Guest Post by Karl Denninger
Nobody launches a “balloon” of that sort of size and mass without a means of “de-orbiting” it should it veer out of its expected flight envelope or on command.
I don’t care if China intended it to enter our airspace or not (although I will assume they did); they most certainly had the ability to prevent it from doing so by sending it a command to come down before it did so. They didn’t do that, on purpose.
Period, end of discussion, full stop.
The United States has full authority under both US and International law to shoot it down and did from the point at which it entered our EEZ’s airspace. We did not have to wait and there is utterly no excuse for our failure to destroy it before it crossed over into the United States.
Nobody has the right to enter the airspace of a nation without permission. If you do it as a manned aircraft you can be forced down and, if you refuse to land, destroyed. An unmanned device, which this clearly is, can be destroyed without warning.
Something of that size and lifting capacity could easily have a thermonuclear warhead on board. Detonation of such at that height would produce minimal direct damage however nothing prevents the device from rapidly descending first and then exploding at, for example, 2 miles of altitude.
Oh, they’d never do that?
Sorry, that’s not how it works. An unannounced and uncleared incursion by a heavy-lift air vehicle capable of carrying such a device must be presumed to have one on board with intent to use it. There are no “do overs” if you get this wrong.
Our military is derelict in permitting this craft into our airspace and our so-called “civilian leadership” is either incompetent or deliberately in league with the Chinese. Either way both must be removed and destroyed, replacing same with functional entities. The Pentagon appears to be more-concerned with what pronouns some “soldier” wants to use than whether a potential nuclear device is floating over several of our major cities and a decent part of our nuclear missile silos inventory.
We are a sovereign nation and its damn time we started acting like one.
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Agree completely. I have two working assumptions about this ‘op’. First, that we probably don’t have all the information about who, what, when, why, and where. Second, that once it was over populated areas, our options became much more limited. It is so shocking of a failure, that I am looking for other explanations that are in the ‘political stunt’ arena, such as Warhawks wanting to cancel the upcoming China / US meeting with Blinken.
Utter hyperventilating bullshit.
I mean why don’t we directly nuke all of China, as they have admitted it was their balloon – better be safe than sorry!
Yet another person duped that this was a “spy” balloon as if China had no other less conspicuous way of getting the data sought than to use centuries old tech. Sorry but this was a pure and simple gaslighting event with another purpose. How do I know? They saw the balloon coming days before it hit the mainland and thousands of miles away over the Pacific and did nothing. Why? What was really going. And no, it wasn’t spying.
He’s right you know.
To see what our response would be. Next time there will be 10 of them and with EMP’s.
Man, i know its wrong of me, but i vas hoping for emps.
Anyone who reads here, would recover and thrive.
I think nukes weigh more than a balloon can hold but I maybe wrong.
With all due respect, yes, you are wrong.
Go ahead and show us your calculations.
Looks like a literal trial balloon. If this is actually the 5th time they’ve sent one over, then they have just about desensitized TPTB here to the idea of a threat… Or maybe, they are hoping for some kind of “New Pearl Harbor” (the words of neo-cons). The games played by our best and brightest rival the Chinese idea that communists can have “civilian” projects on that scale. Sorry, if they have a company that builds craft like that, they have CCP on site approving each and every nut, bolt and screw.
So China and Russia have a right to shoot down U.S. spy satellites? I am given to understand that they each have the capability of doing so.
If they did, would all the sheep bleat that we need to nuke them? You know, for our own security?
Should we shoot down their spy satellites?
Has anyone wondered what happens when you drop a bus-sized solar array from 100,000 feet without being able to know where it will land?
Remember Skylab?
Why blow it up with a $300,000 air to air missile? Shoot some 20mm rounds through it so it leaks and comes down slowly. No danger, no harm.
re: “Shoot some 20mm rounds through it”
We should ALL know why not at this point by now, except, Dunning-Kruger-ism.
A second or two from a 20mm Vulcan cannon might run $500-$1,000. Our genius Air Farce honchos have tried for years to eliminate the low cost option of guns in favor of high Dollar missiles. The 30mm cannon in the A-10 Warthog can kill a Main Battle Tank for less than $1,000. Year after year the AF tried to junk the A-10 in favor of a Million Dollar a pop missile.
Let’s all grow up together, shall we, and maybe learn something?
“The Inside Story on the F-22’s Chinese Spy Balloon Kill”
by Ward Carroll
The guy in the video,
“guns kill is about 1000 feet”
“Bullets would have damaged the spy gear more than a single missile did”.
???
I think he is wrong about both. Definitely the “1000 feet” part is BS. Those 20mm will destroy stuff at a much greater range.
And the damage to the gear is entirely irrelevant if it is going to free fall from 65,000 ft.
Also, READ the comments on that video, some of those people recall previous attempts at taking down other balloons with ‘cannon’ fire from fighter aircraft; Our Dunning-Kruger society doesn’t do well learning from experience though.
If I understand correctly, a plane cannot get up high enough to shoot it down.
F22 ceiling is about 60,000ft.
If they zoom climb and parabolic, they can get much higher.
Of course they could have sent an F15 which has a higher ceiling than the F22.
Eleven easily duped retards.
https://www.ntd.com/another-chinese-spy-balloon-traveling-over-latin-america-pentagon-says_899238.html
The next time one is sent’ it will be pale sky blue and nobody will see it. It will land at night and go boom before morning. We will wake up with no electricity and no way to fix it for several years. No way to pump fuel or move farm goods around the country. At that point, 90% of our people will be dead within a year. Problem solved for Russia and China with a single quick pop to our central nervous system.
Global Warming is our greatest threat said the brainwashed masses as they froze to death. OH no, IT IS CLIMATE CHANGE NOW because the warming thing didn’t mind fuck enough people in the winter time.
SHITLIB AMERICANS MAKE ME SICK!
No, on account of EMP is way overblown.
I’ll say it again……A dry run?
Better than wet runs!
or dry heaves.
I believe that balloon was an uplink repeater. Low power ssets on the ground cannot directly transmit back to Chinese mainland. However, as the balloon went over ground units established contact and securely uploaded data to the balloon which could then securely upload via satellite back to mainland.
Those ground assets could be as simple as a box that recorded data for months or years unattended. While in low-power mode they sent out an occasional handshake request that wasn’t answered until the balloon flew over. This is almost the same technology utilities use to read your meter. Water utilities in particular use it and instead of having a meter reader look at individual meters, a van can drive through the neighborhood activating the meter, downloading the data, then it goes back to sleep.
Regardless, it’s all speculation now as our DoD destroyed the payload rather than piercing the balloon and sprayed the pieces all over the coastal Carolinas.
re: “I believe that balloon was an uplink repeater.”
No one puts brain in gear anymore; The RC-135s circling the balloon for days/a week or more would have picked that up days ago by now.
Multiple failures from our government at all levels over a balloon that could have easily deployed any number of weaponized terror upon our nation !
Meanwhile we are told by authorities if we are concerned about the position of it just LOOK UP.
Like all WASHINGTON DC pathetic parasites , They scurry around like feral cats covering each other’s shit !
With one thumb up their collective assholes and sucking the other and with the precision of a military drill team on command they switch thumbs !
Good thing they’re all indoctrinated with woke diversity training so they never are aware they are licking their own shit !
Not to be jaded but in the current environment i believe that one should start from the premise, “is/was there an actual balloon?”. BTW, Admin+, appreciate your efforts in keeping this site viable. Keep on keeping on.
“Isn’t it Rich, Are we a Pair, Me on the Ground, You in MidAir?
Send in the Clowns”
Clown President.
Clown Balloon.
Clown Congresss.
Clown Border.
Clown Obama.
Clown Pandemic.
Clown Fauci.
Clown Zelensky.
Clown Communist Leader Xi.
CLOWN WORLD!
Anyone see a pattern?
No matter how cynical I get about Biden, I am still surprised. First, he lets the thing fly all the way over the US and does nothing. Then he shoots it down over the ocean. And HOW does he shoot it down? With a $300,000 air-to-air missile that completely blows the thing to pieces which fall into the ocean and are mostly lost. Why didn’t they just shoot a few 20mm rounds through it so that it leaks and comes down slowly in one piece? Why didn’t he shoot it down over Montana and recover it? No one would have been hurt with a slow descent over a huge state with mostly rocks and a few cows. We could have examined it and known for sure what it was. Instead it flies all the way cross country over military bases and ICBM bases, able to transmit information, and then Biden makes sure that it’s mission will never be known.
WHOSE SIDE IS HE ON?! (We kinda know, don’t we?)
They shot down something over Billings and recovered it.
For all the huffing and puffing the neoclowns exert over “threats to the homeland” it’s odd that an actual threat would be treated so lightly.
Something is not what it seems.
“Something is not what it seems.”
SAME as it EVER was
spy barroon rove you rong time. five dorrar!
Karl “Get off my lawn!” Denninger has inflated the size of his front yard to enclose the continental U. S.
I bet his neighbors thought it was the clouds he was yelling at!
Our military is derelict in permitting this craft into our airspace
Unless it was “our military” which launched the balloon as a false flag propaganda operation.
Seeing as pretty much every excuse used to get TeamuSA into war has long since been proved to be false or staged; considering our own military as the source of this balloon story does not seem to be an illogical assumption at this point.