Posted on 02/04/2023 7:24:53 PM PST by dynachrome
Balloon.
And the answer is "no". That this tall tale is even plausible is an indictment of our civilian political "leadership", not our military.
Interservice rivalries being such great fun, can we Air Force vets now start laughing at the Navy for not having a ship in place (despite days of warning and tracking) to collect the wreckage we just shot down for them?
And if the ChiComs should get the goodies, woe be unto Brandon. Woe indeed.
If you watch the better hi-res vids carefully, you can see that the proximity fuse worked just fine. A narrow cone blasts out from the missile into the balloon and, basically, shrapnel shreds the bottom of it. Might have caught the electronics package too - hard to tell, but that should break parts, not vaporize them.
Anything that Hoft writes needs to be read with a critical eye and verified with a second independent source, as he has a known history of sensational headlines about stories that don't have the facts to back up the headlines.
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