Deflated: A NatSec musing on the Chinese Balloon
The flight of a Chinese Weather balloon over the US dominated the news for the past week. On Saturday, 4 February 2023 a USAF fighter jet shot it down.
What is the big deal with this? Why should I care?
In this post I’ll share some opinions, based on personal experience at the intersection of military aviation and National Security. Why should you care about those ? I’ll leave that up to you.
What happened?
A Chinese “Weather” Balloon transited the US for approximately a week. It appears to be a high-altitude vehicle, ostensibly for weather observations. The Chinese government apologized for the event, stating it was an “accident” that the balloon became unmoored, hitched a ride on the jet stream, and traveled over the continental US and Canada.
What REALLY happened?
This isn’t a weather balloon. A normal weather balloon goes up, deploys sensors via parachute, then returns to earth, by puncturing or damaging the balloon itself. The range of such weather balloons in in the tens of miles. The Chinese balloon was 3 times the size of a normal weather balloon, has been airborne over a week, and traveled thousands of miles in challenging atmospheric conditions.
What do I think happened?
This balloon was a test. The Chinese government (or military, or both, since they are the same thing) are testing methods for getting payloads over the continental US. If you recall, the jet stream dipped to the midwestern states, bringing dangerously cold weather as far south as Texas. This provides a great opportunity to float something which would “hitch a ride” on that jet stream and overfly key bases (Malmstrom AFB, MT, Offutt AFB, NE, Whiteman AFB MO). It is important to note that the path of the balloon varied somewhat from the jet stream or air currents below it. I assume the balloon had capability to “steer” by adjusting its altitude to reach different levels of the atmosphere (with wind currents in different directions) and thus adjust its ground track. Google (Alphabet) famously did that for its “Loon” program some years ago. This approach provides limited steering, but even a dozen miles of change would be enough. That would be the most important finding: a balloon which can adjust its ground track autonomously from half a world away, based on off-board weather data, likely from existing NOAA wind maps.
Why did the Chinese do it?
Many reasons. I suspect they did it to see how the US reacted. The Chinese might want to know how the US shoots down something over its landmass. If so, they would have likely pre-positioned someone in the path of the vehicle overland, hoping to gain insight into what weapons were used to shoot down the balloon. The US waited until the balloon was over Atlantic territorial waters, where Chinese surveillance activity might be more easily monitored, and where the debris can be easily recovered — instead of finding the remains of a school bus dropped from ten miles. Spoiler alert: had we shot it over land, there wouldn’t be much left to analyze, even if it didn’t fall on someone’s backyard — or someone’s schoolyard. Whatever did survive would’ve likely been picked up by assets already in place. Yes, Virginia, we are in a quiet global war.
Why didn’t we shoot it earlier?
See above. We saw this coming—literally—many miles away. Adversary satellites fly over US military bases multiple times a day. We’ve been forced to become quite adept at hiding our secrets from eyes in the sky. Shooting the balloon over land would’ve given the Chinese valuable intelligence: how we vector our military aircraft during contingencies, how we engage non-standard targets, and what weapons and tactics we use. Doing all of this in a chunk of ocean that we own — a continent away from the Pacific — keeps our operations protected (even in the age of live, open source video), and allows us to scoop up the debris for analysis, without risking destruction over land. We know it is difficult to find debris in the ocean. Good thing our Navy does it daily. The US likely gained more intelligence by observing the balloon — across a multitude of spectra — than China gained by flying it over sites which could prepare for its arrival.
Was there a risk the US gave China an intelligence windfall?
Highly unlikely. One thing is not accessible to the dozens of Chinese satellites passing daily over the US: electronics intelligence, or ELINT. ELINT gathered from space (through satellites) is problematic because of other electromagnetic noise. Imagine listening to a whisper across a busy highway using a straw and you understand the challenge. A balloon ten miles up would have a much easier time vacuuming up radio, radar, Wi-Fi, cell phone, tactical radio, and other signals, compared to a satellite one hundred miles distant. The Chinese already spy our internet (surprise!), but there are important things the US still hides from the web (don’t tell TikTok). We are very good at hiding our goodies from eyes in the sky, or eyes in the interwebs. So there is very little the balloon could have obtained that we did not have enough time to hide. Again, their biggest windfall would be to learn how we react to such an incursion. We did not give them that gift.
How did we shoot it down?
The press is reporting that an F-22 shot the balloon down with an AIM-9 missile, a very common weapon in our arsenal. Other information and insider reports seems to confirm this. Analysis of publicly available information yields fascinating information.
The F-22 / AIM-9 combination had no difficulty shooting down a target high in the sky. We could’ve done it earlier. We chose not to, for what I think are excellent reasons.
The AIM-9 (which stands for “Air Intercept Missile, series 9) had MORE than enough energy when it hit the target. By my calculations, an F-22 flying around 48,000’ above mean sea level (my estimate of a sweet spot in their envelope) shooting at a target at 60,000’ would have a slant range around 8 nautical miles (just over 9 standard, or statute, miles). This means the weapon was WELL WITHIN its envelope. FAAFO.
The weapon did not fuze when it hit the target. In other words: the missile hit the balloon but did not explode. Malfunction? Hardly. I’d call it brilliant. This seems intentional. The missile punctured the balloon, leaving the payload to plummet intact into the ocean, where US Navy ships, aided by intelligence, will locate, recover, analyze, and exploit the payload. That part won’t be in the news. The Chinese are proably not thrilled to know the US can bring down stuff from the sky relatively intact, then peer into it. The US will perform sophisticated reverse engineering on those goodies. I’m jealous of my colleagues in the intel community, who will have a ball.
So what is next?
In the world of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and — LOOK! SHINY OBJECT! — the furor over the Chinese balloon will evaporate by the next episode of Saturday Night Live. No one in the public will know, nor care. US intelligence services, on the other hand, will have a field day discovering why the Chinese did this. No one will publicly share those findings. Years from now we may learn of some tech employees, influencers, hedge fund managers, and/or college professors arrested as they suddenly tried to leave the US mainland sometime on 5 February 2023. This will be quiet and anonymous, but we’ll find out that the balloon incident, far from being a “mistake”, was a meticulously planned event which showed us the tip of the iceberg in a global war that precious few know is ongoing.
What do you think? Is this based in reality, or the delusions of a has-been? Let me know your thoughts at noel@noelzamot.com.
Thanks for reading!
