Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is a Trends Wide Homeland Security Analyst, Vice President of New America, and a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The opinions expressed in this comment are his own. See more opinion on Trends Wide.
(Trends Wide) — Knocking down the China balloon was akin to my 11-year-old son finally popping the toy balloon he’d been batting around the house all week.
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 deliver balloons into Soviet airspace.
In 1954 he was assigned to the Air Materiel Command Headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. There he worked on the “Greater Union” project, which deployed camera-carrying balloons over the then-Soviet Union. Those spy balloons were launched from Turkey.
My father didn’t talk much about this part of his career, probably because the work was secret, but the show has long since been declassified, having happened some seven decades ago.
Spy balloons are very old technology, folks. Using them is like taking a sharp ax to the war in Afghanistan; maybe it could have done something, but a 2,000 pound bomb would probably have a bigger effect on the enemy. (China has denied that the balloon was used for spying.)
In fact, balloons have been used as spy devices since the late 18th century. Some of Napoleon’s soldiers used them for reconnaissance in 1794. In the American Civil War, balloons were used by Union forces to track Confederate armies; there was even a Union Balloon Corps.
Now the United States and its rivals have these state-of-the-art gadgets called “spy satellites” that can take photos! They can make full motion videos. They can take thermal images that detect individuals moving at night. When the skies are clear, they can spy on just about anything, with a resolution of centimeters.
In fact, commercial satellite images are now so cheap that one can buy their own close-up images of, say, a Russian battlegroup in the Ukraine. Just ask Maxar Technologies, which has built a fairly profitable business based on this model and was just acquired two months ago for $6 billion by a venture capital firm.
In other words, the balloon flyover of the US territory of China is not a national security catastrophe, as a host of hyperventilating Republican politicians, since former President Donald Trump, have hinted on the downside.
But it may help explain, at least in part, an element of a little-noticed report released by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence last month.
The report examined more than 500 reports of unidentified objects in the sky over the past two decades, many reported by US Navy and Air Force personnel and pilots. These reports were evaluated by the Pentagon’s Office of All Domain Anomaly Resolution, a fancy name for the office that tries to examine UFO sightings.
The report noted that many of those sightings, 163, were balloons or “balloon-like entities.”
Now comes the news that three more balloons from China were in US airspace during the Trump administration, but were not widely disclosed then.
This raises some interesting questions about the work of the Pentagon’s Office of Wide Domain Anomaly Resolution: Could some of the balloons they identified be from China? And could some of the 171 “unexplained sightings” of UFOs they also assessed be Chinese balloons?
Republicans have called for congressional hearings on the balloon issue, and surely these questions will be well aired.
Spy balloons offer some advantages over satellites: they are relatively cheap and can be more maneuverable. So obviously it’s worthwhile for the US military to continue to scan the skies for foreign objects that could be Chinese balloons or spy drones.
But China has done much worse. US officials have accused her of profiting from the work of hackers who stole design data on the F-35 fighter jet as China builds its own new generation of fighters – and of sucking up much of the personal information of more than 20 million people. Americans who were current or former members of the US government when they allegedly hacked into US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) computers in 2015. China called the report on the theft of the F-35 “baseless” and denied responsibility for the OPM hack.
Hyping up the globe story may be good for politics, but it’s not a good assessment of the real threats China poses.
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Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is a Trends Wide Homeland Security Analyst, Vice President of New America, and a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The opinions expressed in this comment are his own. See more opinion on Trends Wide.
(Trends Wide) — Knocking down the China balloon was akin to my 11-year-old son finally popping the toy balloon he’d been batting around the house all week.
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 deliver balloons into Soviet airspace.
In 1954 he was assigned to the Air Materiel Command Headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. There he worked on the “Greater Union” project, which deployed camera-carrying balloons over the then-Soviet Union. Those spy balloons were launched from Turkey.
My father didn’t talk much about this part of his career, probably because the work was secret, but the show has long since been declassified, having happened some seven decades ago.
Spy balloons are very old technology, folks. Using them is like taking a sharp ax to the war in Afghanistan; maybe it could have done something, but a 2,000 pound bomb would probably have a bigger effect on the enemy. (China has denied that the balloon was used for spying.)
In fact, balloons have been used as spy devices since the late 18th century. Some of Napoleon’s soldiers used them for reconnaissance in 1794. In the American Civil War, balloons were used by Union forces to track Confederate armies; there was even a Union Balloon Corps.
Now the United States and its rivals have these state-of-the-art gadgets called “spy satellites” that can take photos! They can make full motion videos. They can take thermal images that detect individuals moving at night. When the skies are clear, they can spy on just about anything, with a resolution of centimeters.
In fact, commercial satellite images are now so cheap that one can buy their own close-up images of, say, a Russian battlegroup in the Ukraine. Just ask Maxar Technologies, which has built a fairly profitable business based on this model and was just acquired two months ago for $6 billion by a venture capital firm.
In other words, the balloon flyover of the US territory of China is not a national security catastrophe, as a host of hyperventilating Republican politicians, since former President Donald Trump, have hinted on the downside.
But it may help explain, at least in part, an element of a little-noticed report released by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence last month.
The report examined more than 500 reports of unidentified objects in the sky over the past two decades, many reported by US Navy and Air Force personnel and pilots. These reports were evaluated by the Pentagon’s Office of All Domain Anomaly Resolution, a fancy name for the office that tries to examine UFO sightings.
The report noted that many of those sightings, 163, were balloons or “balloon-like entities.”
Now comes the news that three more balloons from China were in US airspace during the Trump administration, but were not widely disclosed then.
This raises some interesting questions about the work of the Pentagon’s Office of Wide Domain Anomaly Resolution: Could some of the balloons they identified be from China? And could some of the 171 “unexplained sightings” of UFOs they also assessed be Chinese balloons?
Republicans have called for congressional hearings on the balloon issue, and surely these questions will be well aired.
Spy balloons offer some advantages over satellites: they are relatively cheap and can be more maneuverable. So obviously it’s worthwhile for the US military to continue to scan the skies for foreign objects that could be Chinese balloons or spy drones.
But China has done much worse. US officials have accused her of profiting from the work of hackers who stole design data on the F-35 fighter jet as China builds its own new generation of fighters – and of sucking up much of the personal information of more than 20 million people. Americans who were current or former members of the US government when they allegedly hacked into US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) computers in 2015. China called the report on the theft of the F-35 “baseless” and denied responsibility for the OPM hack.
Hyping up the globe story may be good for politics, but it’s not a good assessment of the real threats China poses.
