When former President Donald Trump yelled “Tear down the balloon” on Friday! Through a message in capital letters on his network, Truth Social, two days ago the real commander-in-chief of the United States, Joe Biden, had proposed shooting down the Chinese airship that had been flying over North America since the previous Saturday.
We already know the official version of why the president did not finally give the order that same Wednesday: the military high command advised against the operation at that time, when the device was at an altitude of more than 18,000 meters, due to the risk that the dispersion of The debris on a surface with a radius of up to 11 kilometers represented for people on the ground: at that moment, up to 2,000 citizens could have been in danger in the state of Montana, according to the Pentagon. So it would be better to wait for the artifact to follow its trajectory from northwest to southeast and reach the Atlantic Ocean for the air force to shoot it down then and then army divers to recover its remains, as they began to do after the shoot down.
The Department of Defense had meanwhile deployed, according to what its senior officials reported, the "necessary measures" to protect from aerial espionage the facilities likely to offer some information to the Chinese, including the Malmstrom air base in Montana, where one is located. of the three US nuclear missile silos. Such protection measures could include jamming any signals picked up and sent from the balloon and even downloading any data and software the device might have.
On Saturday, when the blimp was six nautical miles (11 kilometers) off the coast of South Carolina, a single AIM 9X sidewinder missile fired from a Virginia-based F-22 Raptor fighter jet blew up the balloon at 2:39 p.m. hours. The remains fell into waters with a depth of just 15 meters.
What do the specialists from the Intelligence agencies to which the Navy will deliver the pieces aspire to find? Basically, the Pentagon hopes to discover the image capture and communications systems – that is, espionage – contained in the surveillance and data transmission capsule of the convertible: a piece that the army believes could have fallen into the water intact and expects recover. The specialists will apply techniques of what is known as reverse engineering or retroengineering to try to unravel the operation and keys to the manufacture of the device.
Spy balloons do not obtain images that are not obtained from a satellite, but they can offer higher resolution. And they have other advantages, such as that they are cheaper and in good atmospheric conditions they can stay longer near a target and pick up radio, mobile and other transmissions that are difficult to detect from space. But, according to what intelligence experts warn, the expectations of recovering interesting software and data in the bowels of the globe are limited.
What is essential is rather the hardware of the gadget, its system itself. Because his test “will test whether the Chinese have used listening and monitoring devices, communication signals; intelligence apparatus”, explained defense academic and researcher Michael Clark on Sky News yesterday. Thus, the Pentagon "will be able to clearly prove that this was not a weather balloon," as Beijing maintained when the device was discovered and Xi Jinping's government had to acknowledge that it was his. And, to begin with, a meteorological balloon measures up to 6 meters, while this one reached 27, approximately.
More difficult, if not impossible, will be to find out why the balloon invaded Canadian and US airspace: whether it was by accident, as Beijing claims; Either because China was really looking for military information, or because it wanted to provoke Washington and blow up the relevant détente visit that Secretary of State Antony Blinken was going to do over the weekend and actually cancelled. Or because he wanted to respond to the latest US advances in Asia, such as the recent agreement between Washington and the Philippines whereby the US military will have access to four bases in the archipelago, in addition to the five it already uses,
It was also missing yesterday to find out what happens with the supposed second spy balloon sighted in Costa Rica and Colombia, in the latter case with confirmation from the country's Air Force on the detection and tracking, until its departure from Colombian airspace, of a balloon " similar” to the one killed by the United States.
The Chinese balloon fell, at least one of them. But his mysteries are still in the air. Or underwater.
