[nobaddays]

Isnt this the 4th incident in like a week? Seems like its actually a routine occurence but the media is choosing to fixate/overreport it after the spy baloon.

Either that or china’s genuinely trying to test our response times and protocols in preperation for something down the line

[itake]

AFAIK, even if these were routine, this is the first time anyone has actually seen one with the naked eye.

[yucky]

That's not realistic at all.

[jboggan]

These kind of NOTAMs are not routine, especially when they coincide with actual shootdowns.

[space_fountain]

I think policy shifted. I think overflights by balloons are routine. See as evidence reporting that the balloon that started this news cycle was number 4 in the past handful of years, but after the media attention a decision was made to have more of a zero tolerance policy

[ocdtrekkie]

My understanding was that we may have been filtering these objects out as noise of our sensor arrays, and only just started listening more closely for smaller anomalies.

It's possible this balloon traffic has been relatively routine but we are only recently noticing them and responding to them.

[Spooky23]

It’s a tit for tat escalation. The Russians do the same thing with bombers. The difference is this is a novel event so people are freaking out a bit.

Key thing is to let it play out and not get freaked out by theatrical political people.

[cratermoon]

My money says yes, these are routine events. I don't blame the media, though, not directly. I blame the warmongers that have been pushing the anti-China line, starting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

[nop_slide]

Number 5 actually, there was a similar NOTAM last night over Montana.

[chasd00]

It could be a test but is there any doubt worldwide that, of all branches of the US military, the US Air Force is the last thing you want to tangle with?

[onion2k]

If you're correct then whoever (or whatever!) is behind these objects is either stupid or absolutely terrifying.

[gota]

I don't know about stupid. If you can spend X dollars to "force" your opponent to spend X*10 dollars it can be a viable strategy.

I recall the reported costs of "junk rockets" vs those surface-to-air defenses, which I believe are a similar case of the attack being orders of magnitude cheaper than the defense

[toss1]

Sure, that may be the initial ratio, but if it becomes a regular thing, as in sufficiently regular to strain one of our budgets beyond (substituting a few live target shootings for training exercises), we can rapidly develop an appropriate response.

E.g., when there was a new bunker-buster bomb in the initial Iraq war, one was developed in 28 days. Similarly, the MOAB was developed in about a year. There are plenty of teams of highly skilled and well-equipped engineers who will happily undertake to solve that problem.

Also, weapons systems with higher expected rates of use can benefit from economies of scale-ed up production.

Unless they're sending a million balloons this week, it won't be that kind of problem.

[ocdtrekkie]

I looked it up, and an AIM 9X is just shy of a half a million dollars a unit.

[roflyear]

So we can shoot down 1m balloons before we have to worry about it?

[Fricken]

It seems like it takes far more resources to knock these balloons out of the sky than it does to set them adrift.

[pigbearpig]

No, it doesn't take "far more resources." All pilots, military or civilian, need to accumulate hours to stay current. Flying to investigate or shootdown a balloon isn't going to take more resources than ordinary training would.

The recovery might be something else, but then again, those groups are constantly training anyway, so I'd venture to guess the difference is negligible.