Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
The story was all over the headlines—”Pentagon Says It Detected a Chinese Spy Balloon Hovering Over Montana”, NY Times, 2/2/2023, or “Chinese Spy Balloon flying over U.S. ‘right now,’ Pentagon says”, Washington Post, 2/3/2023. And on and on. The story dominated the news cycle for the entire week, culminating on February 4th with American fighters shooting down the intruder off the coast of South Carolina.
Really? A balloon? I couldn’t help thinking that once again the media was stuffing the news cycle with dreck: overblowing, overdramatizing, and overcovering a minor story. A weather balloon? Chinese or not, who cares?
On its face, the story seems ludicrous. In this technological age of sophisticated spy satellites, AI drones, and instantaneous electronic communications, the use of a hot-air balloon for espionage seems ridiculous—almost to the point of absurdity. The fact that one has been sighted floating complacently over Montana while sending intel back to Beijing seems to be drawn directly from a political satire like The Mouse that Roared or Doctor Strangelove, or maybe even The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming. Perhaps the Chinese are also training a new fleet of passenger pigeons and rebuilding their Morse Code telegraph wire network to enhance their communication abilities.
After all, the hot-air balloon is technology that has been used for espionage since the late eighteenth century. Their use is detailed in histories of the American Civil War in the 1860s or the French Battle of Fleurus in 1794. This is hardly modern technology, but apparently it’s becoming a trend. Maybe the old is new again.
And yet, like many other happenings today, the amazingly ludicrous has become the entirely plausible. Apparently several of today’s modern industrialized nations are using hot-air balloons to spy on their neighbors. According to an article by Helen Sullivan in the February 23, 2023 issue of The Guardian, due to the advent of lasers and other state-of-the-art weaponry, spy balloons have made a comeback. They’re out there. They are much cheaper to launch than satellites and their slower progress across the sky provides opportunities for much more detailed surveillance photos. Any sort of electronic tracking device, including radar and GP systems can be attached to the balloons which are also much easier—and cheaper—to retrieve than satellites. Since they float at a much higher altitude than the average jetliner (anywhere from 80,000 to 120,00 feet), and move slowly, balloons can scan more territory than an average satellite. The use of these balloons is, in point of fact, relatively common. American intelligence community has been reinstituting the use of balloons for the past several years, raising the question of whether the Chinese might be letting us know they’re keeping up with the Joneses.
At any rate, the US intelligence community is taking the matter of the wayward Chinese balloon seriously. Despite claims from the Chinese that the balloon was civilian property that had simply blown off course, American fighters shot it down over the Atlantic. Members of the Coast Guard and other armed forces moved in quickly to analyze the remnants. The path of the balloon, since it was first detected about a week ago, took it over sensitive nuclear missile sites in Montana.
It’s hard to believe that the Chinese assumed that this weather balloon would go undetected. In fact, maybe that’s the whole point, that the Chinese want the United States to realize that not only do they (the Chinese) know all about their spy balloon fleet, but that they have already matched it with their own inflatable eyes in the sky. It’s also hardly a coincidence that the sighting of the balloon comes shortly before Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was scheduled to visit China—a visit which has now been cancelled. This incident exacerbates tensions between the two countries since President Joe Biden affirmed America’s commitment to Taiwan and America’s promise to expand military bases in the Philippines.
Maybe the old technology is new again, but there is nothing novel about superpowers vying for the upper hand and international prestige. Russian has been playing games with the US for decades; most recently, it came under scrutiny for its connections to former president Donald Trump and its possible manipulations of social media to influence the 2016 American presidential elections. China has complained that both the US and Russia have been using balloons for years. Sullivan points out in her article that perhaps part of China’s intent of launching a surveillance device that was sure to be detected was to embarrass the US—which it has undoubtedly accomplished.
Another recent—and chilling—event was a memo sent out by four-star Air Force General Mike Minahan predicting war with China within the next two years. Minahan goes on to send out recommendations to this troops, including orders for his men to set their legal affairs in order, and telling them “To aim for the head”. (NBC News). These preparations are fueled by legitimate concerns that China is indeed looking to forcibly reunite Taiwan with the mainland.
So, the ponderous, slow-moving, and anachronistic surveillance balloon might instead of being a in fact be a harbinger of something far more serious than a laughable anachronism. It could be a shot over the bow.
A weather balloon is hardly a spy satellite or a surveillance drone. It is not (at least to our knowledge) navigable and can only perform a fraction of the functions of its younger and more sophisticated relations. Yet I’m reminded of the scene from Apocalypse Now when the river patrol boat captain Chief Philips is impaled by a spear during a firefight with the native Montagnard tribe. After all, spear can kill you just as dead as a hand grenade or a laser-sighted rifle. Sometimes technology can be the ultimate deception.
“Russian has been playing games with the US for decades; most recently, it came under scrutiny for its connections to former president Donald Trump and its possible manipulations of social media to influence the 2016 American presidential elections.”
Perhaps you haven’t been following recent revelations from “The Twitter Files” and a lengthy investigative piece published in the Columbia Journalism Review, but it has become abundantly clear that the whole Russiagate controversy was actually an elaborate conspiracy theory hatched by Democratic Party operatives after the 2016 election. We liberals were the target of this disinformation campaign and we almost unanimously bought into it, hook, line, and sinker. It’s sobering to realize that it isn’t just ignorant dummies (or Republicans) that can be duped by disinformation campaigns, so can the enlightened and educated. Even after the exhaustive Mueller investigation showed that there was no “there” there, many of us refuse to accept that reality to this day. That makes me sad, but what makes me sadder is that Russiagate succeeded in demonizing Russia on America’s political left, resulting in the fact that there is ZERO pushback on the current proxy war with Russia from anywhere on the American political spectrum. The scale of death and destruction from this war we are only now beginning to realize.
Hey Mark,
Interesting stuff. I do believe that the media mishandled the whole Russiagate affair, but I’m not totally sold that the complicity and collusion between Trump and the Russians was a hoax. Here’s an interesting critique of Gerth’s Columbia Journal story from Mother Jones:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/columbia-journalism-review-jeff-gerth-trump-russia-the-media/
Interesting stuff….