So the CCP spy balloon was finally taken down after loitering around U.S. airspace for the better part of a month. And Joe Biden describes the downing with chest-thumping verve, as if allowing Communist China’s military a week-long grand tour of two legs of our nuclear triad, missiles and bombers before popping the balloon was a real feat of military might.
It was a complete and unmitigated catastrophe. A vivid display of colossal dithering and weakness. And the deflection and misdirection which followed thanks to a supine media so brain dead it couldn’t frame the question “What comes after two?” was even more damaging.
“Well, our analysis shows that it’s pretty likely that THREE spy balloons crossed U.S. territory under TRUMP…” Really? The Secretaries of Defense, State, Homeland Security and the Directors of National Intelligence, the CIA and the National Security Council said that as far as they were concerned, that story was hogwash. Which leads to one of only three possible conclusions.
First, said balloons never existed; the whole attempt at diversion is a lie.
Second, the balloons were never detected, only discovered in a “re-review” of old data, i.e. they probably didn’t exist.
Third, they were detected but the military didn’t bother to tell civilian leadership about them.
I don’t know which is the most disturbing.
Let’s say the balloons existed. If we didn’t see them loitering about in our airspace until long after their departure for parts unknown, we’ve just exposed a huge gap in our ability to spot foreign threats. If this is true, we have a lot of work to do very quickly: what can carry the equivalent of three busloads of surveillance equipment can also carry hypersonic nuclear missiles or a very large EMP device. From sixty thousand feet up, China could paralyze the power grid from Seattle to Portland, Chicago to Indianapolis or Baltimore to Richmond.
Not to mention the signals intelligence it could vacuum up – apparently the last balloon’s goal.
And now Chinese leadership knows we have that weakness. Expect followup exploitation as soon as they can get ahold of enough hydrogen to float another giant aerostat.
The third possibility is even worse: it indicates that the military no longer thinks it is subject to civilian leadership. After all, we were only told about this balloon event because a reporter for the Billings, Montana daily paper saw it, had enough familiarity with the sky to realize it was anomalous, enough curiousity to check around to eliminate the usual suspects and enough gumption to tell his audience: “Hey, there’s something weird up there.” After that it was impossible to gaslight the public; anyone in the balloon’s path could just look up. But if he hadn’t let the cat out of the bag, how long would it have been before someone else tipped the public off?
Apparently the Biden Administration wasn’t about to. Even after it became impossible to ignore, it took the White House Clown Show four days to knock it down. Given that it entered US airspace on January 28, that’s a whole week the Chinese surveillance craft floated across the entire country, serene and unmolested.
I’m sure the Chinese Communist government followed that imbroglio with no little glee.
In the immediate aftermath, US and Canadian air forces detected and shot down four other “unidentified aerial phenomena” in a four-day frenzy. According to military spokespersons, we had “raised our radar sensitivities” so we were detecting everything down to chickadee level.
Believe that the ChiComs noticed that, too.
The whole thing was a fiasco of dangerously titanic proportions. A military that can’t see and won’t give its civilian leadership the information it should; a civilian leadership cadre that can’t think its way out of a paper bag and doesn’t know what to do about the locomotive barreling down the track on which it stands; government info flacks who couldn’t connect with the public even if they wanted to; a public just about fed to the teeth with the entire creaky, corrupt apparatus. This kind of public display of careless incompetence and vigorous ineptitude are an invitation to only one thing: stronger aggressions by the world’s thugocracies. We won’t have long to wait for the next one.
At least the empty-headed White House Press Spokesthey Karine Jean-Pierre gave us hope yesterday. The last four objects downed were not, she insisted, “extraterrestrial.” Nope, not a bit. Un-unh. Sure of that.
So, joy. It’s ET to the rescue, everyone…
