What’s going on over North America?
Over the past few weeks, U.S. military aircraft have shot down four “objects” over North America, one of which U.S. officials claim was a Chinese surveillance balloon. This is unusual but not a cause for panic.
99 Red (Chinese?) Balloons
So let’s start by noting that whatever is going over the United States and Canada, it’s not that kind of threat. There are some objects over our shared continent, and these objects, according to both Washington and Ottawa, don’t belong there. Four of them have been shot down, including one taken down in an operation by NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canadian command that has been defending North American airspace since the early days of the Cold War. This is a first: Until last week, NORAD had never shot down anything.
These facts don’t tell us very much, and with so much still unclear, the Biden administration isn’t sharing a whole lot at the moment. So let’s consider a few possibilities.
The simplest answer is that these objects are Chinese surveillance balloons. The National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, John Kirby, said today that China “has a high-altitude balloon program for intelligence collection” and that at the present time, the program isn’t very good, but it’s improving. In a clapback at the administration’s critics, Kirby noted that the Chinese program “was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it. We detected it.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday claimed that the object downed on February 4 off the coast of South Carolina, along with two other objects taken down over Alaska and Canada, were all surveillance balloons. This assertion is especially plausible given the alacrity with which the Canadians, after consultation with the Americans, ordered their jets to destroy the object over the Yukon. (The Canadian rationale was that the object posed a threat to commercial aviation, but Canada’s defense minister noted that it was “potentially similar” to the first balloon downed off the U.S. coast.)
Beijing, according to Center for a New American Security’s CEO, Richard Fontaine, has been ever more assertive in testing North American skies with these balloons. Although the Chinese so far are in high dudgeon over these accusations, officials have admitted that another object spotted over Latin America belonged to the People’s Republic; they claimed that it was a meteorological balloon blown off course, and later reportedly apologized to Costa Rica for entering that country’s airspace.
