“Furthermore I am confident certain tools were employed to prevent it from collecting and transferring quality intel.”
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What I understand was the order was given to these sites being surveilled to go silent so there would be no communications to be gathered.
That’s a far cry from preventing it from collecting and transferring quality intel. The spy balloon was obviously still able to receive and transmit data as it was still able to be steered/maneuvered.
I wish I had you level of faith in our military and intelligence community, but we have Generals who are bombastic that they would inform China if our Commander-in-Chief was going to “get out of hand.”
If you are on the inside, you are aware of the capabilities of the platforms which can be mounted on an orbiting, proximal U-2.
Sure the ground stations could go into a different EMCON status, but realistically ELINT and SIGINT satellites can capture RF from the ground.
It’ll be really interesting to the intel-weenies who get to crawl all over the photos, telemetry and physical guts of this thing.
And yes, flag/general officers are politicians. And we know what that means.