Posted on 02/10/2023 7:02:25 AM PST by billorites
Weather balloon? Spy balloon? Nope, and nope. I guess that the Chinese balloon sighted over Montana and Missouri this week – and just shot down off the coast of South Carolina by an F-22 Raptor – was a trial balloon.
Sure, it may have gathered intelligence about military doings on the surface below, but that was a mere bonus.
If I’m right, Beijing’s chief reason for floating a balloon over North America was to see whether it would elicit a response from the U.S. government and military, as well as from the American people.
And so it did, judging from the subsequent uproar in the press and on social media. Advantage: Xi Jinping & Co.
Now China will use what it learned about American psychology to sharpen its “three warfares” strategy. Three warfares refers to China’s all-consuming effort to shape the political and strategic environment in its favor by deploying legal, media, and psychological means. This is a 24/7/365 endeavor, and it’s in keeping with venerated strategic traditions.
After all, Mao Zedong—the Chinese Communist Party’s founding chairman and military North Star—instructed his disciples that war is politics with bloodshed while politics is war without bloodshed.
In the Maoist worldview, in other words, there is no peacetime. It’s all war, all the time for Communist China.
And getting to know your enemy lays indispensable groundwork for victory. The greats of strategic theory and history—including China’s own Mao and Sun Tzu—constantly hector field commanders and their political masters to acquaint themselves with likely antagonists. But not everything that counts can be counted.
Sizing up a prospective foe accurately demands more than tallying up ships, planes, or tanks, or estimating industrial capacity. It involves fathoming intangibles relating to that foe’s culture and society.
Here’s how the balloon sightings may fit into China’s three-warfares offensive. Suppose you’re Beijing and you want to design strategies and tactics for deterring or coercing the United States, your major opponent. You need to find out how that opponent responds to external stimuli.
So you test its reflexes. You do zany-seeming things like sending lighter-than-air craft into U.S. airspace, in full view of people on the ground. And you gauge their response.
If they overreact to an incursion that poses no direct threat, you’ve learned something. Namely that you can strike a cultural nerve by getting in Americans’ faces. Ordinary folk seem largely indifferent to such worrisome developments as the People’s Liberation Army’s constructing anti-access sensors and weaponry specifically to kill American soldiers, sailors, and aviators in large numbers. Out of sight, out of mind.
But when an unarmed foreign aircraft appears over the North American heartland . . . OMG!
The balloon sightings had strategic import, then. Deterrence or coercion involves threatening something an adversary holds dear, and then convincing the adversary you can and will make good on the threat if its leadership defies you.
Beijing may have come to doubt that it can influence Washington’s strategic behavior by menacing U.S. expeditionary forces in the Western Pacific.
But it might deter, coerce, or even just distract by making mischief in the Western Hemisphere—and by sowing havoc in such a visible way that the man on the street must take heed.
That’s the lesson of the Great Chinese Balloon Blitz of 2023.
So this week’s events have taught, or rather reminded, us of something about Communist China: it is perpetually on the offensive, in wartime and peacetime alike. The episode also taught us something about ourselves and our acute sensitivity to threats to the homeland. One hopes the big brains at places like the White House, Foggy Bottom, and the Pentagon factor that knowledge into their efforts to manage popular sentiment for this age of great-power competition. They can harden American society against China’s three warfares.
Know your opponent; know yourself; and you stand yourself in good stead.
Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.
Yep. The armchair generals have done their Monday Morning quarterbacking. Xi liked the hubris it created. The more I think about it, the more just letting it go was the best strategy and taking it down when we were good and ready.
The CCP has learned that they can send an object anywhere across America to release anything they desire (drones, airborne biowarfare, etc.) without a response...until they hit an ocean. And then...it’s too late.
I find the timing with Joe’s SOTU, suspicious.
I think our public response was exactly what the Chinese social monitoring arm of their intelligence agency wanted.
They can now show the hypocrisy of the American people when it comes to intelligence gathering. For over 70 years we conducted spying missions over others airspace, with the U2 and SR-71 flights going on almost daily. Someone does it to us, and we have a hsit storm response to it.
I guarantee this will be driven home in their media 24/7 to score points with the masses there.
Don’t believe the first but definitely believe the second.
They were spying and it was a testing the waters to see how we’d respond.
BINGO!
AND the CHINKCOMS also have more advanced balloon tech than the West does. They sneak them under the NORAD radar horizon
And they carry a 2500 to 3000 lb payload, good enough for a nuke or a biowarfare pod.
Imagine having to deal with 1000 balloons equipped with nukes or biorwarfare pods, too high to shoot down at 80 angels?
We need x wing fighters like Star Wars.
An extraordinarily unintelligent opinion by Dr. James Holmes.
China’s “trial” balloon got the two parties in Congress, who hate each other, to agree to a unanimous resolution denouncing their action.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Xi Jinping is a disastrous leader who has excelled in making powerful enemies for China. When he took office China was heading to the top, and now the CCP will need luck to survive. I wish the CCP bad luck.
The only reason we (the public) know is because some reporter initially thought he was going to check out a UFO. Otherwise, the Deep State regime would have stayed mum.
And yes, I am insinuating there is an element of treason involved in allowing it to happen.
That balloon should have been blown out of the sky BEFORE it ever crossed into CONUS. Somebody in the Biden Administration knew exactly what was going on. Hell, a simple telescope could have seen what was happening. It was no “innocent” weather balloon.
YES, I believe inaction rises to the level of Treason. The over the top “shoot down” was sickening kabuki theater.
Ohhhh Joey Biden is a Bad Ass. No, more likely Joey Biden is a DUMBASS and waited for “permission” to act like a Bad Ass. China just proved to the world that they “OWN” Joey and other key individuals in the US Govt. This entire incident is on the same level of Treason as the Bald Headed Moron who says the Southern Border is secure.
FJB
“Sure, it may have gathered intelligence about military doings on the surface below, but that was a mere bonus.”
__________________________________________
Spying.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the DNC Dung beetles in their “mainstream media” paid the Red Chinese to float these balloons to make the demented, cranky old pedophile look good and pull his chestnuts out of the fire. The manic “media” Dung beetles have sold Let’s Go Brandon, FJB, to the ignorant, obnoxious and uninformed recipients of college participation “diplomas” in this country and they want to keep it that way.
“That balloon should have been blown out of the sky BEFORE it ever crossed into CONUS.”
“A senior Pentagon official on Thursday tried to justify the military’s decision not to shoot down a Chinese balloon as soon as it entered Alaskan airspace by highlighting the dangers doing so would have posed to the recovery and examination of its surveillance equipment.”
It should have been dropped while still in Alaskan airspace but wasn’t because they couldn’t be comfortable they would be able to salvage it. Instead they blew it up over the Atlantic and are now trying to get the information from it that is already in Chinese hands because they waited so long? Kinder and gentler government? Or just plain stupid? And with the joint radar set up with Canada for our NWAD system, we knew exactly where the thing was from where it entered Alaskan airspace to the Carolinas.
Somehow they missed that part about the ounce of prevention thing.
wy69
I find the timing with Joe’s document scandal suspicious.
Took it right out of the news cycle...poof, gone!
This is more of the “Nothing to see here, folks” BS. They are still working on recovering the buss-sized electronics package from the sea bottom. Let’s wait until they are able to get it on board the salvage ship. Then we will know what kind of info the Chi-Coms were able to pick up.
I’ll bet our Balloons are bigger and better than Xi’s, there both probably using the same components.
I’ll bet our Balloons are bigger and better than Xi’s, there both probably using the same components.
A Senior Pentagon Official = JUST PLAIN STUPID.
Ever since Obozo, the collective IQ of the Pentagon seems to have dropped precipitously.
We both spy on each other 24/7
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