Posted on 02/05/2023 5:25:51 AM PST by FarCenter
The United States has shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of the US state of South Carolina, a week after it entered US airspace and triggered a dramatic spying saga that worsened relations between Beijing and Washington.
The military attack on Saturday drew an immediate rebuke from China, which warned of “necessary” responses and insisted the “unmanned civilian airship” was a weather research balloon that had strayed into US airspace “completely accidentally”.
...
China’s foreign ministry condemned Saturday’s hit on the balloon, expressing Beijing’s “strong dissatisfaction and protests against the use of force by the United States to attack the unmanned civilian airship”.
It criticised the US for “an obvious overreaction and a serious violation of international practice” and said it “will resolutely uphold the relevant company’s legitimate rights and interests, and at the same time reserve the right to take further necessary responses”.
The balloon’s presence in the skies above North America has dealt a severe blow to already strained US-Chinese relations, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken abruptly cancelling on Friday a high-stakes Beijing trip aimed at easing tensions.
China has been eager for a stable relationship with Washington so it could focus on its economy, battered by its now-abandoned zero-COVID policy.
Earlier on Saturday, the Chinese foreign ministry played down the cancellation of the Blinken visit, which had been agreed in November by Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, saying neither side had formally announced any such plan.
(Excerpt) Read more at aljazeera.com ...
Agreed, and the lamestream media as their spokespersons
Kabuki Theatre
Did the Chinese Communist Party send the balloons hoping they would be shot down so they could stir up the commies and distract from their problems back home ? LOL
We should send some weather B-2s over China.
Why did Canada keep silent ?
Did they get the call to keep it quite ? Yep
I take it you’re not a graduate of War College?…
If only Truman had listened to Macarthur...
That’s the issue........ the whole actual issue. You can’t “send” weather balloons anywhere.
Stratospheric balloons go where the thin stratospheric air currents take them.
At best, you can let a balloon lose in to the stratosphere and then track the movement. It can not be guided or directed.
So, my belief is that China released the balloons to learn about stratospheric air currents.
Where did the balloon actually come from? If it tracked near the Alaskan Allution islands did it not also travel over Russian land mass?
” I suggest we send a couple of dozen spy er ah weather balloons over China “
From what I’ve read, there have been US weather balloons that have crossed into China and have been shot down.
Does anyone remember when China held our spy plane and the crew when it was hit by a Chinese plane while flying off the Coast of China? China demanded we stop flying off their coast because it was a “national humiliation”.
“The military attack on Saturday drew an immediate rebuke from China, which warned of “necessary” responses and insisted the “unmanned civilian airship” was a weather research balloon that had strayed into US airspace “completely accidentally”.”
Where was the balloon launched from? Never said or maybe I just missed it.
If the photos I saw were real it sure seems like an awful lot of hardware for a weather balloon. I sure hope we were able to recover it so we can download all that weather data that it collected./sarc
Hmmm...... I doubt that statement for the simple fact that the upper air currents move easterly, not westerly.
The fact that a stratospheric Chinese balloon traversed the United States from Alaska and probably Canada is the proof of that thought.
If the photos I saw were real it sure seems like an awful lot of hardware for a weather balloon. I sure hope we were able to recover it so we can download all that weather data that it collected./sarc
If the hardware survived the splashdown, the navy should be able to recover it as the water depth there is around 40 feet it has been reported.
“A US aircraft at 80-thousand feet altitude should loiter in their air-space....see what they say about that!”
We did hear about it from China and the Soviet Union. It was called an SR-71 and they spent years trying to shoot it down. What China did was no different from what we did. Difference is we have the means to shoot these down as we did yesterday.
So the question remains, did we let this balloon fly across the country because our counterintelligence agencies were collecting data from it (which would be clandestine and not for public consumption) or did Biden instruct our intelligence and military agencies to not do anything about it?
If I remember correctly, back in the 90’s and early 2000’s Chinese subs would get into the baffles of our aircraft carriers and collect intelligence. I remember somewhere reading that we knew it was happening and let them do it because we would gather our own intelligence on their subs.
It is possible and even probable that we know about stratospheric air currents already.
Well you just knew they’d cry foul. After the had the unmitigated gall to send not one but two spy balloons over our territory. The Biden regime should have retaliated further than a shot down. Like maybe bucking up half the Chinese students/spies here and sending them back home.
Everything the Biden administration has done benefits China and hurts the USA.
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