming many leaped to suggest LEO satellites obviate the need for balloons/drones/spy planes because it really isn’t true; there are some things for which a proper resolution and capture is simply only possibly with proximity, at least more than a satellite has. In fact that’s why we still use U-2 spy planes (upgraded) and did for the balloon.
Given the number of unidentified drone/balloon incursions reported by the Pentagon in the last few years near ships and air force bases I do wonder what’s been exposed about our radars and or datalinks. It also doesn’t necessarily matter that the data is encrypted (a weird refrain I saw) because the operating frequencies and behavior of the emitters on our aircraft, ships is in and of itself valuable information.
I’m sure that NORAD doesn’t use their most advanced sensor platforms in such a circumstance, but there could be all kinds of interesting close range data to collect on the aircraft and weapons systems used to respond.
Is that what happened in this case? Did you initially try Googling yourself, only to encounter multiple definitions of "UAP" which seemed irrelevant to the article? Given the search results that came up for me, as well as the extent to which UAPs have been in the news lately, that would be surprising.
> Rude. And ineffective.
My goal is not to be rude. But I put about as much effort into answering your question as you did into asking it. You would have gotten your answer faster, while creating less work for others, if you had simply typed your question into Google instead of the HN comments field.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can even answer your own question, and make that your comment. Something like "OP's comment was the first time I had encountered the acronym 'UAP'. After a Google search, I found it means 'unidentified aerial phenomena'. In case others were wondering."
If I remember correctly, the F-22 Raptor is the champ in terms of highest ratio of service required per hour of flight (40:1).
The F-35 clocks in at 4-8 hours of service per hour flown (6:1).
One example from the article linked below:
USMIL budgeted $39m dollars for the blue angels to fly 69 days in one year. It's up to 11 F/A-18 Hornets at once, but in my experience they only fly for a couple of minutes for a show.
Plus, who knows what kind of math games the military plays in terms of budget reporting. Operating commercial aircraft is already very expensive, and military craft are an order of magnitude moreso.
The planes are beautiful, though <3, and remain operationally effective.
https://www.inverse.com/article/33711-military-flyover-costs...
Edit: Good points @elif and sandworm101, thank you!
It's not like they leave their best toys in the toybox all year.
Less thrilled about it as someone who happened to be on a flight transiting nearby airspace last night, and who is familiar with incidents like KAL 007.
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/32...
Of course, that could be a lie too!
EDIT: Wikipedia claims the service ceiling of the F-22 is 65k feet anyways.
1. Will I be able to stay in power? (Related: Will my populace support this war? Will my economy keep functioning?)
2. Will I end the conflict with more power / prestige / resources? (Related: How expensive will the conflict be in blood and treasure?)
Most of the things the West are doing over Ukraine are to make the "Related" answers less palatable. Very few people are calculating enough to climb to power, then risk everything on a gamble with bad odds.
If China gets serious about Kinmen and Matsu, then everyone should start worrying.
Additionally, tensions are escalating with China and the economy seems unstable. I sincerely hope that reasonable minds will be able to prevent any further escalation of these conflicts, but there is always the possibility of an unintentional incident that could lead to an expansion of these wars.
If bankrupting Israel by forcing them to expend Iron Dome interceptors is Hezbollah's plan, it obviously isn't working.
One such system operated by Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EL/M-2084
Makes it a lot easier to get funding when requested too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lockheed_Martin_F...
He covers the "Tic-Tac" and "Go Fast" videos too, just not in that specific video. Like in this one, where he explains how the "Go Fast" video isn't actually even a fast object zipping just above the water, but rather an object flying at roughly wind-speed at about 12000 feet.
The lens flare was caused by the camera looking at the ass end of another jet. The radar saw the other jet.
For even one of these videos to have a mundane explanation that should have been obvious to the Navy upon investigation, I think that discredits the lot. Either the Navy couldn't figure it out themselves (which seems highly improbable), or for some reason the Navy is deliberately misleading the public, or at the very least allowing some of their personnel to mislead the public and playing coy about it. I think this is what's happening.
But why?
My guess is that there's an internal report describing the FLIR system and how the FLIR system works and how the internal workings of the FLIR system caused the visual phenomena. But that's all classified.
So they did the absolute minimum the Executive branch required them to do and left it up to the White House Press Secretary to explain it to the American public.
To me it reeks of the brass not wanting to have any more of their time wasted. There's a great scene in The Wire where the metro police, the harbor police, the state police, and the county sheriff arguing that a string of murders don't fall under their jurisdiction; it's your problem you deal with it etc, subverting the trope of the local cops fighting with the federal/state police (usually the FBI) that "this is my jurisdiction" or whatever. I think this is the same. The Executive branch (I'm 80% sure it was Trump, coulda been Obama, too lazy to look it up) demanded that they do a thing they didn't want to do, and then they dragged their feet and did the bare minimum, and in the process made a mess that now the Office of the White House now needs to clean up. (which they didn't, because they don't want to explain a classified sensor system in a public briefing either)
As for the other reports/hearings, it seems like it’s driven more by Congress. For example: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelima...
> This preliminary report is provided by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in response to the provision in Senate Report 116-233, accompanying the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2021, that the DNI, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF), is to submit an intelligence assessment of the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the progress the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding this threat.
And amusingly we ran into the helium issue because our initial vendor didn't have any available, forcing us to buy a bunch of smaller, lower pressure containers from a party store. We miscalculated, assuming there wouldn't be anything left when the pressure equalized..
I'd like to hear more about this perspective- is this based solely on the fact that they haven't done it before or something else?
> it took until the middle of the 2010s
Here's a Chinese general openly threatening war with Japan in 2012:
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/chinese-general-pre...
The Taiwan Strait crisis of the '90s was before my time but it'd be interesting to know how bellicose the rhetoric got back then.
China imports 66%-75% of its oil. That would drop dramatically in a hot war, as oil imports via the South China Sea would likely be blocked. This would require any imports to sail around Australia, which would likely be stopped by the US.
Russia would happily sell China oil, but it doesn't produce nearly enough to cover the gap.
No oil, no military. No oil, no economy.
I do not think oil is such a big problem. China import is 10mln barrels while Russia exports is 5mln barrels, Kazakhstan is 1.2mln barrels. I am sure they can transport Iranian oil if needed. What will also happen is that Russia will buy oil on international market to resell to China. There is no infrastructure now to transport that much oil but it can be built surprisingly fast. Germany just demonstrated that it's possible to built LNG terminal in six months. If you ignore property rights and all enviromental regulation and enlist military you can built trans-asia pipeline in a few months. China can also import oil thru Vietnam.
Edit: Taiwan crisis wasn't great, but it ended when the US sailed an aircraft carrier through Strait of Taiwan. So while it wasn't great, it wasn't like they were threatening war against US.
We changed the url from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/politics/unidentified-... to what appears to be the article with most recent updates (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34745940 - thanks yabones!).
If it's cheap enough, there will probably be youtubers and tiktokers buying them en-masse just "for the lulz".
If this is an actual spy object you also need to factor in the cost of the surveillance. How much money does the military lose due to the sensitive information being lost. Or how much does the military need to spend to regain strategic advantage? That probably costs more than a F22 flight and a missile.
Obviously this depends on the number of objects that one needs to respond to. Cheap surveillance devices can obviously overwhelm this and then you have a war of attrition.
In the example of the article we need to consider the cost of flights being downed (which they down when considering the cost of hitting an object and downing an aircraft. Quite expensive). Flights being canceled and/or delayed is expensive.
Then 100. Then 1000.
By all means, let the US military shoot as many as they want.
Let the propagandists call it "a great military display".
Then, just like the West is doing with Ukraine when it comes to artillery rounds, watch the Western arsenal of A2A missiles drop to critical levels that they won't be able to rebuild with any sort of expediency.
It should be a lesson the US learned a thousand times over, but we just saw them do it again: the aeronautical equivalent of bombing a farmer with an AK-47 and calling it a "victory".
Anyone stupid enough to do it without following FAA rules (assuming launched in the US) is going to find themselves in some serious trouble.
Technically whoever launched this thing saved us money on the target. So the cost was negative.
Think about how much healthcare, food, housing, we are burning up with this nonsense.
It does indeed sound like something like that. The size of a small car would mean a tiny payload as those balloons get huge in the stratosphere. One thing I wonder is why it didn't burst. Weather balloons are meant to burst as soon as they get that high.
The chinese balloon, and I quote the article: "was like two or three buses". That thing was big.
"Not maneuverable" and "previous balloon" so is it fair to assume that it's a balloon as well?
Good. Right?
This increases the risk of being killed by a drone for everybody, even if is as collateral damage. If international laws can be so easily violated for free, why do we need them? Do we really want a world without rules?
Edit - this video isn't loading for me, but I've just watched what I assume is the same briefing on Twitter. They have a pilot assessment that the object was unmanned - but they can't tell us balloon, missile, drone? I'm not understanding how a pilot could see the thing, communicate ("I'm looking at an unmanned object, should I shoot?") and somehow not convey what the object was. I appreciate the speed of this briefing, but I would prefer they wait at least until they know what they are saying. In the briefing below the guy says NORAD has been tracking it for a day - and they still don't know what it is? I guess that rules out missile, at least.
No details beyond this yet due to classification restrictions.
Research med kit and laser too.
Air to air kills since entered service:
2005-2022: 0
2023: 2
Reminds me of George Carlin's joke: shellshock becomes battle fatigue becomes PTSD. Don't make it better, change the name!
In this case, though, I imagine the difficulty (and associated prestige) is considerable less... :)
The US would deorbit everything China ever put into space if they started shooting at satellites. Those satellites are part of the strategic triad and would be a direct threat to the US nuclear umbrella. The AEGIS systems off the Chinese coast would take care of any attempts to add satellites back into space.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23942463
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970609
You could fly a flashing cow in this times and nobody would stop looking down at their phones.
These are the same clowns that have claimed to have extant physical samples of extraterrestrial materials, but only offered them to independent examination once, which didn't go well supporting their claims, and have paraded an endless number of excuses since while doubling down on claims it offers incontrovertible proof.
There's no big mystery here, these are relatively unsophisticated conspiracy nuts that got above average traction. That's it.
- Drones can be the size of small cars
- 40K feet is not a problem for a drone
In such a case it'd be more about the class / properties of the drone...
If the above hypothesis is true, it means the U.S. is trying to rile up / ready / etc. the population to view China as a threat.
Kind of ironic given the intense scrutiny and fears prior to Trump getting elected that he would trigger a depression or war because of his isolationist attitude about China specifically.
But more importantly what does that mean now? Will it justify laws passed to further isolate China?
Is it to take advantage of a training opportunity? I would think less advanced aircraft may be more cost effective to operate.
This one was considerably lower. But IIRC Alaska is a common station location for f-22s so may have just been coincidence.
* Flying at 40k feet altitude
* Size of a small car
* Not manned
* Didn't appear to be maneuverable
* Shot down with an AIM-9X heatseaking missile
What could that be? Also, seems premature to assume China again when Russia is far closer to the Alaskan coast and just as antagonistic.
There was a consequence -- we shot it down.
> That is the irreversible change it signifies, imo.
It's not irreversible. Additional consequences can be initiated at any time.
Diplomatic or economic retribution of some kind would be a consequence.
Were you hoping the US would react without thinking through their options?
Personally, I want a considered, measured response. We can always add sanctions or start a nuclear war later. Right now it seems important to understand what happened, discuss with other leaders, and figure out a smart response.
But yeah a lot of people just want to escalate every situation.
The US was an original signatory of the Meter Convention. Our customary units have been based on metric units since 1893. Our food packaging features metric units. Our scientists use metric units. Our school children learn the metric system. Our military uses the metric system. Our cars are built with metric fasteners.
Changing informal habits takes decades and has questionable benefit. Canada tried it in the 70s and is going to take another generation at least to fully convert for informal use.
If that unit causes you any pain, @throwaway4good, here is a translator perhaps to more native units:
https://www.converttobananas.com/
1 car == about 26 bananas.
Improvement?
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103
"One of the most unusual military actions of World War II came in the form of Japanese balloon bombs, or “Fugos,” directed at the mainland United States. Starting in 1944, the Japanese military constructed and launched over 9,000 high-altitude balloons, each loaded with nearly 50 pounds of anti-personnel and incendiary explosives. Amazingly, these unmanned balloons originated from over 5,000 miles away in the Japanese home islands. After being launched, the specially designed hydrogen balloons would ascend to an altitude of 30,000 feet and ride the jet stream across the Pacific Ocean to the mainland United States. Their bombs were triggered to drop after the three-day journey was complete—hopefully over a city or wooded region that would catch fire.
Nearly 350 of the bombs actually made it across the Pacific, and several were intercepted or shot down by the U.S. military. From 1944 to 1945, balloon bombs were spotted in more than 15 states—some as far east as Michigan and Iowa. The only fatalities came from a single incident in Oregon, where a pregnant woman and five children were killed in an explosion after coming across one of the downed balloons. Their deaths are considered the only combat casualties to occur on U.S. soil during World War II."
https://www.history.com/news/5-attacks-on-u-s-soil-during-wo...
The airforce then bombed hydrogen generating facilities nearby the suspected launch sites.
Section offense and defense
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/battle-of-attu-60-years.htm
Much like this story, many Japanese planners did not appreciate the vast size of the American west. A hundred random firebombs were basically irrelevant compared to the many thousands of yearly lighting strikes that also regularly cause fires. Who knows how many Japanese balloons are out there hanging from some tree undiscovered.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-sep-11-me-then1...
The site of the people that found the remains of the plane is online and has a nice old-times look (with frames):
But who knows really, maybe the US govt is better at hiding its secrets than I give it credit for.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/rHGWmyyb9nI?feature=share
There was something about fear being the mind-killer. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam to the Red Telephone please - paging the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam!
User dTal is on the same train of thought as I was regarding the "not maneuverable" part.
What other type of object exists which can fly and yet does not have the ability to maneuver?
Most balloons are not equipped to actively change their bouyancy.
I assume a weather balloon can handle those issues though. [0]
(I'm British and so not a US tax payer, just a spectator, but would argue the same here)
It's a crying shame the F-22 production line was shut down, so it's great to see it performing well.
(Speaking as a DCS sim pilot with a long time interest in military aviation).
Air to air missiles cost on the order of $300,000.00 weather balloons cost and order of magnitude less.
It might be possible to shoot down balloons with unguided rockets. It depends on how close the fighter can get and how accurate the rockets are. Rockets are super cheap.
The problem is what can you fly that has a cannon and can reach those altitudes. Apparently only the F22 and F15 could, and that was their very limit.
The shoot-downs used AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles (per TFA). We also don’t know the ceiling altitude of the F-22 since it’s classified.
However, the F-22 can carry the AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile (AMRAAM) which has a disclosed engagement altitude of 70,000 feet - capable of engaging even higher altitude balloons than these. As I understand it, the Extended Range AMRAAM-ER is believed to have an engagement ceiling of 85,000 feet.
Meanwhile, the US also has the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system, an air defense system capable of engaging targets at very high altitude. While its capabilities are classified, its max engagement altitude is at least 490,000 ft. or 93 miles … though using it to attack a balloon is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. THAAD is mobile and could be deployed in response to a high altitude balloon threat (some of which can fly 120,000 ft.)
This seems like conjecture. Is there any reliable data on how much said balloon cost?
It's conjecture for me to presume the sky is blue without looking out of my window, but it's a safe bet on days with good weather.
Unless this balloon -- or whatever it was -- was diamond-bedazzled and platinum-plated and filled with alien technology it's a safe bet that it was a fair amount cheaper to produce/launch/maintain than sortieing one of the most expensive and exclusive modern aircraft in the world and shooting off a missile that costs 600k/ea -- and that's not even considering collateral costs associated to the action.
See also:
F-22 Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon Off Carolinas With Missile (Updated) https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-22-shoots-down-chine...
U-2 Spy Planes Snooped On Chinese Surveillance Balloon https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/u-2-spy-planes-snooped...
F-22 Shoots Down “Object” Flying High Over Alaskan Waters https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-22-shoots-down-new-o...
The Soviets Built Bespoke Balloon-Killer Planes During The Cold War https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/the-soviets-built-besp...
With a missile, the pilot can shoot from several miles out and never has to fly directly at the target. So, it's much safer.
The airforce would have thousands of missiles. Assuming they have some FIFO system they would use missiles heading for expiry.
Not sure how pilot training goes but would assume they have training hours requirement. If a mission covers those hours all the better for more real experience on what they would be flying anyway.
Anyway I don't know this as an expert, but logically seems costs are largely sunk regardless of an infrequent balloon incident.
The world will run out of helium before the US runs out of missiles.
Probably fits nicely in the training budget.
In your comment, you say "it means the US is trying to rile up / ready /etc" the population. That's not the only plausible (or even most likely) scenario though.
The publishing of this info could indeed be for that purpose. Or it could be for something else, such as to influence the currently-ongoing negotiations with other players (eg European) at a critical time.
Or it could be for some other purpose again, that's neither of those. :)
The hypothesis above is roughly connected to this wider idea about international relations that the 'big ideas' happen behind closed doors, and there is a second 'public' face. Here the balloon type incidents leak to the public strategically while other incidents go unmentioned except in private or in some esoteric place.
If true, why would the US press and mainstream media be headlining it when of course it'll enrage the population. It was a choice to publicize it and a choice for our political parties to point fingers at each other over it, as part of the typical spin cycle.
If so, the previous balloon was a pretty fuckin' stupid way to do that, since letting it wander all over the US was obviously going to be used by political adversaries to attack the administration (justly or unjustly, doesn't matter).
But regardless of what the actual facts on the ground (er, in the sky) might be, or what party A says about party B, the media and online commentariat are framing them within a narrative of aggressive threats from China, and of war being imminent, possibly even necessary. Our consent is clearly being manufactured for something.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-mill...
EDIT: found my astonished comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22694150
That said... from a national security perspective - it is still the right call to be wary of devices that are likely compromised by another nation. You should just be assuming that if you didn't make them locally (as in under your own territorial control) they are compromised during production. For everyone. Everyone should be acting with that as the default.
Same way if i found out the UK was spying on me as an American. I wouldnt be happy, but its not the threat China is.
But Cisco in China is gathering intelligence on and setting up network to disable, chinese infrastructure.
I live in the west and happen to like our infrastructure. So while I don't think Cisco should be doing what its doing, I would completely ban Chinese gear from the infrastructure be it backbone or consumer level.
Having 0 air to air kills for an interceptor is a good thing in the way that it's doing its job as a deterrent and enemies don't even try.
See Space Development Agency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
That's what China has been most upset about at United Nations.
That happened last month in November 2022. It mysteriously destroyed itself.
Weird thing to downvote folks
i am sam. i am sam. sam i am. that sam-i-am! that sam-i-am! i do not like that sam-i-am!
I actually think we’re somewhat lucky in that most of us can immediately grok a measurement in either system when we see one online.
Canadian metrication follows the rest of the British empire which was centuries behind the rest of the world (including the US) in metrication.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Station_Kurt
German sub drops off a team in 1943 to install a weather station on Newfoundland.
Wasnt discovered until 35 years later only because some scholar found reference to it in the German archives.
Labrador, where’s the station was located, is a lot less densely populated than Newfoundland.
This seems like what amounts to a training program to me, unless a lot more start coming.
That’s all before bringing up that the person I quoted claimed off-hand that it’s an order of magnitude difference. They’re probably rather similar in cost.
Anything needing bus-sized solar array gonna have some fancy equipment on board. All of that needs engineering to not fail at the temperature range up above and code to make it do what is needed
I've seen this claim often, but I'm still finding it hard to picture. I realize it's not going to "pop like a balloon", but days or weeks seems incredibly long. The weight of the payload causes at least some pressure on at least the top of the balloon, right?
Is the issue just the size of the hole versus total volume? Or maybe it's that the bouyancy increases as it starts to descend? Do you have a link that would make this clearer? I searched a little, but what I found were just assertions of fact.
I did find the 1998 story of the failed Canadian attempt to shoot down a balloon with fighter jets firing bullets (https://apnews.com/article/268893fddde785d029d5a51b136951eb). This makes me inclined to believe the conclusion, but it's still not intuitive to me.
Their leaders, and the people representing them during negotiations.
> If true, why would the US press and mainstream media be headlining it when of course it'll enrage the population.
No idea. Possibly a side effect, maybe wanted, maybe not.
Potentially so "the population" gets onboard with whatever the outcome of the EU negotiations are.
In this the american football field seems more "reliable" as a unit of measure, seemingly fixed to 91.44 x 48.8 m or 100 yards x 160 feet + the borders that may vary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football_field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch
Personally I "convert" a "football field" to half an hectare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare
or 100 x 50 m.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/attacks-i...
We interdict Iranian missiles to terrorist groups about once a week.
Iran's stated goal is to forcibly convert the world to their preferred brand of theocratic rule - the "women are very literally property" kind of theocratic rule.
10 mm = 1 cm
10 cm = 1 dm
10 dm = 1 m
1000 m = 1 km
Makes math and scaling up and down a lot easier than having to remember that
12 in = 1 ft
3 ft = 1 yd
5280 ft = 1 mi
1760 yd = 1 mi
How cool would that be? I'd suggest to use a factor that is the easiest to multiply by, in order to simplify operations. I guess the optimal factor would be 10. What is easier to multiply or divide by than 10, right?
I think I need to patent this bright idea. It's amazing nobody has thought about it before.
The raw space pizza footage even has the Gopro's audio from the little speaker looping the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfGvVjEN1u8
After it fell back to earth, the local police in New Jersey were nonplussed and thought it might have been a terrorist device. The interview with Anamanaguchi on the topic is well done, but didn't surface after some quick DuckDuckGoing.
I think the vast majority of people on this site understand that balloons get "bigger" when rising in altitude. (quotes because the balloon is the same size but looks deflated closer to the ground)
The trick is to remember that it is like the sql NULL. No unidentified object matches any other unidentified object. It is only once you identify the object can you claim that it is of extra terrestrial origin not before. And once you identify the object it is no longer a UFO.
I mean, those are IR missiles and such a balloon wouldn't have a great signature.
I assume that “$” is a oops?
We'll all have bigger problems if that day comes than the pesky billion or two it will cost from the US $773B DoD budget.
People in the Olympics are the best athletes in the world. And I bet world class athletes need a big pool to compete in.
That gives you a pretty decent sense of the scale of an Olympic sized swimming pool without ever having seen one.
For example, I made a comment about a similar comparison in a post here on HN a while ago because their example was simply ridiculous [0]. The author in that article referenced the volume of a large body of water as being "about 240 billion Olympic sized pools". I believe that they could've used almost anything else that most people would identify as being very large as a reference but instead they chose a large swimming pool. If an item is used as a reference the scale of the reference and the object should be chosen such that the reader could quickly understand that while one may be big, the other is bigger by some easily pictured amount.
Clearly a baloon is so hard to dispose target that making sure the aircraft indeed can be up to this task is worth any money!
Science and engineering all use metric in the US. Automative all moved to metric voluntarily. I know construction is still imperial.
Its mostly consumer facing things that still imperial. And if you go to Canada its pretty common to see $/lb printed along side $/kg. People often talk about height in feet and inches, weight in pounds.
Its really not that different.
Machinists still do a lot of work in inches.
https://www.weather.gov/bmx/kidscorner_weatherballoons#:~:te....
> Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide! This includes 92 released by the National Weather Service in the US and its territories.
It was tested in 2008 to destroy failed recon satellite.
Epotential = mgh = 420,000m * 9.8 m/s^2 * mass ~= 4,200,000 m^2/s^2 * mass
To reach that altitude, ignoring air resistance, you'd need kinetic energy, provided by the formula:
Ekinetic = (mv^2)/2
Solving for v, we get v = sqrt(8,400,000 m^2/s^2) ~= 2.900 m/s ~= Mach 9
That's the minimum muzzle velocity you need to send a projectile up into the ISS's path (Add a few more mach numbers due to air resistance).
It's certainly easier than getting into orbit, a single-stage missile could do it without any trouble.
No one said the press was being controlled.
In all seriousness, I have no idea.
Thank heavens pot is legal in so many states now
Seriously, the concept of weighing the cost of an action vs the cost of inaction was not... exactly invented by Eve Online players. The entire point of warfare is to make waging war more expensive to your opponent than to yourself, whether in terms of men, materiel, dollars, or popular support. And the concept of a Pyrrhic victory is likely as old as war itself – even our very term for it derives from a battle fought 2300 years ago!
Also wonder how effective it is. Especially nowadays in such an interconnected world where products, and especially sand, could be coming from the opposite side of the globe
Sand with a variety of both of those can look much more varied, under a microscope, than you might imagine.
Or maybe the US government chooses to fund all areas of research, like mineral surveys, in the hopes they can call on a field of knowledge repository to use in a war machine.
I'd like to believe there is a soil library that staff were doing microscope slide searches late into the night.
Machines last for decades and can’t practically support multiple standards. There’s an enormous amount of inertia in such a system.
Similarly aviation uses feet for altitude in most countries.
(One could make the same argument for the U.S., but that’s not the open question at the moment.)
(Resident Alien)
Airplane on autopilot with dead/sleeping pilot
Control surface problem (e.g. 737 elevator jackscrew excursion scenario)
(Just thinking out loud/adding ideas, not contradicting).
Multiple cities all at once.
Hell, don't even tell airline about it and send it at cargo, it is only checked at departure port (AFAIK).
Same really with cargo containers by ship.
"Should we just send one to every American?" Psaki shot back, her voice dripping with sarcasm. [0]
Twitter dragged her so hard it was/wasn't even funny, and the next day the White House did just that. Thanks lady!
[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/12/21/anger-jen-psaki-helped-a...
...probably around zero dollars. It would be different if it was above say active war zone but in this case it is almost as far from potential warzone as possible so probably absolutely nothing.
It would be naive to believe that military information is only important when bullets are being fired. This would be like saying that your class textbook is only useful when you're taking a test. (A cold war is like you have an upcoming test)
So now our leaders are trigger happy about shooting down any potential new balloons in order to try and save face while looking tough. Meanwhile, I’m sure plenty of Chinese officials are feeling pretty smug at the reaction they were able to cause and pride that they can present themselves as a capable challenger to American hegemony.
I agree that a ballon over Alaska is unlikely to gain much intelligence, but with the right equipment at the right place you can get a lot of useful insights into your enemy's capabilities even at peacetime.
There's a school of thought that says the US won the cold war by convincing the Soviets to bankrupt themselves trying to keep up with the arms race. Now I don't necessarily think that fully explains things, but I do think there's a lot more politics to a "spy" device than the actual photographs, especially outside the context of a hot war.
More to the point, if one side keeps secrets and another doesn't, the secret keepers have an advantage. Its a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, where secrecy is defection.
Even if the ceiling of the F-22 is substantially higher than 40,000 ft. (which I think is plausible), and is close enough to effectively engage these balloons, then I doubt that the Air Force would choose to make the tradeoff of disclosing the F-22’s performance capabilities to adversaries in order to save the cost of an AIM-9; the F-22’s performance is a secret and classified.
If we were faced with defending against a large number of high-flying objects then the reasoning might be different.
[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
600m is likely the default battle-zero, but it is nowhere near the maximum range of a 30mm round.
I haven’t seen info regarding detecting tracking unused nuclear weapons using sensors. Do you have a source?
Edit: some more info. 881 Aleuts were gathered up, endured slave labor, and 118 died from lack of food, warmth or medical care. All extremely preventable as is evidenced by the camp just 30 miles away of around 700 Nazi POWs. All 700 returned home alive and in good health. Historian Stan Cohen even wrote, "All in all, the German imprisonment in Alaska was quite pleasant."
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/21/516277507...
The last two paragraphs are a pathetic conclusion from the governement.
Perhaps with the exception of fahrenheit most people here will know what you mean if you use units like feet and will often even prefer thinking in feet over metres for certain things. Personally I default to feet for something like height or a floorplan, although I can think in metres quite easily too.
But sailboat length is traditionally measured in feet. Same for aircraft altitude.
So sailors and aviators are more likely to use feet (and nautical miles) as measurement.
It's now defined in reference to SI meter, but it originates as 1/60th of a degree of latitude.
But I couldn't even tell you how many cm to an inch. I just know how big a 40" TV or a 28" bike is.
The main exception? MacBooks. Those will be labeled e.g. "14 inch" (14インチ).
At all other times, your incentive is to make the biggest lie you can get away with.
The local 50 meter pool here is always filled with people young and old (and on no way elite) that just swim. You don’t need to be very fit to be able to swim 50 meters without a break.
It‘s a different kind of swimming compared to just hanging around and having fun, sure, but it always seems to be quite in demand when I see pools like that.
(The swimming complex close to me has two Olympic size swimming pools and one of those is open to the public, the other is used by actual elite athletes but also kids who are learning to swim. There is also a small 12.5 meter pool with adjustable depth to learn swimming and for aqua fitness courses.)
The NCAA only started to “recommend” that universities, when building new facilities, to make their competition pools Olympic sized in 1996.
Remember that Olympic pools are deep - usually a minimum of 2.15 meters - and don’t usually have ledges for assisting with egress. They are really dangerous. A person that gets into distress, especially near the middle, will find it nearly impossible to self-rescue. Without attentive guards/coaches/onlookers they are nearly certain to drown.
I treat myself to an Olympic swim every now and then, even though it means driving to the next city and expensive parking. Highly recommend it!
Although the X is an all aspect missile, the parameters would still be quite different.
I think this is would all be firmly in the "not public domain" bucket of details though, as I haven't seen much of this modelled in DCS.
(I suppose they could also have used eg a radar guided AIM-120, but they are primarily for BVR, more expensive at ~$1.1, and far, far more scope for erroneous target locking, so why risk it when the 9X obviously gets the job done. Again, from the point of view of an armchair - or a rig to be precise - sim pilot. I claim no credentials beyond this interest).
Only naive people would think so. 9/11 was 21 years ago. Where have you been?
> America is the one who brazenly flies and spies over other countries, that doesn’t happen to us.
Satellites have been used by all major powers since pretty much forever. As for other means, do you have insights of those brazen efforts by the US?
> So now our leaders are trigger happy about shooting down any potential new balloons in order to try and save face while looking tough
Lazy thinking. You don’t know if this latest incident was in response to the event last week or there was something specific that prompted them to shoot it down. They didn’t even say it was Chinese. Strange unknown flying objects are not new of course. They following article discussed something happened in 2019, and was disclosed a year ago:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/video-of-mysterious-dr...
Syria comes to mind. Russia was invited by Syrian government [0]. US was not, but still invading country and airspace [1].
———
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_interventio...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in...
And if you think that I didn't say anything… I suggest re-reading my comment.
But my dad, who worked on (British) military IFF stuff, did have a story about an ICBM early warning system (I think American) that determined an attack was inbound because someone forgot about the Moon.
So ... not even a fixed length but one that varies by latitude
(given the Earth is an oblate spheroid | rotated ellipsoid | flattened sphere)
that's something on the order of 20 metres of sloppiness by my reckoning.
…which is why the French Navy (who originally defined the unit) switched it to be SI derived in 1906 and the international standard was updated in 1929.
The deception methods that were applied were truly remarkable, they used decoy tanks and sent people out to imprint fake tank tracks into fields.
They also understood IR and would shield real troops while leaving coal to burn in empty pillboxes and bunkers
There was also the shoot down of the F-117A by what was effectively a rag-tag group of AA who planned the operation and pulled it off
A lot of what was learned in the earlier Bosnia campaign was applied later in '99 - not just the use of decoys and microwaves, but using spotters to track the regular flight paths of incoming fighters and intermittently switching radar off and on (this is how Scott O'Grady was shot down in his F16)
Gen. Wesley Clark was a huge advocate of the doctrine that you could win wars with air power alone and never have to sacrifice ground troops - that thinking changed after '99
[0] note that I in no way condone the overall goal of what took place there and those same family members would be the first to tell you it was horrific
Delusions about winning wars with only air power are very close to a century old now. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia ) But they seem hugely appealing to parts of human psychology - so "proved horribly wrong, yet again" doesn't do much to cure them.
That said - Gen. Clark was a career Army officer, not Air Force. And "we don't need an army to win" ideas have, ah, limited appeal to career Army folks. My read is that he was a good officer, stuck under a political leader (Pres. Bill Clinton) extremely reluctant to commit ground forces. Clark knew not to contradict his boss, and did what he could within the imposed constraints.
It puts success entirely in the hands of the best funded. You can simply simulate the war and arrive at the outcome.
So as a member of the “losing” side, how do you respond? You only have one choice to win: escalate. Escalate to terrorism, NBC weapons, etc.
Both sides have to bleed in a fair-ish fight to keep wars roughly conventional.
Microwave ovens frequency is 2.45GHz with a narrow spectrum because microwave ovens are under strict RF regulation, like anything that is an intentional or unintentional radiator.
Microwave oven magnetron's power is miserable compared with any AAD radar. Plus, microwave oven is not designed to emit RF energy when it's opened. So, emitted power will be even less.
https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/1254/2017/01/tang264.pdf
The mesh of the door can be simply cut out, or the interlock microswitches pressed down with dowels or tape.
The article you linked shows that there’s frequency drift over time with a microwave, and that different magnetrons have different spectrum profiles.
ECM gear in US warplanes can classify a system based off its emissions and people think they're fooled by a microwave oven?
People often say "nuke" when referring to using a microwave.
I tried growing marijuana with CFL lights in my dorm room. When the cops showed up, I ate the biggest of the 3 plants, a few inches tall, right in front of them.
S band is used for target acquisition a whole lot.
> and are not modulated in any way resembling a missile fire control system
Yup, but when you're deciding whether or not to launch a HARM it's better safe than sorry. In turn, asymmetries accrue.
Indeed, you can't really afford to ignore the microwave oven S-band emitter, because you could use even a literal microwave oven for illumination with passive radar techniques for target acquisition pretty well.
Point being - even if the emissions doesn't match anything you have on record (except possibly a microwave) - would you risk a $100M airplane on it being a decoy?
"I'm not going to start Third World War for you," - https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/aug/02/balkans3
"...One of Clark's most debated decisions during his SACEUR command was his attempted operation to attack Russian troops at Pristina International Airport, immediately after the end of the Kosovo War in June 1999..." "https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/6hjuss/kos..."
"Incident at Pristina Airport" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Pristina_airport
If you wanna bomb someone you don't get to complain when they turn around and engage with whatever means they have.
I’m from a country where we would be able to launch massive manned and unmanned aerial attacks at an enemy country. And yet I still think that we should be careful to avoid such an asymmetrical use of force.
Using aerial attacks as part of a wider strategy, fine. But if the enemy sees absolutely no possibility of winning a war conventionally, as you say “you don’t get to complain”.
China has a Dictator, a total absence of a Justice System, total surveillance and censorship, and large swaths of the population of some regions in concentration camps, a large number of individual dedicated to holding in place that apparatus.
Meanwhile you're free to walk down the street and tell the US President he's an idiot and you're not going anywhere without the entire US media knowing about it if they want to put public eyes on it for the sake of your own rights. There are laws, all sorts of controls, Judicial oversight, yada yada.
As if that even needs to be said.
However, in whatever state you live in, your local government is far and away the most likely to care about your habits, to want to convince you to vote against your interests, to accuse you based on flimsy evidence etc. A foreign country poses nowhere near the same risk, even if it's the worse regime in history and you live in the best.
I think we have to accept that these intelligence agencies are effectively untouchable and here to stay. With that in mind I think it boils down to: who can do the most harm by spying on you:
- a country thousands of miles away which you probably have no connection to and don't visit
- the country you live in
I said in another comment but it bears repeating - I don't want anyone spying on me, but I am losing no sleep over Chinese intelligence, I am an extremely uninteresting target for them. If a Chinese agent is watching me die repeatedly in Elden Ring, looking at webcam footage of me gawping at my monitor while I scroll HN, or checking the stupid FB messages I send to my friends they'll realise pretty quickly I'm not worth the bandwidth or the storage space. A local agency might be interested in those FB messages, especially if I was politically active, vocally against the government and I was trying to organize protests or strike action.
> but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them
If we learned anything from the last half-century, it's that this predicate is just comically wrong.
Why? What has china done that's worse? Did they nuke a country? Wipe out entire races of people? Did those nasty chinese invade dozens of countries? There is nothing inherent in a western democracy that makes it good.
> Our intelligence agencies are out of control but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them in than China.
There are no mechanisms for controlling any intelligence agencies. All intelligence agencies around the world are state actors. No law applies to them. Ask the people the intelligence agencies murdered, drugged, experimented on, etc.
Unless you are chinese, you are far better off being "spied on" by the chinese than a western democracy because the chinese don't have any jurisdiction over you. This is all common sense. China isn't going to arrest you and put you in jail. A western democracy will though.
* unless perhaps you were applying for military clearance
Our government is so powerful, you can't even make a dent.
I mean I don't want anyone spying on me, but I'm less worried about China targetting me than the Czech government (where I live) or the UK one (where I'm from).
> far more reason to be interested in you than China ever would
I think this is naive. Psyops are real and are made more effective with knowledge of personal preference and habits. It is likely that Chinese intelligence has targeted literally everyone on the Internet in some way.
The shoot down also involved the SAM radar operator violating his own SOP by leaving his radar on longer than they normally do, and firing at a non-PID contact, because they _knew_ the aircraft was going to be there.
Complacency kills.
Wait, what? If they saw the aircraft take off, they definitely knew where it came from, no?
What is that, exactly?
This is the article I read about this some time ago; good detail here! They quote complacency as a factor, arrogance would be another good word - in grossly underestimating the sheer determination on the other side.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/an-in-depth-analysis-of-how-...
Citation needed. How much value does intimate knowledge of individual preference and habit have for psyops? How much of an advantage does China gain when they convince a democratic electorate that their actions are no big deal?
If China had it's way, they would not 'invade' Taiwan either, we would wake up one day and realize the process happened over 20 years and that Taiwan is under CCP control.
And that Vietnam, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, Korea are also subject to arbitrary power of the CCP a little bit like Lukashenko in Belarus is a stooge of Putin.
That's what the surveillance is for.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/15/china_shenzhen_zhenhu...
3 big deals happened at Nokia. They sold the devices business to MS. They acquired the Siemens half of Nokia Siemens Networks. They acquired Alcatel Lucent (French Alcatel and American descendant of Bell Lucent) and merged it with what was NSN. They sell every component of the modern networking stack from 5g antennas to undersea cables.
Outside China, though, Ericsson now claims to serve more operators than just about any other vendor. Ekholm today put Ericsson's share of the market for radio access network (RAN) products at 39%, excluding China, telling analysts it has grown from just 33% when he took over in 2017. Fifty percent of 5G traffic outside China runs over Ericsson, he said, while 16 of the world's top 20 operators are using its 5G core.
Unless you’re Chinese. Now that we know China has secret police stations all round the world.
Democracy. Vote. Free expression. Tell the people what is happening and why privacy is important.
> Were either reined in at all after the Snowden leaks,
Yes.
> or was it business as usual after things calmed down a bit?
No.
> I think we have to accept that these intelligence agencies are effectively untouchable and here to stay.
We do not. They are not. Apathy is toxic. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good to do nothing.
> With that in mind I think it boils down to: who can do the most harm by spying on you: - a country thousands of miles away which you probably have no connection to and don't visit - the country you live in
China is our single greatest geopolitical adversary. Psyops are real. The ability to influence the public opinion of a geopolitical adversary supports the Chinese salami slicer strategy. It’s reinforced by understanding their adversaries electorate.
> I said in another comment but it bears repeating - I don't want anyone spying on me,
Same.
> but I am losing no sleep over Chinese intelligence,
You probably should be.
> I am an extremely uninteresting target for them.
We are all interesting targets. They may not assassinate, extort, or disappear you in the middle of the night but they can change your opinions without you even noticing.
> If a Chinese agent is watching me die repeatedly in Elden Ring, looking at webcam footage of me gawping at my monitor while I scroll HN, or checking the stupid FB messages I send to my friends they'll realise pretty quickly I'm not worth the bandwidth or the storage space.
Why would an individual agent need to look at anything? People aren’t interesting. We’re all basically the same. But if they know you play Elden Ring and browse HN they can tailor an effective message to you and everyone like you.
> A local agency might be interested in those FB messages, especially if I was politically active, vocally against the government and I was trying to organize protests or strike action.
Yes and that’s an illegal abuse of power. One that can be remedied in a court of law.
edit: you deleted your reply before I could post mine. It seemed like I pissed you off a bit so I was trying to clarify and apologise a bit. Here's what I wrote:
> You did though
Well I said that they're untouchable and was then trying to clarify that we should still be pretty pissed off about it. I wrote the original at half-past midnight, it was a little clumsily worded. But you do have to accept that they are currently nearly untouchable and effectively operate outside the law and that right now you can do very little at all about what data is being collected on you.
> I don’t think that is a favorable interpretation
I don't think it is unfavourable at all, the only thing you've really stated there about why you'd be worried about any Chinese intelligence is that they can manipulate your beliefs without your knowing. You have to admit that there's at least a bit of a similarity with the hysteria around communist brainwashing.
I'm sorry for causing any offence, I know it's not nice to feel like someone's accusing you of being a fervent nationalist (not my intent) but as an outsider your last couple of comments do have that air of "America is just ... better" and contained a slightly naive belief that you'd have any kind of hope taking on NSA or any other big TLA. I'll grant that what China would do with the data it collects on its citizens is likely far more severe than what the USA would (e.g. I don't think you're gonna be locked up for posting a an anti-Biden meme in USA, but sharing Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh in China will get you in a lot of hot water) so if that's what you meant then fair enough. I still don't think Chinese spying should be higher up on your list of worries than NSA spying - and in the grand scheme of things there are things you can worry about that you can actually change.
Give me an example of Americans who have been materially harmed by those agencies? And what was the damage?
Have Americans been oppressed, slandered for political gain, wrongly imprisoned, illegally targeted by police because of NSA activity?
I think it's doubtful for anything other than a few incidents; the proportionality of these tradeoffs does matter as these agencies do actually go after bad people. Like people selling sanctioned gear to Russia, money laundering, sex trafficking, etc. you know - 'bad things'.
I don't see professors disappearing because they said something on campus Biden didn't like.
Naively, one might say "ah but that ended in 1971!" - but let me put it this way: if you spotted a cockroach in your house, you'd be a fool to think that was the only one.
Also: the oversight/limits you're protected by could disappear some day, they're imaginary and socially constructed. Sure, you trust our current government to handle these powers responsibly, (though you really shouldn't, see above), but why are you so confident you can trust _tomorrow's_ government?
This is the straw man of all straw mans.
You could have a Totalitarian Overlord someday, after all it's all 'socially constructed'. You'd have a million other, worse problems on your hands.
That your making that argument and can't provide examples of specific harm despite widespread powers of the state is problematic.
Creeping authoritarianism is a general problem, not an NSA problem.
~ Senator Chuck Schumer on why publicly criticizing the intelligence community is a poor choice for a politician
# Covert & 'illegal' projects by FBI aimed at infiltrating, influencing, disrupting, and discrediting various political organizations
# Existence of the program was discovered after activists stole documents from an FBI office and leaked them to media
# Targets included: antiwar activists, feminist organizations, civil rights activists (ie MLK), environmentalists, animal rights activists, communist party, KKK, American Indian activists, far right groups
# Methods included:
* Breaking into homes, violent beatings, vandalism
* Assassination
* Smear campaigns
* Fabricating evidence, false testimony (leading to wrongful imprisonment and activist intimidation)
* Fabricating letters to discredit/humiliate people or erode their relationships, or cause conflict (leading to death in many cases)
I don't actually need to talk about hypotheticals, the US government has already abused these things to squish people or ideas it didn't like. The point about creeping authoritarianism is a secondary argument. My point is that sometimes it's better for certain tools/institutions not to exist at all.
I think we ought to treat surveillance technologies with the same type of reverence we treat nuclear tech (though maybe not to the same magnitude). Nuclear technology isn't intrinsically a bad thing: the problem is that, combined with human tendencies (tribalism, territorialism, etc), a conflict that previously would've resulted in a mere x deaths could now result in x^y deaths, or even total annihilation.
You agree that creeping authoritarianism is a general problem. Do you think it might just be in the nature of human societies? If so, wouldn't it be prudent to carefully consider what tools and institutions we leave lying around, in case the worst happens? We all accept this with nukes - there was some kind of effort at nuclear disarmament (though not enough). We should do the same for surveillance.
I'm only trying to convince you that we need to be very cautious, skeptical, and distrustful of things like the NSA, because the US govt cannot be trusted with it now, and it might get even worse in the future. What hypothetical evidence would someone have to show you, to change your mind?
You do understand it'd be very appropriate for the FBI to infiltrate such groups, as they indicating they are currently doing now with 'far right' and other radical groups, especially those with wepaons.
Your characterization of 'assasination' is problematic. I wouldn't say Fred Hampton was so much assassinated. He and his buddies were involved in a shooting which killed police, very shortly thereafter the cops planned the raid to arrest them and two Panthers were killed. It seems that Fred was killed in cold blood. While this is obviously 'very illegal' - this is not the US Justice Department targetting someone, this is local Chicago/Oakland cops form of extra-judicial retribution for the gang killing of their colleagues. Again, not right, but something totally different what might be implied from 'assassination'. They killed cops, the cops got out of line and got revenge.
Very notably - these acts caused national attention and there was an enormous reaction. Information was made public, there was public and political furor, transparency etc..
All of this is some time ago, when central oversight was harder, when the violence was much higher, and where groups of various kinds (aka local cops, local Panther groups) would act independently from central control.
And in the grand scheme of 300 Million poeple, it's relatively small stuff.
Also, it's a good reason for not having a single power like J Edgar Hoover in charge of anything.
Finally, it should be noted that this was the start of the cold war, and the Soviets were absolutely funding totalitarian uprising around the world. Stalin direclty controlled 17% of the Bundestag during the Weimar. While obvoiusly not sufficient to cause 'The Big Bad Man' to rise, without it, 'The Big Bad Man' likely would have never existed. Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua ... so much of the world ... was perturbed by very real, direct intervention from Soviet backed 'Marxist-Lenninist' groups. The 'Red Scare' was not a fantasty. It might have been overstated on some level, but it was a material 'existential' problem.
The same, continued tactics by Russians have landed us in an 'almost war' for the West in Ukraine today. Russian spies are all over Germany, Putin has corrupted so many people in Europe including literally former German Chancellors, Austrian, Hungarian leaders - the FBI exists so that this does not happen so brazenly in the the US and allied nations.
The FBI will step out of line again, just like all groups do, and there should be constant vigilance, but given the total independence of other branches, I'm not worried at all. There will always be whistleblowers, eventual transparency etc..
These people are usually naively driven by some kind of decontextualized political mindset, where the equate the arbitrary actions of some state far away, in same context as local governance, and a big dose of ultra liberal (classical) utopianism.
'The NSA is like Xi because they can spy on me'.
It's like saying 'Biden is as bad as Xi because ultimately the Police in the USA could arrest me and put me in prison for 70 years'.
It's barely theoretically true and it makes little sense to compare systems that have oversight and independent judiciary with those controlled by a Dictator.
It's good that the US has the ability to know which Russian stooges are giving money to would-be US presidents, or heading his presidential campaign. And good that the US can trace large sums of money floating out of FTX's Bahamian bank account into the hands of whoever, especially politicians.
If a student protester dissappears in the night because they made an online post critical of the governor - well, all of us will hear about it a few hours later.
(And also bringing up how no state actor only does bad things to bad people in order to dispute the typical “if you’ve got nothing to hide/have done no wrong then you have nothing to worry about”.)
ISIS is worse than a mall cop with a bully streak, but it makes more sense for me to worry about that mall cop while shopping at the mall than to worry about ISIS.