The spy balloon that changed the US conversation about China
Jamie McIntyre
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After transfixing those who could see the tiny white dot high in clear blue sky with their own eyes for the better part of a week, a 200-foot-tall Chinese spy balloon met an ignominious fate at the pointy end of a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile fired from a U.S. F-22 stealth fighter jet on the first Saturday in February.
The climactic kill shot sent the deflated dirigible plunging 60,000 feet into U.S. territorial waters 6 miles off the South Carolina coast. There, Navy divers and unmanned submersibles set about the task of salvaging the wreckage, which the Pentagon says will yield an intelligence bonanza.
PENTAGON RELEASES PHOTOS OF DOWNED CHINESE BALLOON
The incursion prompted paroxysms of perseveration among lawmakers, retired commanders, former defense secretaries, and various military experts. They raised questions about whether President Joe Biden dithered while the surveillance balloon, which China implausibly insisted was a civilian airship collecting weather data, drifted lazily on the jet stream over the continental United States with its array of cameras and antennas presumably beaming data back to Beijing.
Biden said he gave the order to the military to shoot down the balloon when he was first briefed about it Wednesday, Feb. 1, four days after it was first spotted approaching U.S. airspace near Alaska.
“I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down … as soon as possible,” Biden said, “without doing damage to anyone on the ground. They decided that the best time to do that was as it got over water, within the 12-mile limit.”
The eight-day delay in taking action against the balloon, which was clearly violating U.S. sovereign airspace, raised a number of unanswered questions.
It wasn’t clear if, as many of the president’s critics insisted, it would have been better to down the balloon when it first entered U.S. airspace over the Aleutian Islands. The ocean there can be as deep as 5 miles as opposed to waiting until it was over just 50 feet of water on the east coast.
It wasn’t clear if the U.S. had the ability to effect a controlled descent over land by somehow piercing the balloon to cause a slow leak, as former Defense Secretary Mark Esper suggested in an interview on Fox.
It’s not clear what kind of intelligence China could gather from a loitering balloon that it can’t get from its hundreds of low Earth orbit satellites.
And it’s still a mystery as to what exactly China was thinking conducting such an audacious spy mission with the flimsy excuse that the balloon was blown off course and just ended up over a Minuteman III missile field in Montana by happenstance, all on the eve of high-level U.S.-China meetings to be held in Beijing.
Many Republicans saw the flagrant violation of U.S. sovereignty as an in-your-face message that China’s military sees the Biden administration as weak and easily intimidated.
“Make no mistake: That balloon was intentionally launched as a calculated show of force,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) at a hearing examining the Chinese Communist Party’s threat to America.
But another explanation is emerging for why China might have thought it could get away with it: It has at least four times in the past.
When the Pentagon revealed earlier this month that there had been four other instances in which Chinese balloons flew over U.S. territory, three times during the Trump administration and once during Biden’s first year, Republicans immediately cried foul. They contended the Pentagon was trying to provide cover to Biden for what was increasingly being portrayed as a blunder.
Former President Donald Trump, along with one of his defense secretaries and a former director of national intelligence, all said they had never been informed of any such incidents.
The Pentagon’s explanation: U.S. intelligence analysts didn’t figure it out until last year.
Turns out they had what U.S. Northern Command Commander Glen VanHerck, the general in charge of defending the homeland, euphemistically called a “domain awareness gap.”
Translation: U.S. sensors were finely attuned to threats from aircraft and missiles in space — but not so much for slow-flying airships traversing the upper stratosphere.
The Pentagon says the gap has since been fixed, as evidenced by the immediate detection of the latest Chinese balloon incursion, which the intelligence community says it has now determined is part of a larger balloon surveillance program that China has been conducting for years, largely undetected.
“Our awareness and understanding of this capability have increased over the last couple of years,” said Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman. “This wasn’t the information that we necessarily had previously, but again, our analysts have been able to, over time, put the pieces together and learn a lot more.”
Ryder insists the decision to delay the shootdown for several days was driven not only by concern for the safety of citizens or property that could be hit by falling debris, given that the balloon’s payload was the size of a small jetliner and weighed over a ton, but also by the chance to closely monitor how Chinese balloon technology works.
“This was a unique opportunity for us to observe this balloon and its characteristics very closely as it traveled over the United States,” said Ryder. “And I won’t go into details, [but] we gained a lot of information.”
What is clear in the aftermath of the shootdown is that relations between Washington and Beijing have taken a nosedive. Just as the Biden administration was anticipating a reset after Biden’s meeting last year with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Hopes were also fueled by what seemed like a new, less combative tone displayed by China’s vice premier at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in which he seemed to signal a move away from China’s so-called wolf warrior coercive diplomacy of the last five years.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken was forced to cancel at the last minute a planned trip to Beijing in which he was expected to get face time with Xi. And when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to arrange a call with his Chinese counterpart after the shootdown, he was refused.
China’s Foreign Ministry has accused the U.S. of overreaction and a “deliberate hyping up of the matter,” insisting the airship posed no threat while demanding its return.
“The silver lining of the spy balloon is that I think it exposes the CCP’s new charm offensive as a farce,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), chairman of the newly formed House Select Committee on China, in a video posted on Twitter.
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“All the Wall Street bosses and media apologists coming back from Davos gushing about the CCP’s change of tone and their willingness to reengage — that’s a farce. It’s a bedtime story they tell gullible Americans,” he said. “I’d like to think this is the last time that we get fooled, but I’m not holding my breath. This incident should burst anyone’s bubble — or balloon, as it were — about the true intentions of the Chinese Communist Party.”
And should China try it again, “I think we are very confident that we’ll be able to detect these kinds of capabilities,” says Ryder. “We’re always going to reserve the right to take appropriate action against any foreign objects.”