> How much does a weather baloon cost? ...compared to a F22 flight, a missle + all the logistics?
If this is an actual spy object you also need to factor in the cost of the surveillance. How much money does the military lose due to the sensitive information being lost. Or how much does the military need to spend to regain strategic advantage? That probably costs more than a F22 flight and a missile.
Obviously this depends on the number of objects that one needs to respond to. Cheap surveillance devices can obviously overwhelm this and then you have a war of attrition.
In the example of the article we need to consider the cost of flights being downed (which they down when considering the cost of hitting an object and downing an aircraft. Quite expensive). Flights being canceled and/or delayed is expensive.
> How much money does the military lose due to the sensitive information being lost.
...probably around zero dollars. It would be different if it was above say active war zone but in this case it is almost as far from potential warzone as possible so probably absolutely nothing.
I don't think it would be a stretch to say that we're in a cold war with China. Many modern battlefields aren't on the ground and fought with bullets. They are economic, political, and proxies. In cold wars you often have technological and economic races too (see cold war with Russia). Militaries believe that if you don't want a hot war to break out you wave the biggest {st,d}ick.
It would be naive to believe that military information is only important when bullets are being fired. This would be like saying that your class textbook is only useful when you're taking a test. (A cold war is like you have an upcoming test)
I’d hesitate to call this psychological warfare, but it now seems like the American people are paranoid about spy balloons and having their airspace violated. America is the one who brazenly flies and spies over other countries, that doesn’t happen to us.
So now our leaders are trigger happy about shooting down any potential new balloons in order to try and save face while looking tough. Meanwhile, I’m sure plenty of Chinese officials are feeling pretty smug at the reaction they were able to cause and pride that they can present themselves as a capable challenger to American hegemony.
We're trigger happy because the right used this to attack Biden in an effort to show that he is weak. This is also why many papers also mention that many balloons floated over during the previous administration. Though of course, why wouldn't China take advantage of that? Troll your enemies in any way you can.
> it now seems like the American people are paranoid about spy balloons and having their airspace violated
Only naive people would think so. 9/11 was 21 years ago. Where have you been?
> America is the one who brazenly flies and spies over other countries, that doesn’t happen to us.
Satellites have been used by all major powers since pretty much forever. As for other means, do you have insights of those brazen efforts by the US?
> So now our leaders are trigger happy about shooting down any potential new balloons in order to try and save face while looking tough
Lazy thinking. You don’t know if this latest incident was in response to the event last week or there was something specific that prompted them to shoot it down. They didn’t even say it was Chinese. Strange unknown flying objects are not new of course. They following article discussed something happened in 2019, and was disclosed a year ago:
So the US flew all those U2 spy planes over the Soviet Union for fun, and the Soviet Union shot one down in 1960 just to prove that they could?
I agree that a ballon over Alaska is unlikely to gain much intelligence, but with the right equipment at the right place you can get a lot of useful insights into your enemy's capabilities even at peacetime.
I'd say the Soviets absolutely shot down that U2 in large part to prove that they could, and that to some degree at least, the US was flying those planes over to prove that they could.
There's a school of thought that says the US won the cold war by convincing the Soviets to bankrupt themselves trying to keep up with the arms race. Now I don't necessarily think that fully explains things, but I do think there's a lot more politics to a "spy" device than the actual photographs, especially outside the context of a hot war.
There is a lot you can learn by floating a slow moving object rigged with antennas over your adversary and then noting which types of radar light you up and from which direction. Especially when you float them over military sites.
But my dad, who worked on (British) military IFF stuff, did have a story about an ICBM early warning system (I think American) that determined an attack was inbound because someone forgot about the Moon.
More to the point, if one side keeps secrets and another doesn't, the secret keepers have an advantage. Its a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, where secrecy is defection.
If this is an actual spy object you also need to factor in the cost of the surveillance. How much money does the military lose due to the sensitive information being lost. Or how much does the military need to spend to regain strategic advantage? That probably costs more than a F22 flight and a missile.
Obviously this depends on the number of objects that one needs to respond to. Cheap surveillance devices can obviously overwhelm this and then you have a war of attrition.
In the example of the article we need to consider the cost of flights being downed (which they down when considering the cost of hitting an object and downing an aircraft. Quite expensive). Flights being canceled and/or delayed is expensive.