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Chinese spy balloons floating over the US and latin america

wink said:
Well the envelope was completely collapsed. I was thinking a couple gun shots would only allow the gas to exit out those holes or tears making the decent much slower. Luke's kills went up in fire thanks to hydrogen. No worry here.
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The Canadians tried to shoot down a weather balloon gone awry back in '98 and even after 1000 rounds of 20mm it didn't deflate, it then proceeded across the Atlantic before finally coming down in Finland. Talked to a contractor out in Iraq and he said the observation balloons there would regularly get shot up quite a bit and they rarely had deflation issues because of it.
 
robav8r said:
No comments or analysis about the array hanging underneath the balloon. Anything folks can share in this forum?
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The size and possible capacity certainly provides quite a bit of flexibility of what one might want to put on it.
 
Carroll has always been a blowhard whose content should be taken sparingly (at most), and with a fair bit of salt. But people still listen to him, because, by God, he flew F-14s like a hundred years ago... so he MUST know what he's talking about!

IYK,YK.
;)
 
sevenhelmet said:
Carroll has always been a blowhard whose content should be taken sparingly (at most), and with a fair bit of salt. But people still listen to him, because, by God, he flew F-14s like a hundred years ago... so he MUST know what he's talking about!

IYK,YK.
;)
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He's a Monet, just take a couple of steps back.

Lord knows if I was held to a standard of 100% always right, else always wrong.
 
taxi1 said:
He's a Monet, just take a couple of steps back.

Lord knows if I was held to a standard of 100% always right, else always wrong.
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?

If you had a Youtube channel and put out "facts" that you pulled out of your own ass, then we'd hold you to the same standard. There is and should be a standard for credibility that involves getting your data from somewhere other than where the sun don't shine. Ward Carroll is a arguably an expert in his field, so he should know better than most where that line is. However, he routinely reverts to assumptions and conjecture (which he presents as factual), which results in diminishing his credibility, and that of others with similar expertise. Being an expert doesn't give you license to just make shit up. Experts doing that is why people stop listening to experts.

Now there are people who will believe that missile didn't have a warhead on it, and refuse to be told otherwise, because "Ward Carroll said," blah blah blah. Is it really all that important? No, but this is exactly how the really important stuff gets twisted, and the next thing you know alien lizards are controlling us, the MMR vaccine causes autism, and the Free Masons killed JFK.

I actually think this Chinese balloon drama has been handled reasonably well from a counter-intelligence, risk-management, and kinetic perspective. But that doesn't stop the Internet Keyboard Warriors from armchair quarterbacking how they would have gotten too close for missiles, switched to guns, and brought it down before it ever crossed the first Aleutian Island chain because, by God, everyone in Washington is asleep at the wheel.
:D
 
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taxi1 said:
Lord knows if I was held to a standard of 100% always right, else always wrong.
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He is a 'professional' military aviation expert, he should know better and be held to a higher standard. He claimed soon after the Sky Dong made its appearance that the crew did it by dumping fuel, which unsurprisingly turned out to be a bad take shortly thereafter and one that any former Naval Aviator/Flight Officer should have been wary about claiming.

HeyJoe knew him when they were both flying Tomcats and had this to say about him:

Now that’s not the Ward that I have known for 30 years and counting. He endeavors to be on cutting edge and in the know...when I saw same bum gouge, I discounted it immediately. In fact, it was passed to me by someone on East Coast, but didn’t seem right which is why I checked the thread here. I knew the AW rock tumbler would have straight gouge as it was revealed. Surprised, really surprised he went for it. He knows better.
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The greater irony is his original claim to fame was as creator of “Danger Boy” cartoon who was the JO’s JO. His draft novel was a thinly (if at all) disguised send up of all the senior officers above him. He was such a renegade that he read about it in his FITREPs and didn’t make LCDR on his first look. That is the Ward I came to know.

I don’t do Twitter but followed link above which had a log of his tweet. I was quite surprised that he was purporting to be in the know and postulating how the “artists” created their masterpiece. Like I said, he used to know better as editor of Approach and PAO of the Safety Center. Recovering LSO is on the mark in regards to those in the know keeping silent....I fear that the Ward I knew is now amongst the Media Pundits who rush to be first and grab the public attention which equates ultimately to revenue and is oftentimes hand in hand with “fake news” or least half baked news.

I suppose there is another irony at play here. He may not have gotten positive feedback, but the more “looks” his Twitter Feed generates, the more he wins. Military.Com was built on click ad revenue and he was there generating those “looks” that translate to revenue. So the former “Angry JO” appears to have joined the ranks of those he once decried. That is ultimate irony to me.....
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Flash said:
He is a 'professional' military aviation expert, he should know better and be held to a higher standard. He claimed soon after the Sky Dong made its appearance that the crew did it by dumping fuel, which unsurprisingly turned out to be a bad take shortly thereafter and one that any former Naval Aviator/Flight Officer should have been wary about claiming.

HeyJoe knew him when they were both flying Tomcats and had this to say about him:
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Bingo.

taxi1 said:
Lord knows if I was held to a standard of 100% always right, else always wrong.
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I take a more nuanced approach than the binary response you indicated above. All I'm suggesting is we can't presume reliability of Ward Carroll is putting out, specifically because he is on the social media sensationalism-to-get-clicks gravy train.
 
sevenhelmet said:
I take a more nuanced approach than the binary response you indicated above. All I'm suggesting is we can't presume reliability of Ward Carroll is putting out, specifically because he is on the social media sensationalism-to-get-clicks gravy train.
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I'm with you.
 
Here is a good article on the apparent scope and why the Chinese might be using balloons for intel collection. I've been a little disappointed with even some of the smarter commentary questioning why the Chinese would use balloons for intel and trying to discern some deeper meaning from it when it is probably pretty simple why:

1 - Cost - It is cheap, especially when compared to a satellite
2 - Persistence (and Access) - As was obvious by the amount of time it took to fly across the country, they can stick around and observe things a lot longer than a satellite in LEO.
3 - Fidelity - Sensors are going to get a lot better info from 20 km than 300 km.

But there is a much higher risk to sending a balloon through sovereign airspace, so why were the Chinese willing to take the risk? They seem to have gotten away with it for years and with the relatively small cost it was apparently worth it to whoever was doing it.

Which brings to mind that this might be a case of someone doing what they want without many others, or anyone, not knowing what they were doing to include those in charge. It appears that not everyone in the Chinese government was on the same sheet of music with the foreign policy folks seemingly to have been caught completely off guard, as was the government as a whole. As with any large country there is an equally large bureaucracy but since China is authoritarian there is little in the way of checks and balances with the party, military and security services doing whatever the hell they want. Like a Chinese govie version of Cartman.

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P.S. Any resemblance to @CommodoreMid is purely coincidental.
 
I just find it particularly funny that the Air Force got a balloon kill in the F-22 while in 2017 an F-18 bagged a Fitter over Syria. ??
 
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