The future of foreign policy in the US is that everything is Havana Syndrome.
if we had called covid havana syndrome we would have got government support
Imagine if a spokesman for the Pentagon is giving a press briefing.
"As it has been repeatedly said - these Cessna-like objects—"
A young, green reporter doesn't follow well-established Pentagon press conference protocol and blurts out: "Excuse me! Cessna-like?!?"
"I... I misspoke. These cylinder-like..." He clears his throat. "These cylindrical objects"
"I must interrupt. Were any of 'objects' shot down small aircraft?"
Try as he might the spokesman can't help sounding like a guilty little kid who let the cat out of the bag. "The most recent three objects are cylindrical. Therefore they were not small aircraft..."
...Cessnas are kinda cylindrical when you ignore the wings. Actually all planes are.
Not all. Some planes are nothing like a cylinder, e.g.: P-38 lightning, Vought XF5U, Convair XFY-1 Pogo, F-117
It is your communist duty to deploy a weather balloon wherever you are, just to fuck with the state.
A red bloom rises
The mass line becomes a cloud
Murmurations of Revolutionary Defeatism
I think there just might be multiple weather balloons all got lost and now they're blowing in haphazardly.
The USA is hysterical and trigger-happy. They are so desperate to start something with china. It's pathetic.
Someone needs to spread a rumor that Norfolk Southern is a Chinese company
My theory that this whole thing is just to give bored pilots something to do seems more possible every day.
I'm guessing half of these are migrating geese, the other half are probably experimental polar bear flying machines.
I’m guessing half of these are migrating geese
Oh snap, what if there's a strain of bird flu that's so virulent that shooting down birds with missiles is the only safe way to handle it?
Well gotta give the 30 year old jets their first 3 kills.
(lobbyist whispering to press liaison)
"Make sure they mention exactly what brands of weapons they used"
All fighter pilots born after 1992 can't dog fight, all they know is never guns machine guns, fire sidewinder missile, no maneuvers, charge they phone, and lie.
More like all pilots post ww2. Top gun was invented because the pilots forgot how airplane combat worked once they got jets and kept getting shot down by soviet jets
Oh i have superieor thrust and could dictate the fight by always having more energy? Na ill just turn horizontally and bleed all my speed leaving me vulnerable to the more manuverable aircraft.
What a clown theater. Surely this is just to create a distraction from the Nord Stream topic, right?
nord stream, east palestine ohio, the fall of bakhmut, take your pick
20 bucks most of these are highschool and college mini weather balloon projects
That'd be so funny. We scrambled fighter jets and fired missiles because at the cost of atleast tens of thousands of dollars because Jaxon is trying to get into MIT
at the cost of atleast tens of thousands of dollars
Think an order of magnitude or two higher. A single Raytheon AIM-9 Sidewinder costs $400,000. Flight time for a Lockheed Martin F-16 costs about $400 a minute to operate, and its annual maintenance costs are about $10,000,000.
I am almost certain that is the case. I was in an undergrad science club that wanted to send up an atmospheric balloon for fun, but didn't get the money together to do it. And had a family member work at Raven, which made/makes (recently acquired and being sold off for parts to other engineering firms) all of the US's high altitude balloons. There are so many "citizen-scientists" that send up balloons without directly notifying the government that shooting down high-altitude objects will more directly affect Bob from Kansas's film project than hidden Chinese spy missions.
if an F-16 is shooting them down, theyd have to be pretty high up, which would maybe require FAA clearance?
This is like the reverse of when the US would send objects to Cuba to trigger their Soviet air defense radars, to figure out how to build aircraft that could fly over there undetected. But now it's China probing the US defences. And the US has figured out how to reliably track these objects now. At least that's what I think.
But with every object shot down, China learns more about how the US air defense and fighter planes work. And if the objects don't get shot down, well China knows that they've evaded detection by the US. A win win situation for China, if you put diplomacy aside.
In essence, during the early 1960s, the CIA launched radar reflectors on balloons off Cuba's coastline via a U.S. Navy submarine and employed an electronic warfare system called PALLADIUM that would trick the latest Soviet radar systems into showing their operators that enemy aircraft were rushing toward Cuban shores or doing all types of crazy maneuvers. This coaxed the Cuban air defense system and its radars to light up and spurred rapid communications between air defenders on the island.
The balloon-borne radar reflectors of different sizes also showed up on the Soviet radars, and by monitoring the targets that the radar operators concentrated on, and thus could detect, it was determined how sensitive their Soviet radar systems actually were.
From an article written during 2021
Would be incredibly funny if China is using 1960s CIA ops against the USA lol
Yeah, this lines up with actual serious weather events. I think the bigger play is the US increasing "preparedness" and previously ignored civilian incursions are now triggering interceptions.
Also all these pilots are finally on clearance to go live and are finding any excuse to shoot shit that they can.
How long until some retired engineer just cruising around in a home-made gyrocopter gets shot down?
Or a sidewinder misses the balloon and decides to target a civilian plane?
