Spy Balloon Incident
The Chinese balloon, with what appeared to be a solar array hanging beneath it, drifting high above the US, raised a feeding frenzy of alarm from elected officials, though the balloon was almost certainly a wind-blown scientific apparatus.
The balloon was shot down off the Carolina coast the afternoon of 04 February 2023 and an operation was launched to recover the debris. Presumed US Fighter Jets were seen circling the craft before one appears to fire a missile at it, causing the remnants of the balloon to crash to the ocean. The AIM-9X missle used can be configured for proximity detonation which this appears to be. So the payload doesn't take the brunt of the detonation, instead peppered with shrapnel. Impact with the water did the most damage. The Balloon reportedly fell only a few miles off the Coast in water around 45ft deep so it is expected that Recovery Operations will be relatively “Easy”.
An F-22 Raptor from the 149 Fighter Squadron, based at the Langley Air Force Base, used a single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, fired from 58,000 feet in the air, to shoot down the balloon that was flying at 62,000 feet at the time it was shot down. The remains of the surveillance balloon spread over a seven-mile to eleven-mile debris field in shallow waters about 14 to 17 meters deep in the Atlantic.
The Biden administration had previously hesitated to shoot the balloon because of risks to people on the ground from falling debris. Republicans pounced on the initial decision not to shoot it down over rural Montana as a sign of weakness on the part of the Biden administration.
The balloon was observed flying over Montana earlier in the week by a commercial aircraft, after flying over the Aleutian Islands and Canada, according to a U.S. official. Montana is home to US land-based nuclear missile silos. The Pentagon said the balloon flew over several "sensitive" areas.
The balloon was about 60,000 feet above the central continental US and was moving east, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said 03 February 2023. The balloon "has the ability to maneuver,” Ryder told reporters, but he did not provide specifics. He also flatly denied the Chinese government's claim that the balloon serves a civilian research purpose, saying that the US knows it is a "surveillance balloon."
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on 06 February 2023 rejected the claim that the balloon was a civilian meteorological airship, and said the United States had no plans to return the debris to Beijing. “It strains credulity, as we have been saying for many days, that this was some sort of innocent weather balloon that was just floating upon the winds,” Kirby told reporters. “We know that they had a measure of control over its speed and its direction, and we believe it was conducting surveillance over sensitive military sites.” Kirby dismissed China’s contention that the balloon was for meteorological purposes, however, saying “it strains credulity … that this was some kind of weather balloon that was floating on the winds”.
Former US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen was asked on ABC News if he thought elements in the Chinese military might have launched the balloon to disrupt the Blinken visit. “Clearly, I think that’s the case,” he said. Mullen said the craft was manoeuvrable and rejected China’s suggestion it might have been blown off course. “It has propellers on it,” he said. “This was not an accident. This was deliberate. It was intelligence.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed his trip to China in light of the incident, which he called a “clear violation of our sovereignty," but said lines of communication will remain open to resolve the issue.
“SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!” the former president wrote on his Truth Social platform. Trump, who has announced a bid for the 2024 presidency, tied his criticism to a wider vow to curtail Chinese espionage if elected. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who is expected to launch her own presidential bid later this month, also called for the US to shoot down the balloon in a Twitter post. The former governor said "Biden is letting China walk all over us."
Representative Joe Wilson [R-SC] said "The catastrophic Chinese Spy Balloon spectacle clearly threatened American families from Alaska to my home community in South Carolina and confirms President Biden and Vice President Harris should resign."
"As usual when it comes to national defense and foreign policy, the Biden administration reacted at first too indecisively and then too late," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said.
The United States and China entered a new period of heightened tensions. If the United States was able to recover from the ocean evidence that shows that this indeed was a spy mission and not a meteorological mission, the could embarrass the Chinese. And may well very much embarrass the People's Liberation Army. This may be difficult to manage, particularly if the United States came out very publicly with this information, which was deemed convincing. However, a failure to do so could embarass the United States.
Former Department of Defense analyst-turned anti-war whistleblower and activist Karen Kwiatkowski said "if it is determined that [the US] belatedly shot down a weather balloon with a 5th generation fighter jet with a standoff air-to-air Sidewinder missile, it feeds into the global narrative of the US military as an offensively-oriented warmonger, and kind of silly." Kwiatkowski believes that the longer the Pentagon waits to produce evidence of the balloon’s malicious nature, the more likely it will be that it really was just a harmless weather balloon, as the Chinese say it was.
Pentagon official Melissa Dalton said the balloon was 60m (200 ft) tall “with a jetliner size payload”. Dalton, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, said the U.S. military wanted to capture the balloon and analyze it. “If we had taken it down over the state of Alaska… it would have been a very different recovery operation,” she said at the hearing. “The water depths offshore the Aleutians… go very quickly, from about 150 feet to over 18,000 feet in the Bering Sea. The winter water temperatures in the Bering Sea hover consistently in the low-30s, which would make recovery and salvage operations very dangerous.”
US authorities insist the balloon departed from Hainan, an island in southern China that is home to a naval military base. The intelligence community (IC) reportedly began tracking the Chinese high-altitude balloon at Hainan Island. According to US officials, the balloon had flown over Alaska and Canada before surfacing in the US state of Montana, which is home to a number of sensitive nuclear missile sites. Unnamed officials told the Washington Post they believed such balloons were being used to gather intelligence on strategically important countries. These countries included Japan, India, Taiwan and the Philippines.
FBI officials said it's too early for them to determine much from the wreckage of the device. So far, the U.S. has only collected fragments of the balloon, including the canopy, wiring and some electronics. The rest is at the "ocean bottom" and will take a long time to recover due to weather. "We're only seeing a very small portion of the balloon’s payload at this point," one of the officials said. "We have literally not seen the payload, which is where we would expect to see the lion's share of the electronics."
The alleged Chinese “spy balloon,” shot down off the coast of South Carolina, was equipped with advanced surveillance equipment capable of picking up sensitive communications, an unnamed senior State Department official told the Wall Street Journal on 09 February 2023. It was fitted with “large” solar panels to power the extensive instrumentation on board, which allegedly included antennas, sensors and other equipment capable of intercepting communications and gathering other intelligence.
The source claimed its manufacturer had a “direct relationship” with the Chinese military. “The company also advertises balloon products on its website and hosts videos from past flights, which appear to have overflown at least U.S. airspace and airspace of other countries,” the official said in Thursday’s statement. “These advertised balloon videos seemingly have similar flight patterns as the balloons we have been discussing this week.”
The unnamed official said the US military spent the eight days the alleged spy craft was traversing the continental US gathering information about the device, using high-altitude U2 spy planes. Authorities were also reportedly examining the debris found floating in the Atlantic Ocean.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun its investigation into China's alleged spy balloon. According to a senior FBI official on 09 February 2023, so far the balloon canopy, wires, and a small number of electronic components have been secured but is too early to tell the function of the balloon or China's true intent in sending it. Investigators added,.. the lower structure of the balloon, which is presumably equipped with most of the electronic devices such as monitoring equipment, has not yet been secured. A large part of the wreckage, including the substructure, is still under the water, and the removal operation was temporarily suspended because of high waves.
The timing of the balloon incident sparked speculation about deliberate sabotage of the Blinken visit, but China experts mostly say that is unlikely. They warn that the incident will distract from efforts to stabilize bilateral ties to deal with future potential crises in Taiwan, the South China Sea. "There were expectations that early 2023 would be a window of opportunity for Washington and Beijing to get to work on building the guardrails for the relationship that both sides recognize are vital for preventing confrontation,” said Patricia Kim of the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.
“With more information coming out about China's vast surveillance balloon program, and Beijing having dug in its heels that this was a civilian weather vessel and that the U.S. overreacted by shooting it down, it's hard to see the restoration of the moderate diplomatic momentum we saw following the Biden-Xi meeting at Bali anytime soon,” Kim told Radio Free Asia.
Washington had spoken of building guardrails or setting a floor on ties, which have deteriorated over longstanding disputes like Taiwan, as well as trade and technology, amid ideological competition between Washington and Beijing.
The spy balloon incident argues against holding the hope that Xi Jinping, fresh from being appointed to a third term as China’s top leader, would temper his approach to diplomacy after a decade of his assertive, authoritarian rule has ruffled feathers with much of the outside world.
“I don't see like anything in Xi Jinping's rhetoric or behavior that suggests that they're thinking about playing it nice. If anything it was more of like a temporary pause,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “They recognize that the situation has gotten worse for them, but they tend to blame outside forces outside of their control. And this balloon incident’s no different,” she told RFA.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
