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Pentagon Declines to Answer If It Shot Down $12 Balloon with $400k Missile
- emrah 4y agoWhy did they blow up the balloons instead of trying to capture them in one piece and perhaps study them? What if they had something dangerous on board that could spread everywhere in the air upon getting blown to pieces?!
- scyzoryk_xyz 4y agoTheatrics. Pentagon money well spent, bang for the buck, if those factored in.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoAnd now next years budget is justified with more money dedicated to missile manufacturers.
- pas 4y agojust make it a magnitude cheaper, but order 10 times as many, same deal, better PR!
- hypothesis 4y agoThey better be ready, because next guy is definitely going to launch 10x balloons for a grand total of “next to nothing”!
- kilgnad 4y agoExactly but why the theatrics? To cover up the huge event from the week before: https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int/22973-us-and-norway-blew-up-the-nord-stream-pipelines-seymour-hersh.html https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int/22973-us-and-norway-b... The point isn't to trick you into thinking it's real. It doesn't matter if you know it's all a bunch of bullshit. The administration literally conducted an act of war the week before. The theatrics are done to cover everything up. To make this bullshit the forefront of your mind rather then the blowing up of nord streams 1 and 2.
- gsatic 4y agoThey are not that competent. At best you could say they spend most of their time tricking themselves. But that's an American speciality not confined to the military.
- mardifoufs 4y agoI don't think there's a way to capture a balloon at 80 000 ft of elevation. Also, balloons would be just about the worst way to reliably deliver a payload without risk of it coming back to you. And there's also the fact that it's a scenario that has never happened, and there's nothing that would lead us to believe it has any chance of happening.
- Laaas 4y agoSend up a similar balloon but with people.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoYou wouldn’t even need people, a drone would be fine
- kjkjadksj 4y agoEasy, you use another balloon to grapple it, reduce lift, and therefore bring it down in a controlled manner. Of course this takes engineering and thought versus using a missile we can readily reorder.
- dpkirchner 4y agoWonder how much time and money it would take to create a maneuverable balloon that could rise 80k feet and precisely make contact with another balloon (that may also have some maneuvering controls).
- akerl_ 4y agoAh yes, “easy”.
- mardifoufs 4y agoIt's not about thought and engineering. If it was actually useful to do that, the military would've had no problem developing a solution like that. In fact, air to air missiles are infinitely more complex and engineered than any grappling balloon could ever be. It's just that it makes no sense to build something that is completely useless, for a scenario that won't happen.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI'd accept a few million from the DoD to begin a feasibility study of capturing them with a large butterfly net.
- krono 4y agoBlowing stuff up is just another means of communication Looking at that train derailment incident with the chemical spill and fire that recently took place in Ohio, it seems to me that the established order is rather willing to take the exact type of risk you describe
- kilgnad 4y ago[flagged]
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoThe F-22 costs more than $50,000 per flying hour to operate. The USAF flew the F-22 for approximately 28,000 hours in FY2021; but that $1.4bn expense is less than 1% of their annual budget. We're talking about a $400K missile so much, why?
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoWell, rather than poring over armed forces budgets, most of us are checking our W-2s around this time of year, and I tell you what: I can hardly afford the Secret Service bullets.
- ashwagary 4y agoWould you rather pay 5-10% less in taxes by cutting military spending?
- jackmott 4y ago[dead]
- pydry 4y agoCoz it's either that, Seymour Hersh or exploding trains and the last two are kind of awkward.
- sabujp 4y agotwo missiles apparently
- _-david-_ 4y agoThey need to fly to ensure that new pilots learn and older pilots remain polished. They don't need to blow up a pico balloon if that is what it was.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoOK - but flying an actual intercept mission and firing a warshot at an atypical target is a pretty good way to improve or maintain readiness.
- fma 4y agoThey didn't recover the object...so they wouldn't be able to answer either way. I'm surprised they couldn't do a visual inspection and say yep...it's a pico balloon. And if it was, I'm pretty impressed a missile can hone in on something like that.
- abudabi123 4y agoThe Cuban Missile Crisis had backdoor communication to resolve the urgent problem of the day. That object in a spy thriller movie could be a backdoor object.
- panarky 4y agoIf you find you're angry about a large government wasting half a million dollars, then you'll be really angry when you find out how much it actually wastes. And then when you find out that government waste is a fraction of the waste in private enterprises, well, you probably won't be angry about that at all. Because the personality that rages at public waste never seems to be all that concerned with the much greater level of private waste.
- sabujp 4y agoyou're wrong about the private waste, I'm angry about it also but I can't do anything about that. But as a tax payer in the top 2% in the US I am justified in my anger towards the US govt wasting tax payer dollars shooting AIM-9x in F-22s to blow up balloons.
- shitlord 4y agoWas there a more cost effective way to shoot down the balloon? Is there any actual competition in the missile industry? I read the story about the F-18 shooting down a balloon with its gun, but it's also expensive to fly and maintain such a jet.
- jtsiskin 4y ago…not shooting it down in the first place.
- shitlord 4y agoIf a balloon really is operated by someone attempting to spy on sensitive military installations, it makes financial sense to shoot it down. It's cheaper to spend 400k on a missile than to have your adversary learn something they shouldn't.
- panarky 4y agoIf the federal budget is $2T and if you paid $100K of that in taxes, your contribution to a $400k wasted missile is two cents. I might suggest that two cents does not justify very much anger.
- elliekelly 4y agoZero Hedge is an even less reliable source of information than the narrator in the blog’s favorite book (or, more likely, movie).
- abudabi123 4y agoTwo $400K missile a shot were needed to bring down one balloon at the target price range $12 to $180. The first sidewinder missile missed.
- johnea 4y agoIt was only $400K? Must have been one of those old icky missiles that desperately needed replacement anyway. U.S. defense spending will OBVIOUSLY have to go up: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/16/ukraine-war-defense-budget-taiwan/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/16/ukraine-w... Military spending as percentage of GDP: World total 2,113 2.2 100% 1 United States 801.0 3.2 38% 2 China 293.0 1.7 14% 3 India 76.6 2.4 3.6% 4 United Kingdom 68.4 2.1 3.2% 5 Russia Russia 65.9 3.1 3.1% I mean, we're only spending 1/3 of all the money spent on military in the world!! How lame is that? We need to shoot down those weather baloons with $1M missiles!!!
- cafard 4y agoWhere's Frank Luke when you need him?
- am44jnsf 4y agousing a laser would be a much more practical weapon against a balloon. Anyway, Bing better stop sending up those balloons.
- AbrahamParangi 4y agoBoth zerohedge and Snowden are sources that you should basically never be listening to. They are intensely unreliable and Snowden’s essentially a state mouthpiece for the Russian government at this point.
- sander27home 4y agoThis is how American military was defeated with absolute humiliation by Talebans and Vietnamese. The opponents simply overwhelm your expensive toys with cheap counter measures. Even American soldiers like Deltas and Rangers couldnt afford to get slaughtered by untrained enemy combatants in the hundreds of thousands. Imagine China flood American skys with a million balloons with fentanyl powders. How effective is American patriots and THAAD and F35 going to defend against that? No wonder American was defeated in Afghanistan after spending 10T ISD and 20 years there. This obsessions with wonder weapon is one of the reason how Hitler loss to Stalin Russia. Guess Americans have to relearn that lesson.