A few things I'm not clear on...
Why a balloon?
Satellites can read license plates from 22,000 miles up. What could a balloon do that a satellite couldn't. It's a safe bet that any nation with "eye in the sky" tech already knew exactly how many ICBM silos we had and their exact locations.
Which makes me wonder... What if they wanted us to shoot it down over CONUS? What if it was chock full of aerosolized nasties? In that case DoD made the right call waiting to shoot it down over the Atlantic.
The current administration is staffed entirely by morons... And the top brass at the Pentagon and joint chiefs strike me as woke ladder climbers... But I'm sure there are low level analysts who looked at this and decided that shooting it down might not be a good idea.
I have no real evidence. But it strikes me as incredibly stupid to hang a SAR camera on a balloon and hope it gets the pictures you want... Especially with billions of the People's Republic dollars already circling in orbit. But certain bugs are easily aerosolized. Put em in a big balloon, let the cowboys shoot it and spread that aerosol into prevailing winds and you could do some serious damage.
That's certainly an act of war... But if half of your enemy is dying of anthrax... What are they going to do about it?
Like I said, nothing to back this up. But the fact that they used a balloon and we were cautious about shooting it down makes me wonder what we weren't being told.
Mike
balloons can do things satellites can't do, drop biological weapons, nuclear weapons, they too can do photos. The closer you are the better photos you can take. They can intercept radio and other communications.
You could be testing US response and detection capabilities.
They wait on shooting it down to get more info from the balloon, the balloon is more than likely communicating/transferring info to china. We can listen and gather info on Chinas tech and methods from the balloon.
Once we gather all the info we want then shoot it down to study the hardware itself. Shooting down over water offers a less destructive landing.
Sometimes low tech can do a certain job much cheaper and easier than high tech.
