Friday, March 29, 2024

China’s Spy Balloon Was a Big Deal, Likely Gained Valuable SIGINT for Beijing

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ANALYSIS's fiasco keeps getting worse. As I noted earlier, almost all of the Biden spin about the Chinese balloon that spent eight long days surveilling military and strategic sites across the was misleading or outright false.

Contrary to the furious pro-Biden spin, the 200ft tall balloon with a jetliner-sized surveillance package strapped to it did pose an intelligence and military threat. (RELATED: China Tested Biden With Massive ‘Spy Balloon' While Likely Practicing EMP Attack)

It could also have been shot down much earlier without undue risk to those on the ground – especially since it first cruised over the Aleutian Islands and parts of Alaska.

And no, President Trump did not know or ignore prior Chinese balloon incursions when he was in office.

Reports of brief crossings of Chinese balloons over peripheral parts of the U.S., like Florida, or U.S. territories far from the continental U.S., like Guam, did not surface until well after Trump left office. (RELATED: Suspected Spy Balloons That Transited Country Under Trump Only Discovered After Biden Took Office)

Apparently, the Pentagon didn't detect those extremely brief forays at the time, displaying a major gap in our surveillance capabilities.

But this incursion was of a whole different scope and scale.

I earlier argued that the primary goal of this latest extended cross-country balloon incursion for was political.

It was a clear test. What would Biden and the U.S. military do? And their answer was basically nothing until after the airship completed its 8-day surveillance mission.

However, an added, and more dangerous goal was potentially to test how to use a stratospheric balloon to employ a small nuclear device at extremely high altitude to produce a massive electromagnetic pulse () that would fry communications, power networks and almost all electronics across much of the United States.   

For more on that, see my previous piece.

But let's return to the more mundane intelligence-gathering functions of this airship.

While the Biden spinners rushed to say that the balloon could not gather intel not already gained by Chinese satellites in low earth orbit, this is simply ignorant and untrue.

One left-leaning intelligence news site, SpyTalk, edited by the elderly Jeff Stein, wrote in an almost knee-jerk fashion without waiting for more facts: “Pssst: Chinese Satellite Not a Threat. Experts say news media hysteria over the floating orb not at all warranted.”

Stein then brought in his usual suspects to buttress his pro-Biden spin.

The liberal Stein quoted one of his regular minions, Paul Cobaugh, a left-leaning retired Army information operations specialist with no intelligence or technology background, as saying we have a “variety of capabilities to render it unusable or mitigate the threat.”

This is partly true. We do have means to mitigate the threat.

A senior U.S. defense official said Feb. 2 that when the Chinese balloon was detected near Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, home of the 341st strategic intercontinental ballistic missile wing, the Pentagon “acted immediately to protect against the collection of secretive information.”

That likely meant shutting off signals-emitting systems and moving secretive aircraft and sensitive equipment under cover or into a hangar.

The Pentagon can take similar steps to stop satellites from gathering intelligence, but it is far more disruptive to have a giant airship looming overhead for long periods of time, as it was in this case.

But SpyTalk's Cobaugh takes his uninformed argument about the balloon to an extreme, adding with no nuance or uncertainty:

“It's not a threat.”

SpyTalk didn't stop there though and added the always predictable, hyper-partisan, Trump-hating former Air Force general and CIA director Michael Hayden to the mix, who totally dismissed the Chinese balloon, and Biden's inaction, by saying:

“Really, it's not a big deal.”

Well, this is all just nonsense. It was a very big deal.

Beyond the various risks noted above and in my earlier piece, the ability to vacuum up valuable (SIGINT) unavailable to satellites makes the balloon threat unique. (RELATED: 4-Star General Reacts After Biden Finally Shoots Down Chinese Spy Ballon)

As  reports:

Experts say balloons loitering at high altitudes can offer some advantages over satellites and drones — or could at least augment their intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said one benefit of these balloons is their ability to hover closer to the ground than satellites, and they may be able to intercept communication or electronic signals that orbiting systems can't.

“It could be thermal infrared, it could be signals intelligence. One of the reasons there are advantages to the suborbital position is you might not be able to do all of that from space,” he told C4ISRNET in a Feb. 3 interview. “There's a whole lot of value to something other than space.”

Bryan Clark, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, said balloons also offer more persistent, less predictable coverage over an area of interest. While satellites follow a known orbit, airships use wind currents and automated controls to maneuver in different directions. They can also hover in one place for a long period of time.

Clark told C4ISRNET: “With a satellite, you know when they're going to go overhead, so you stop doing whatever you're doing for the time it's overhead. If you have a balloon, it could be out there for days or months, and you're sort of left either having to stop whatever you're doing that's generating intel — or you live with it.”

And there is much more our intelligence experts and agencies can't yet divulge about this balloon.

Hopefully, once it is fully recovered, we can expect a full damage assessment.

So, yes, the high-tech, high-altitude, Chinese surveillance airship that spent eight days traversing the U.S. was a threat, and the leftist partisan spin machine continues to churn out uninformed nonsense.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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Paul Crespo
Paul Crespohttps://paulcrespo.com/
Paul Crespo is the Managing Editor of American Liberty Defense News. As a Marine Corps officer, he led Marines, served aboard ships in the Pacific and jumped from helicopters and airplanes. He was also a military attaché with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at U.S. embassies worldwide. He later ran for office, taught political science, wrote for a major newspaper and had his own radio show. A graduate of Georgetown, London and Cambridge universities, he brings decades of experience and insight to the issues that most threaten our American liberty – at home and from abroad.

9 COMMENTS

  1. It should be obvious to everyone by now that the Biden Administration doesn’t know how to handle national security or manage the country let alone promote policies that are good for America. That pretty much goes for all Democrats.

  2. This whole story has me quite concerned, whether it’s factual or not. On one hand, if true, my understanding growing up through the 60’s, 70’s,80’s, has always been that NORAD was on the lookout for any such approach or incussion of our airspace and would react without needed approval from any other order. In other words, the plan is already in place. Why was not the plan adhered to? On the other hand, if this shit is all a fabricated story to create another distraction to what we should all be focusing on, that is more concerning. Either way, it’s a sad state of affairs.

    • I know closely someone who worked at NORAD, for a long time which included the Trump presidency. NORAD (Canada, Alaska, and the Lower 48) didn’t have any indications at all, at any classification level, of PRC balloons coming into any of NORAD’s 3 regions.
      It is plausible that balloon skirted Guam, HI, etc., but the claims of balloons under Trump are vague and intentionally hard to follow…

  3. Now why would anyone with half a brain think this wasn’t the reason for the balloons? I exclude Demonrats because they don’t have one, period.

    • I am sure the DemonRats have brains just as we do. It’s not the mental capacity. It is because they have swallowed the new godless religion and are converts programmed to revere tthe new sacraments of the religion, principle like: globalism, elimination of all national boundaries, disruption of our systems, destruction of our Republic, promoting abortion, elevation of the LGBTQ minority to a political force, climate change and global warming. etc. Chesterton said, ‘Those who do not believe in God will believe anything,’ or words to that effect. Some of them are selfish scoundrels. But some are likely good people, however minus WISDOM.

  4. It seems obvious that if civilians in Montana hadn’t called attention to this the Biden Administration’s plan was to do allow this surveillance platform to proceed unfettered—just as they had done with previous surveillance.

  5. If the American Communist/Marxist/Fascist/Socialist Party (i.e., the Democrats), weren’t so HeII-bent on destroying America, I’d could maybe believe that it was an errant weather balloon and nothing to worry about.
    Unfortunately, when the American Communist/Marxist/Fascist/Socialist Party members are all sitting in the dynamite shed smoking cigarettes,cigars, pipes, bongs, fentanyl, and doobies, I have to admit – I’m fairly skeptical about anything they say.

  6. Seems like the following is an all to appropriate question. Whose side is Biden & Co. on. Same might be directed to the U.S. Military.

Comments are closed.

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