The U.S. military's record on dealing with China's spy balloon challenge? It's a mixed bag.
Let's start with the positives.
The downing of the most recent balloon over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday was highly impressive. The military cordoned off the relevant air and water spaces and gathered intelligence to allow for highly effective targeting. Waiting for the optimal moment to strike, an Air Force F-22 fighter jet from the 27th Fighter Squadron fired one missile that scored a near-perfect hit. A video shows that the balloon's intelligence, power, and communications array was dissected from the balloon while suffering little apparent structural damage. This will likely allow for maximal U.S. intelligence exploitation of the array. While the array obviously hit the water at speed, any impact damage is likely to be far less problematic for exploitation purposes than if the array had suffered explosives-related fragmentation.
How much of the array/balloon has been recovered?
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby noted on Monday that "the [Atlantic] debris field is about 15 football fields by 15 football fields square." Nevertheless, the government may be exaggerating the complexity of the recovery operation so as to deceive China as to what it has already recovered. Consider that the military had a lot of assets monitoring the balloon's trajectory and debris trail (this allows for the monitoring of hundreds of debris objects ranging from very small to large). The water where the debris landed is shallow, and water conditions are acceptable.
There's another positive to note — namely, that the Air Force's 27th Fighter Squadron and its sister 94th Fighter Squadron serve as a key element of the nation's air dominance rapid response force. That an F-22 so ably accomplished this shootdown will, at least at the margin, boost the morale and confidence of U.S. fast jet forces globally. As the likelihood grows of a near-term conflict with China over Taiwan, this consideration carries real importance.
WHAT CHINA'S BALLOON WAS DOING
Also praiseworthy was the military's effort to jam the balloon's communications and controls. Any other nation would struggle to provide the persistent and wide-ranging capabilities entailed by this full-spectrum disruption. This effort mitigated the intelligence-gathering value that the balloon produced, thus shifting its technical cost-benefit appraisal firmly into the cost category for Beijing (the balloon's political intelligence value is another consideration altogether).
There are negatives.
Senior military officials have clearly been playing a deliberate bureaucratic rearguard covering operation with regard to the broader Chinese balloon concern. This bears note in relation to previous incidents that we're just now learning about. These incidents were not reported to Trump administration officials and included apparent Chinese balloon incursions over Guam, Hawaii, and the coastal areas of the continental United States. The military says that its failures to detect, deal with, and brief on those incursions are down to the balloons being hard to detect. They say some balloons were originally classified as UFOs.
These are weak excuses. America's military and intelligence community have long been aware of China's spy balloons, their capabilities, and Beijing's strategic employment of them. Moreover, as I reported on Monday, the People's Liberation Army explicitly uses the stigma over UFOs as a useful cover for its balloon operations. The PLA's own website describes how "many national and military studies have found that experimental stratospheric balloons are emerging as viable, capable alternatives to aerial weapons that are less likely to be detected by enemy air defenses or often mistaken for UFOs."
It is thus inexcusable that senior military officers continue to take the view that "UFOs," whether of the truly unconventional kind, the Chinese spy balloon kind, or the drone kind, can be a catch-all excuse for higher tolerance of air defense mission failure. Congress should call the relevant active and former combatant commanders to testify on what they did and did not do during previous balloon incidents.
Ultimately, the balloon is down, and its debris is in U.S. hands. That's obviously a good thing. At the tactical level, the military performed superbly during this incident. At the strategic level, however, some harder questions must be asked.