A $400k missile to shoot down a balloon?..................
RE: A $400k missile to shoot down a balloon?..................
Where did you get this figure?
It’s just so tough to get close enough to use a safety pin.
Why be surprised. We did “shock and awe” in Iraq where we used million dollar weapons to destroy $10,000 bridges and then we paid “contractors” 10 million to rebuild it.
We did all that with ROE that said our military could not dispatch insurgents placing bombs along the roads because they were not pointing rifles at anyone because you know that people randomly take shovels out to the road to repair potholes in the middle of the night. I just did one the other day. /s
We did spend tens of billions of dollars on IED resistant vehicles instead of sniper teams and drones to kill the people planting bombs because the ROE said our guys should have traumatic brain injuries the rest of their lives rather than kill a person repairing a pothole at 1 in the morning where they filled the hole and ran a wire off into the brush as part of the repair.
You could not make this crap up.
Using guns would endanger a 100 million dollar airframe and pilot. Way too much danger of a collision, especially if debris separated.