There are three new intrusions leaving America’s leaders grasping for explanations

A Case Study of an EP-3 Collision between a US Navy and a U.S. Air Force: CNN’s Jeremiah Sanner

Sanner was the deputy director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration, where she oversaw elements that coordinate and lead collection, analysis and program oversight in the Intelligence Community. She worked as an intelligence briefer for the president. She is employed at the University of Maryland as a professor and as a CNN national security analyst. Her own opinions are expressed in this commentary. There is more opinion on CNN.

The official suggested that the US is eyeing sanctions for the presence of the balloon in US airspace – which US officials have repeatedly called a violation of US sovereignty and international law – noting the US “will also explore taking action against PRC entities linked to the PLA that supported the balloon’s incursion into US airspace.”

The US Navy says there have been too many unsafe intercepts by the Chinese fighter jets over the last twelve months; in December, a Chinese fighter plane flew just 20 feet in front of a US RC-135 plane carrying 30 crew. Just five weeks after a meeting between President Biden and President Xi at the G20 Summit, this happened as well.

The most memorable and instructive example dates back to the presidency of George W. Bush. On April 1, 2001, two Chinese fighter jets harassed a US Navy plane. One crashed while colliding with the other. The EP-3’s pilot managed to regain control of his heavily-damaged plane and made an unauthorized emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. The 24 US crew members were held for 11 days, and some were repeatedly interrogated before US officials negotiated their release.

Jiang Zemin blamed the collision on the US. Nearly two months elapsed before the two sides reached agreement for the return of the aircraft. Having removed and refused to return the plane’s hardware, software and communications equipment, the Chinese insisted the EP-3 be dismantled and transported by a third party at the US’s expense. The Bush Administration paid Beijing $1 million for costs associated with the incident, which included the detaining of the plane’s crew. Washington offered some $34,000, which China refused, and never apologized.

US officials had been watching the balloon for several days before it was seen over Montana. President Joe Biden said over the weekend that he’d directed the US military to shoot down the balloon as soon as it was safe to do so, but officials said it posed a risk to civilians and property on the ground.

The incident has already sent ties into a downward spiral and resulted in the postponement of an expected visit from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China earlier this month. After a meeting between the president of the United States and the leader of China, it was thought that the trip would help ease tension between the two powers.

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen writes about the costs of chaos in The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. It is possible to have another opinion on CNN.

And it reminded me that when my father, Tom Bergen, was a lieutenant in the US Air Force in the mid-1950s, he worked on a program to help send balloons into Soviet airspace.

The Headquarters Air Material Command is located near Dayton, Ohio. There he worked on the balloon project that carried cameras over the Soviet Union. Those spy balloons were launched from Turkey.

Since the program happened around seven decades ago, it has been declassified, and my dad probably didn’t talk much about it because it was a secret.

Can The Chinese Balloons Be a Threat to Foreign Intelligence? The Unexplained Sightings of Aliens

The officials added that understanding the components of the balloon is vital intelligence and could be “important pieces of evidence for future criminal charges that could be brought.”

The United States has these new-fangled gizmos called “spy satellites,” which can take photos. They can do full- motion video. They can take thermal imagery that detects individuals moving around at night! When the skies are clear, they can spy on pretty much anything, with a resolution of centimeters.

Indeed, commercial satellite imagery is now getting so inexpensive that you can go out and buy your own close-up images of, say, a Russian battle group in Ukraine. Just ask Maxar Technologies; they have built up a rather profitable business on this model, which was just acquired two months ago for $6 billion by a private equity firm.

But it may help explain an element of a report published by the US Office of Director of National Intelligence last month.

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office has an intriguing question about some of the balloons they identified: could they be from China? There are at least some of the 171 unexplained Sightings of Aliens that they assessed to be Chinese balloons.

China has done worse. The US has accused it of benefiting from the work of hackers who stole design data about the F-35 fighter aircraft as China builds its own new generation of fighters and of sucking up much of the personal information of 20 million Americans who were current or former US government employees. China called the F-35 theft report “baseless” and denied responsibility for the OPM hacking.

The US has found evidence the Chinese government has used high altitude balloons to launch espionage operations across the globe.

The suspicion that foreign countries are gathering intelligence from the air runs both ways. The U.S. is accused of flying its own vehicles more than 10 times into Chinese airspace, which it has denied.

And not all of the balloons sighted around the globe have been exactly the same model as the one shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, that official and another source familiar with the intelligence said. Rather, there are multiple “variations,” these people said.

The Washington Post reported the link to the broader program which was uncovered before the balloon was spotted last week.

Officials emphasized that the balloon’s signals were an important key to discovering a tracking method, but not the only piece of the puzzle. One Defense Department official says that the US was able to identify past instances of these high-altitude balloons by figuring together different clues from different sources.

If the balloon that traveled over the US is part of what Washington describes as a coordinated and military-affiliated surveillance program, one possibility, according to analysts, is that Xi may have been aware of the program, but not its day-to-day operations.

China maintains the vessel downed by the US was a weather balloon thrown off course but did offer a rare expression of “regret” over it in a statement Friday.

But multiple defense officials and other sources briefed on the intelligence say the Chinese explanation isn’t credible and have described the balloon’s path as intentional.

This elite team consists of agents, analysts, engineers, and scientists who are responsible for both creating technical measures and analyzing those of our adversaries.

OTD personnel are also responsible for managing court-authorized data collection and work to defeat the efforts of foreign intelligence agencies, but they are also in charge of constructing devices to surveil national security threats.

There are several reasons why we wouldn’t do that, says one member of the House Intelligence Committee. You want to see what it is doing, and we want to collect off it.

A defense official said the US has procedures in place that protect sensitive locations from being monitored by overhead drones.

The Defense of a Detecting High-Altitude Chinese Sky Balloon Over the Atlantic Ocean Shot Down by an F-22 Fighter Jet

The US Navy released photos Tuesday of its recovery effort of a suspected Chinese spy balloon, which US fighter jets shot down over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday.

On Monday, the commander of NORAD told reporters that there was a balloon that was 200 feet tall and carried more than a couple of thousand pounds.

Imagine yourself with a huge amount of debris falling out of the sky, and picture yourself as a safety standpoint. VanHerck said on Monday that they are talking about that. “So glass off of solar panels, potentially hazardous material, such as material that is required for a batteries to operate in such an environment as this and even the potential for explosives to detonate and destroy the balloon that could have been present.”

The opportunity to assess the capabilities on the balloon and the transmission capabilities was well worth the time that was taken.

The balloon was ultimately shot down on Saturday afternoon by a single missile from a F-22 fighter jet out of Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. The operation was carried out by active duty, Reserve, National Guard, and civilian personnel, according to the Navy’s photo captions.

The news of a Chinese balloon touched off panic in the U.S. When the Pentagon said last week that a similar high-altitude balloon had been identified over Latin America, China responded by saying it was another research balloon that was badly off-course, deeming it “an unexpected, isolated incident caused by force majeure,” meaning events beyond the country’s control.

The alternative would raise a separate set of concerns about China’s decision- making in relation to the US if it was learned that Xi was aware of the balloon being dispatched to the United States ahead of the US Secretary of State visit to Beijing.

She declined to comment on the equipment on board the balloon and the entities that own the balloon. Chinese statements suggest that the balloon was not operated by a government entity but rather it was linked to one or more companies. The person has not been named.

Mao Zhen said on Monday that China is a responsible country. We always follow international law. We have informed all relevant parties and appropriately handled the situation, which did not pose any threats to any countries.”

China is reviving technology from decades ago that can be used to build lighter-than-air vehicles, as well as developing vessels such as solar-powered drones. They include stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons – similar to the one identified over the continental United States and shot down on Saturday.

And a range of “near-space flight vehicles” will play a vital role in future joint combat operations that integrate outer space and the Earth’s atmosphere, the article said.

The program’s existence shows the renewed importance that Chinese military officials attach to ballooning objects, a concept that Honghu’s research might have influenced. These airships, officials and researchers say, are not just tools for surveillance or gathering weather and meteorological data, but they also provide help with advanced weapons China is building, including hypersonic missiles, and are a new and important area of competition with the U.S.

The Liberation Army Daily, a state-run newspaper affiliated with the Chinese military, states that new warfare is taking place near space.

Near-Space Reception: A Story of American Progress and China’s Developments in Using Air-Drift Balloons for “Near Space Reception”

The sightings could reflect years of Chinese state and private investments into balloon capacity, making use of a centuries-old technology that could drift at low enough speeds that radar systems might not immediately tag them as foreign objects.

“They are cheap, provide long-term persistent stare for collection of imagery, communications and other information – including weather,” said Mulvaney, who authored a 2020 paper that detailed China’s interest in using lighter-than-air vehicles for “near-space reconnaissance.”

An example of advances China has made in this domain is the reported flight of a 100-meter-long (328 feet) unmanned dirigible-like airship known as “Cloud Chaser.” In a 2019 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, Wu Zhe, a professor at Beihang University, said the vehicle had transited across Asia, Africa and North America in an around-the-world flight at 20,000 meters (65, 616 feet) above the Earth.

The US has also been bolstering its capacity to use lighter-than-air vehicles. The US Department of Defense commissioned a American firm to use their stratospheric balloons as a means to develop a more complete picture and apply effects on the battlefield, according to a statement from the firm.

The documentary did not provide further information, but a paper published in April last year stated air-drift balloons were spotted over China in 1997.

“Understanding the atmospheric conditions up there is critical to programming the guidance software” for ballistic and hypersonic missiles, according to Hawaii-based analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

Both the self-governing island of Taiwan and Japan have acknowledged past, similar sightings, though it is not clear if they are related to the US incident.

The data from the incident will be sent back to China, if the balloon itself is referred to as a dual use or state owned.

All of the responses from the US and other countries at the end of the day have value to China and the PLA.

Reply to a brief House briefing on the Balloon-Rescued from the Atlantic Coast by President Xi Jinping

Administration officials from the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday on the balloon, which has prompted criticism from Republicans over allowing it to float across the US before it was shot down off the Atlantic coast.

The Chinese balloon was believed to be capable of monitoring US communication, according to a Biden administration official.

Lawmakers were told Thursday that the order to send the balloon was dispatched without Chinese President Xi Jinping’s knowledge, sources familiar with the briefing said.

The officials spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity and said that the US had only collected a small amount of electronics, along with the balloon canopy.

“We did not assess that it presented a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in actionable technical means from the Chinese,” said Gen. Glenn VanHerck, the commander of US Northern Command and NORAD, on Monday.

According to sources, the US has assessed that the Chinese appear to have stopped sending information after learning of the balloon, and that the US’ measures to protect sensitive intelligence from China’s spy operations should be taken into account.

The officials told lawmakers that the waters in Alaskan airspace are quite cold and deep, making it less likely they could have recovered the balloon, according to sources.

The sources said the House briefing was tense and several Republicans were railing against the administration, including one who said that the president looked weak by their actions.

The Pentagon told us they could mitigate in real-time and that safety was the top priority, according to the Illinois Democrat.

“I believe that the administration, the president, our military and intelligence agencies, acted skillfully and with care. Their capabilities are very impressive. Was everything done correctly? I can’t imagine that would be the case of almost anything we do. But I came away more confident,” Romney said Thursday.

Hearing the Pentagon’s assessment of the Chinese surveillance: Sen. Jon Tester and the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee

Senators pushed defense officials at an Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday over the military’s assessment of the Chinese surveillance, with Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana telling officials that he did not know how they could unequivocally say it was not a military threat.

“You guys have to help me understand why this baby wasn’t taken out long before and because I am telling you that that this ain’t the last time. “We saw short incursions, now we have seen long incursion, what happens next?” asked Tester, who is the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.

Pentagon officials said at the hearing that the Defense Department was not concerned about the balloon gathering intelligence over Alaska as it was not near sensitive sites.

The parts of the balloon recovered on the surface of the ocean have been delivered so far, while recovering additional pieces of the balloon that sunk has been complicated by bad weather, officials said.

The officials are still unsure as to whether any of the pieces were made in America or somewhere else. Because analysts have yet to look at the bulk of the equipment on the balloon, the officials said that there has not been a determination as to everything the device was capable of doing and its specific intent.

Of the small portion they have examined, analysts have not identified any sort of explosive or “offensive material” that would pose a danger to the American public.

The balloon that was found had English writing on it, however it was not high-tech, said a source familiar with congressional briefings. The source declined to say what parts of the balloon contained English writing.

Chinese spy balloon mission and China-US relations: State Department officials and senior state officials address the latest congressional hearing on alleged violations of the airspace sovereignty

The official said that based on China’s “messaging and public comments, it’s clear that they have been scrambling to explain why they violated US sovereignty and still have no plausible explanation – and have found themselves on their heels.”

The official said that the balloon did not have an explanation for violating the airspace of Central and South America. “The PRC’s program will only continue to be exposed, making it harder for the PRC to use this program.”

As U.S. Navy crews continue to fish parts of the alleged Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic, a senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, gave reporters an update on Thursday on some of what has been learned so far.

One FBI official said that it was too early to know what the intent was and how the device was operating.

Wang Wenbin, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, says this shows the U.S. is “without a doubt the world’s largest surveillance habitual offender and surveillance empire.” The U.S. national security council denied the allegations.

And the government is investing in improvements, too. In 2018, for example, China launched a project to research materials that can be used to make balloons that are higher in the air.

A source told Congress that the Biden officials believed both the senior leadership of the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese Communist Party were unaware of the balloon mission, and that China was still trying to figure it out.

The assessment was communicated to American lawmakers in briefings Thursday, according to CNN reporting – and if true, could point to what analysts say would be a significant lack of coordination within the Chinese system at a fraught period of China-US relations.

It could mean that Xi and his top advisers underestimated the potential gravity of the fallout of the mission and the possibility it could imperil Blinken’s visit, which would have been the first from the most senior US diplomat since 2018 and had been welcomed by Beijing as a path to easing strained ties.

Beijing, in a statement last weekend, appeared to link the device to “companies,” rather than the government or military – though in China the prominence of state-owned enterprises and a robust military-industrial complex blurs the line between the two.

“The problem with the centralization of power under Xi Jinping is the lack of delegation of authority to lower levels,” said Thompson, who is a senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

That means that lower-level officials who may have the capacity to more closely monitor such missions may not be empowered to do so, or not be equipped to make political judgments about their impact, he said. Power struggles between lower and higher ranking officials could also complicate communication, he said.

“There is a tension throughout the Chinese system – it’s a feature of Chinese governance, where lower levels fight for their own autonomy, and upper levels fight for greater control,” he said.

Past crises in China have pointed to these tensions, including the outbreaks of both SARS in 2002-2003 and more recently Covid-19, where reporting delays were widely seen as having slowed the response and compounded the problem. Local officials who feared repercussions or were used to a system where information flowed from the top down were blamed by some.

There is a possibility that balloon launches could end up in a gap where operations are not the same as in space or other aircraft missions.

In this case, entities that launch balloons may have received little or no resistance from other countries and are often seen as routine based on weather conditions and at modest costs.

“As a result, while the leaders of these programs have also become emboldened over time to test new routes, it was likely that they didn’t get top priority attention from the perspective of political risk,” he said.

Chinese President Xi Jintao, the Pentagon, and the Pentagon: Its Implications for China’s Defense Modernization

The Chinese Foreign Ministry was caught off-guard by the situation, releasing a first explanation more than a day after the Pentagon said it was tracking a suspected balloon.

“Because of his personality, he wants 100% (control),” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor, also at the NUS Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. I don’t think the president allows for that kind of freedom.

Even though the public was frustrated by a faltering economy after years of zero-Covid policy, and although the US responded by postponing the talks, Xi may have been happy that he diverted the attention of the public.

It is thought that Washington wants to keep the dialogue going, even though they were not aware of the situation during the meeting between President Joe Biden and China’s President Hu Jintao.

China has imposed sanctions on two American defense manufacturers over arms sales to Taiwan, a day after Beijing pledged to take “countermeasures” in response to Washington’s handling of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that entered US airspace late last month.

Private players have been brought in by the Chinese government. The U.S. Commerce Department imposed sanctions on six Chinese entities for their support to China’s military modernization efforts, after the U.S. shot out the Chinese balloon.

The Entity List is a powerful tool to identify and cut off actors who want to use their access to global markets to threaten American national security.

Three days in a row the US Fighter jets were dispatched to shoot down unidentified aerial objects high over the North American continent, threatening a political storm.

On Friday, an F-22 shot down another unidentified craft over Alaskan airspace . US pilots were able to get up around the object before it was shot down and reported that it didn’t appear to be carrying surveillance equipment.

NORAD has seen nothing short of craziness over the last two weeks and a half dozen hours after the February 4 shooting down of an Airborne Object over Lake Huron

There is a lot of intrigue going on with both the US and Russia involved in a proxy war against each other, as well as with China and Russia being hostile to each other.

“What’s gone on in the last two weeks or so, 10 days, has been nothing short of craziness,” Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS, hours before an airborne object was shot down over Lake Huron.

With the North American Aerospace Defense Command on heightened alert, US fighters have now blasted three objects out of the skies since Friday following the shooting down of the Chinese balloon off the South Carolina coast on February 4:

An F-16 shot down a high-altitude object over Lake Huron on Sunday, which lies between Michigan and Ontario. The object was assessed by the Pentagon as a flight hazard and not a military threat. The craft reached a radar signal picked up earlier over Montana, which is home to the US intercontinental missile silos.

In fact, NORAD commander Gen. Glen VanHerck said recent objects shot down were likely the first “kinetic action” that NORAD or the US Northern Command had taken against an airborne object over US airspace.

It’s possible that the last few days brought serious national security and political questions far beyond the political fight of Washington, and that can only be assessed once more details are understood.

As officials understand the sequence of events and more about the objects, new speculation and criticism could be premature. CNN’s Natasha Bertrand reported on Sunday that NORAD had recently readjusted the filters it uses to sift data, which had previously concentrated on spotting fast-moving objects below a certain altitude. The source briefed on the matter said that Early warning filters were put in place to avoid picking up birds and weather balloons.

Biden, Tapper, and the State of the Union: Air Space Intrusions from the White House aren’t Securing the Southern Sky

Biden on Thursday justified the decision to wait to shoot the Chinese balloon, saying he gave the green light for the US military to take it down “as soon as it was safe to do so.”

The political blame game is heating up. On CNN’s “State of the Union,” GOP Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, linked the incursions of US air space to Republican claims that Biden is failing to protect the southern border and complained that senior officials were not briefing Congress enough. And he also adopted a novel critique of Biden given claims that the president didn’t act quickly enough before.

Turner told Jake Tapper that they seem happy, but this is certainly preferable to the environment they showed during the Chinese spy balloon incident.

The argument that the height of the Chinese balloon made the Biden administration not worry is a lie, as shown by this.

Biden, who didn’t address the new intrusions at a black-tie event with state governors on Saturday, has yet to speak to Americans in person about the trio of incidents over the weekend.

“Because we have not yet been able to definitively assess what these recent objects are, we have acted out of an abundance of caution to protect our security and interests,” said Melissa Dalton, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs.

“They are getting lots of positives that they did not get before. Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said most of that will be airplanes.

“What we can’t answer now is, is this bigger aperture picking up lots of stuff that has essentially been forgiven, around in the skies, because it didn’t pose a threat, or is it part of something organized for whatever surveillance?”

There was more confusion on Sunday. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said on ABC’s “This Week” that the two objects shot down over Alaska and the Yukon were balloons but smaller than the original Chinese intruder, after saying he had earlier been briefed by Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser.

Republican Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana appeared to make a direct link Sunday on “CNN Newsroom” between the Chinese balloon and the latest objects, even if there is no confirmation so far that they are connected.

The U.S. Approach to the Airborne Objects That Have Been Shooting Down: Implications for the Case of the Feb. 9, 2016 Capitol Hill Shootdown

“It doesn’t give me much safe feelings knowing that these devices are smaller,” he said. “I am very concerned with the cumulative data that is being collected. … I need some answers, and the American people need answers.”

“Crews have been able to recover significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified as well as large sections of the structure,” U.S. Northern Command said.

The recovery operation has included the use of a crane to bring up large pieces of the airship, which was kept aloft by a balloon estimated to be up to 200 feet tall.

The U.S. quickly dismissed the explanation by blowing the balloon out of the sky.

Even before that shootdown, analysts urged the Biden administration not to allow the craft to return to China — both to limit the data it might convey, and to allow the U.S. to gain its own insights by recovering the equipment.

All of those objects have been described as smaller than the reputed spy balloon that triggered the initial uproar in early February. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Monday that no debris had yet been recovered from those objects.

Kirby said on Tuesday that new guidance will be provided by the National Security Council by the end of the week.

Questions about the balloon and other objects that were recently shot down — and the U.S. approach to the airborne objects — prompted a classified intelligence briefing for the entire Senate Tuesday morning. That session will be followed by a closed hearing by the Senate Intelligence Committee, scheduled for 2:30 p.m. ET.

Both the U.S. and China have traded fiery allegations of extensive aerial surveillance programs and injecting a new source of distrust and animosity between the two countries.

Shooting down the balloon, Biden added, sent “a clear message that the violation of our sovereignty was unacceptable. We did what we had to to protect our country.

Feb. 9: The U.S. briefs diplomats from 40 countries about the Chinese balloon it shot down. Both the House and Senate get classified briefings on the incident on Capitol Hill. The House passed a unanimous resolution condemning China’s alleged actions.

The White House’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, insists that there is no evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with the recent takedowns.

Chinese officials and diplomats discuss the discovery of a surveillance balloon in the U.S. airspace with the Secretary of State at a high level of contact

Emily Feng reported from Taipei. Lexie Schapitl reported from Washington, D.C. The report came from Washington, D.C.

The path the balloon traveled may have been decided by strong winds rather than deliberate maneuvers by Beijing, as US officials are not sure if it was intentional or not.

The Secretary of State met with the Chinese diplomat on Saturday. It is the highest level of contact between the two countries since the discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon over U.S. airspace earlier this month.

Asked earlier this month whether the Chinese government is “controlling the movement of the balloon, or is it just floating with air streams,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to comment in detail.

“The balloon went over many of them. He stated that it was loitered in some cases. “We took measures to protect that information. We took measures to get information about the balloon. And I think we’ll know more when we … actually get the remains.”

The Downing of a School Bus in China: Measurement and Detection of New High-Alptitude Objects Above US Airspace

The Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on Thursday that the two companies will be added to China’s sanctions list. They are banned from importing, exporting and investing in China.

Beijing has previously imposed sanctions on both companies in relation to their arms sales to Taiwan, without specifying what the penalties would entail and how they would be enforced. China’s ruling Communist Party views democratic Taiwan as its territory, despite never having controlled it.

Jake Sullivan is being directed to lead a government-wide effort for addressing future encounters with similar high-altitude objects by the president.

Specifically, the administration will be establishing an improved inventory of unmanned airborne objects above American airspace, implementing further measures to detect the objects, update rules and regulations for encounters with these types of objects above US skies, and establishing common global norms for similar encounters.

Administration officials from the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community have briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill on the initial Chinese spy balloon in recent days.

And officials had been wary of having the president speak publicly about the objects until more information was gathered about the three unidentified objects that were downed last weekend.

“The military advised against shooting it down over land because of the sheer size of it. It was the size of multiple school buses and it posed a risk to people on the ground if it was shot down where people lived,” he said. “Instead, we tracked it closely, we analyzed its capabilities and we learned more about how it operates. Because we knew its path, we were able to protect sensitive sites against collection. We waited until it was safe in the water and that would allow us to recover large quantities of components for further analysis.

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry says that a Chinese weather balloon was found on an outlying island and registered to a state-owned electronics company

The Defense Ministry stated that a Chinese weather balloon made a landing on a outlying island.

The ministry’s statement on Thursday said the balloon carried equipment registered to a state-owned electronics company in the northern city of Taiyuan.

Taiwan was the first line of defense after China split in 1949 and they are still considered to be a first line of defense.

Reached by phone, a publicity officer at the company, identified in the report as Taiyuan Wireless (Radio) First Factory Ltd., said it had provided electronics but had not built the balloon.

The spokesperson, who gave only his surname, Liu, said Taiyuan was among a number of companies that provided equipment to the China Meteorological Administration.

The balloon was likely among those launched daily to monitor weather and was probably set off from the coastal city of Xiamen with no fixed course, he said.

Its deflation was likely a natural outcome of it having reached maximum altitude of around 30,000 meters (almost 100,000 feet), Liu said. Such balloons regularly fly over the Taiwan Strait but have only recently begun to draw attention, he said.

Information on the equipment was written in the simplified Chinese characters used on the mainland rather than the traditional on Taiwan, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/17/1157771528/taiwan-reports-that-a-chinese-weather-balloon-was-found-on-an-outlying-island

The Pentagon’s Central Military Commission: Where the enemy resides within the seams: Taiwan’s closest military ally and diplomatic ally

Despite not having formal ties, Washington is Taiwan’s closest military and diplomatic ally. Beijing protests strongly over all contacts between the island and the U.S., but its aggressive diplomacy has helped build strong bipartisan support for Taipei on Capitol Hill.

While not expressing regret for downing the three still-unidentified objects, Biden said he hoped the new rules would help “distinguish between those that are likely to pose safety and security risks that necessitate action and those that do not.”

A part of the Chinese military called the Strategic Support Force most likely oversees near-space programs, said John K. Culver, a former U.S. intelligence analyst on China. The central military commission is made up of the leaders of the various branches of the military and is equal to other branches of the military. It oversees space programs, electronic communications and cyberoperations.

Current and former U.S. officials said the U.S. government did not pay much attention to that zone. The military and intelligence agencies have been able to use space related budgets to deploy assets into far- flung outer space.

“We know how to detect them, we know how to track them, and we know how to kill them. We just weren’t looking for them, says the retired commander of the U.S. Northern Command. Where the enemy resides within those seams is where this goes to find.

On the first day of internet access in New Zealand: Mike Cassidy’s “moonshot” experiment at Loon, a 20 million km long journey

Mike Cassidy just about broke a gut when he read the story. Before he left Alphabet in 2017, he was in charge of a project called Loon, which aimed to provide internet access to underserved regions via stratospheric balloons. The X “moonshot” lab is where Loon began and later graduated to be a separate unit.

The first public demonstration of its kind in New Zealand, Loon had already met and surpassed a whole host of breaking points, which was a claim that Wu was making. Altitude? Using specially fabricated materials for its skin, Loon had no problem sustaining heights above 60,000 feet. Is it possible to circumambulate the globe? Cassidy states that one of the balloons went around the world 14 times and contributed to 40 million kilometers in the air. Networking three balloons? At one point, we had many in the air at the same time. All of them networked. What made the Loon balloons even more impressive was how much they were able to steer themselves by taking advantage of AI-powered predictions of wind currents, informed by real-time government weather data. Armed with that data, the balloons could autonomously change altitude to find a favorable wind direction. And it was all controlled by software that could be operated by a staffer’s laptop or cell phone.

U.S.-China Relations after the Decay of a High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon: The Airship Case

In a U.S. summary of the meeting in Munich, Price said Blinken “directly spoke to the unacceptable violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law by the [People’s Republic of China] high-altitude surveillance balloon in U.S. territorial airspace, underscoring that this irresponsible act must never again occur.”

During a discussion with Wang, Blinken discussed discouraging China from supporting Russia in its war with the Ukrainians and condemning North Korea for firing a missile into the sea of Japan, according to Price.

Chinese state-owned Xinhua News Agency reported the Blinken-Wang meeting was “requested by the U.S. side.” China Global TV Network (CGTN) said Wang made clear China’s “solemn position on the so-called airship incident in an informal conversation”, in a brief news report.

Wang demanded that the U.S. side change course and acknowledge the damage that their excessive use of force had caused to China-U.S. relations.

He said that China wanted to support peace talks in Ukraine and would forward a proposal for a political settlement of the issue.

It’s too soon to tell how the meeting will impact relations between the U.S. and China. Biden said that he would speak with China’s leader but would not apologize for shooting the balloon down.

The original intent was not positive, but it was apparent that it was a attempt to surveil the very sensitive military sites in the United States.

The top US diplomat said that he is concerned about China helping Russia’s military, specifically that Beijing is considering supplying Moscow with “lethal support.”

We have made it quite clear to them that lethal support would be detrimental to our relationship, and we have also made it clear that they shouldn’t even think about it,” Blinken said.

Honghu Program: Exploring the Early Stages of Airspace Science in China and Implications for its Geophysical and Navigational Role

The Honghu Program will be a research initiative focused on producing near-space technology that can identify clearly, stay in place and be useful. He vowed to build “my country’s first near-space science experiment system.”

Until recently, militaries overlooked that part of airspace, just before the beginning of outer space, due to its proximity to the ground.

“Strengthening the exploration and understanding of near space, seizing the strategic commanding heights of near space and cultivating emerging high-tech industries have become the focus of competition among countries around the world,” declared Xiang Libin, a vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Xiang, an engineer who specializes in microsatellites and space technology, also serves as chief commander of the Beidou satellite system, China’s competitor to the U.S.-run GPS.

Near-space balloons can be fixed to one spot on the Earth’s surface, allowing them to fill a void that satellites cannot.

Their hypersonic application has turned slow-moving balloons, previously considered a low-tech option, into a surveillance and navigational tool seen as increasingly crucial by Chinese military officials.

“Near-space vehicles have increasingly become the new darling of long-range and rapid strike weapons, and the pace of future wars will be significantly accelerated,” said an editorial in Chinese state media.

Run through the state-run Laboratory of Quantitative Remote Sensing Information Technology in Beijing, the Honghu Program’s researchers focused their efforts on developing materials light yet strong enough to prevent gas leakage at such high altitudes and to improve the limited steering abilities of the blimps.

The project scientists would conduct six experiments in the next two years by flying balloons off the elevated Tibetan plateau into northwestern Qinghai province. The experiments were designed to collect atmospheric and wind data as well as ground data from the balloons, according to state media.

Much of that research is based on papers and patents published by near-space researchers, in line with a claim made by Beijing that a balloon shot over the U.S. was a research balloon. Yet even simple meteorological data can have military applications, say analysts, collected at a fraction of the cost of operating a satellite.

The US military calls for a kill chain that could be accomplished with balloonists. It’s kind of all the steps you would need in terms of finding the target, getting that information to the hypersonic missiles, then giving updates to the missile,” says William Kim, a consultant for Washington-based think tank the Marathon Initiative.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/03/1159414026/china-balloon-near-space-scientific-research-weapons

Beijing’s program of civil military fusion wants to bring in more private companies than it does at Beijing, according to Yang Dong, a Hong Kong technology investor

Four of the six companies are private enterprises founded or run by just two men, and one of them is Wang Dong, a technology investor.

Matthew Turpin says that Beijing’s program of civil military fusion certainly seeks to bring in more private companies largely because the Chinese government views them as more innovative than what their state-owned enterprises have been able to do in the past.

An online biography for Wu showed a career first built within the public sector, teaching at Beihang University, a state aeronautics institute now sanctioned by the U.S. government for its military ties. He then became a member of the Chinese army’s General Armaments Department.

In 2015, Wu struck out on his own, founding an aerospace company dedicated to developing what it called “near-space vehicles,” including balloons. In 2019, one of his companies said it successfully circumnavigated the globe with a silvery, high-altitude blimp.

The rivalry between the United States and Russia appears to be motivating private innovation. Published papers from Chinese government-affiliated research bodies closely monitored U.S. private companies and technology, including SpaceX, and measured domestic progress in near-space research with these companies.

Turpin is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute, a Washington think tank, and he said that you could know who key individuals are in certain areas. Beijing can use high-resolution imagery to map out the routines and locations of important personnel who work at military sites.