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Comment by spacephysics | Hacker News Reader

Things like these make me question how the US Air Force gets this wrong.

Meanwhile we have a chemical disaster in Ohio that’s killed untold amount of animals, fish, wildlife in a 10 mile + radius…

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> Meanwhile we have a chemical disaster in Ohio that’s killed untold amount of animals, fish, wildlife in a 10 mile + radius…

This has absolutely nothing to do with anything on this topic, and I think the Federal Government which spends trillions a year can do more than 1 thing at a time. Statements like this are like saying Apple can't focus on the new iPhone or Apple Music at the same time. It's a ridiculous political trope.

Seems like the US Air Force got it pretty right to me. They were instructed to shoot down the unidentified flying object and they did.

Yeah, they did a spectacular job of distracting the media so the Navy could grab the important bits of the actual spy balloon without being hounded. Making a bunch of hoo-rah never-been-in-the-military-but-I'm-really-tough Congressfolk look bad is just icing on the cake.

This [1] article has some bemusing details on the third engagement of the Great Balloon War of 2023. The relatively immobile balloon was the size of a small car, and it took two $400k missiles to pop it, after the first one missed. So I think the answer of how it works is, "not easily"!

[1] - https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/air-force-missile-miss...

How does a $400,000 missile "miss" it's target? Surely the bulk of that $400,000 is related to targeting and guidance?

If it takes a million dollars of ordnance to pop a balloon how are we not completely fucked in any real conflict?

It only took a couple box cutters to take down the World Trade Center.

Using expensive missiles is a form of power projection. It tells the adversary we are willing to outspend them 1000 to 1. Sometimes there is a logical answer to why we are spending too much money.

Also bullets work just fine, they just cause slow leaks that could take hours to ground the craft, which might not be what you want.

Arguments around force projection are certainly going to be popular inside the beltway. At a certain point the deficit does become a national security concern, and announcing to our adversaries that they can exacerbate that timeline with incredibly inexpensive balloons is no longer "projecting" anything that resembles "power"

Jingoism isn't power.

My brother in Uncle Sam, we’re only one week into this “crisis”, which is widely overinflated. China is posturing about balloons in its own South China Sea, while America is gassed up about balloons over the Alaskan heartland. This is the posturing phase, and a missile or three is a rounding error in the US defense budget. I don’t see the economy losing buoyancy yet.

Nevermind that the training value of firing a live AIM-9X at a live but odd target is probably worth more than $400k on it's own.

Bullets (20 mm cannon shells) could work to an extent. But they are short ranged and require the fighter aircraft to get close to the target at a high closure rate. This creates some risk of a mid-air collision. Using guided missiles is much safer.

Canon rounds aren't great for balloon targets. It's quite likely that a balloon doesn't offer enough resistance to trigger the fuzes, which leaves you with a bunch of live rounds falling ~40k feet and hitting whatever is below. While self-destructing rounds do exist for the M61 20mm canon, they aren't cleared for aircraft use, only for ground-based use.

well they are air to air missiles and are more designed to hit an airplane with a giant engine (that gives a nice bright ir signature) and <30k ft rather than a cold object at 80k ft. if I had to guess it's probably just a software bug.

On the other hand, a $400,000 missile can bring down a $100M fighter or a $1B bomber. The economics of modern warfare can take a while to get used to.

“[Balloons] have extremely small radar and thermal cross sections, making them relatively invulnerable to most traditional tracking and targeting method".

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/why-shooting-down-chin...

IR and semi active radar guided? As in not really designed to shoot down baloons. The baloon hardly has an IR signature. I'd say it's a pretty good missile if it did the job with 50% failure rate despite being designed for something else.

Baloons and small drones should be downed with lasers. Like cut in half or something like that.

No doubt some bright spark is hard at work on a specialized anti-balloon munition that can do it for at least a little less.

Or they will be if it becomes a real problem anyway.

Because it's designed for a hot, metallic jet at 400knots, at several miles away. How radar reflective is latex or whatever rubber makes up these balloons? How hot is the payload? If you make the heat-seeking missile too willing to lock onto low grade heat sources, it might suddenly decide that a bird is a better target at the wrong time.

For radar guided munitions, the surface you are targeting needs to reflect enough of the radar energy for the seeker head to "see" it.

Also is the AIM-9X really only $400k? That's insane for the capabilities it has.

They got it perfectly right. You can only tell what kind of balloon it is by the time it is on the ground.

And there is no reason why the USA can't be both worried about spy balloons and about the chemical disaster in Ohio.

I think they made a mistake by not considering the size of the balloons. There is huge difference between the large spy balloon and this small balloon. The payload of the former was bigger than envelop of latter. They should have been able to tell from the radar but definitely from the fighter. Most concerning is that nobody thought about it and the response seems to have been panicked.

I think these are 'better safe than sorry' cases, and that as more data rolls in they will re-calibrate. Look at it in an adversarial way: whoever wants to spy on the US could easily try to make the gear small enough that it would be taken for something innocent, and then to use a satellite uplink to move the payload off to the mothership. The question isn't really whether or not this particular balloon was a mistake or not. The question is what the minimum size is of a balloon that is still a viable spying platform. I don't have the answer to that question, but I've seen some pretty impressive miniaturized gear that I think you could easily take up with a small balloon, enough to be worried about it from a counter espionage point of view.

What evidence do you have that nobody thought about the size of the balloons? That's a comically unlikely take.

The fighter can only slow down to like 180 knots, while the balloon might be blowing around at 10-90 knots depending on where exactly it is. How close do you have to be with the Mark 1 eyeball to actually disambiguate this kind of target, how long would you actually be at that range in a fly-by, and how many fly-bys are you willing to do before "whatever, we will just apologize to the NOAA or a college somewhere" and shoot it down.

Maybe the targeting pod could give you a zoomed up view, but it's not really designed for nearly stationary, high altitude objects.

>how the US Air Force gets this wrong.

You are aware that the Air Force is staffed by human beings that are prone to making all sorts of mistakes, yeah?

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