Input | Output |
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Link | YouTube |
Published | 2023/02/06 |
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Status | article incomplete |
Beau says:
A Chinese surveillance balloon raises questions about delayed shooting and public awareness leading to its downing, with potential foreign policy implications.
Policy analysts, government officials
The full transcript provides a detailed analysis of the decision-making process behind shooting down a Chinese surveillance balloon and its potential consequences on foreign relations.
#Surveillance #ForeignPolicy #USMilitary #PublicAwareness #Analysis
Well, howdy there, internet people.
It's Beau again.
So today we are going to talk about the balloon again
because, I mean, that's what people want to talk about.
We will go over the two most common questions
and then I have one that I find really interesting.
Okay, so if you have no idea what I'm talking about,
like you've missed all of social media
and the news and everything else over the weekend,
a large surveillance balloon,
a Chinese surveillance balloon,
flew across the United States.
Now, we talked about it a few days ago.
Surveillance overflights are nothing new.
They happen all the time.
Not a big deal.
They are occurring, I assure you,
they're occurring right now,
whether it be plane, something exotic, or satellite.
Okay, this isn't a big deal.
They shot this one down.
They shot this one down in the Atlantic.
Now, DOD has confirmed that it happens all the time.
Using balloons, in fact, they have said,
yes, this type of activity is increasing.
It's happened a few times over the last several years,
to include under Trump,
so just go ahead and stop that line.
And yeah, they didn't shoot any of those down.
So the two questions that are obviously coming in is,
one, why did it take so long to shoot it down?
And two, why did they shoot this one down
when they didn't shoot down the other ones?
Why did it take so long?
My guess is the second part to this,
the other question took a little bit of time to reach.
But once the decision was made,
there was still going to be a delay
because you're talking about something the size of a few buses,
two or three buses, at 60,000 feet.
What is up will come down,
especially if you poke a hole in it, which is what's going on.
People seem to be imagining a balloon, like a party balloon.
This had a giant technology bay, a bunch of components.
Having something like that fall on your home from 60,000 feet
and hit, I don't know, your kid's bedroom
in the middle of the night,
you would probably think that was totally uncool.
Now, you do have some people, including a senator, asking,
well, you mean there was nowhere along the way
that they could make that decision,
they could make that decision and shoot that thing down
and it'd be safe?
Anywhere that it went, I find that hard to believe.
Okay, Mitch, stop acting like you're brand new.
It doesn't suit you.
Sure, there are probably areas along the route
that were less risky,
but given the fact that the debris field is seven miles wide,
no, not with the same degree of certainty
they would have over the water,
which is where they put it down.
Recovery operation goes into effect.
They're getting it all and they will transfer it up
to a, quote, FBI lab in Virginia.
So that's why it took so long.
Why did they decide to shoot this one down?
Okay, well, what was different about this one
and all the other times?
Me and you.
That's the difference.
We knew about it.
What the American public doesn't know
is what makes it the American public.
When the American public found out about it
and people took to Twitter and Facebook
and everywhere else to talk about how scary it is
and all of these horrifying possibilities,
even though that most of them knew it wasn't true,
they were just doing it to be sensationalist and get clicks,
it scared people because that was the goal
of the people putting this kind of stuff out.
When those people got scared, it created an outcry.
And then one of two things happened to my way of thinking.
Either DOD walked in talking to the president and was like,
hey, people really want us to shoot this thing down
and we'd kind of like to play Humpty Dumpty with it
and see if we could put it back together again,
figure out how it works.
And Biden was like, well, okay, fine.
Or Biden saw everything that was going on, people scared,
realized that because it happened under Trump
and Trump didn't do anything,
if he did this, he would look good.
He alleviated the concerns of Americans who were scared
because of their uncle on Facebook.
And he acted for what would be political reasons.
Now, is that right?
It depends on whether or not the other things apply.
If he's acting for political reasons
and the US military really didn't want to play Humpty Dumpty
with this thing, that would be fine.
If he acted on political reasons
and they already knew everything they needed to know about it,
that's kind of not because there's going to be foreign policy
fallout from this.
We've talked in the past,
it's normally about other countries,
but this is one of those examples
where the domestic situation ends up impacting foreign policy.
China's going to have a response to this of some kind.
So those are the two ways that I can see the decision
being made to shoot it down.
That's how I think it happened.
One of those two.
Okay, but it was shot down.
Here's my question, because this really weird
and unexpected thing happened.
The Chinese are insisting it was a civilian craft,
knowing that the US is going to recover it
and play with it and analyze it.
I mean, that's odd.
That's not something you would expect,
unless it is a civilian craft.
And by that, I mean the instrumentation on it
is dual purpose, has more than one use.
What they will find on it could reasonably,
plausibly be explained away by civilian purposes.
And that would be a very unique outcome.
Now, keep in mind, just because something has civilian purposes
doesn't mean that it doesn't have military purposes.
There are a whole lot of civilian agencies
that started out under the War Department
because they had military applications.
And that's why the government got involved with it.
And then it became its own standalone civilian thing.
That's pretty common.
So what might happen here is all of the stuff
that people were talking about, as far as clarity of image.
That was one of the big ones.
That's why they might use a balloon over a satellite.
It may not even be that kind of instrumentation on board.
For the first time, I'm actually genuinely curious
what's going to be on it.
I have a guess, but I mean, it's a guess.
So those are the two questions that came in the most,
and the one that I have that I find really interesting
all of a sudden.
But yeah, there was probably not a place
that they could be as certain that nobody would be injured.
Keep in mind, a lot can happen when something
is falling from 60,000 feet.
It's kind of hard to determine where it's going to fall.
Even with them putting all the time and effort
they did into choosing the location to hit it off the shore,
it still actually didn't land where they wanted it to.
And the debris field is pretty big.
That's why that decision was made.
So and yeah, the reason they shot it down
is because we found out about it.
Not because it was a threat, not because it was scary.
If it was a threat, they wouldn't have waited.
They would have shot it down before then.
They would have shot it down and taken the risk of it hitting
somebody's home.
The fact that they waited shows it wasn't a risk
or it wasn't a threat, which please keep that in mind
when you're consuming information
about the next thing from the people who
turned this into something that was terrifying
and presented a whole bunch of scenarios that many of them
aren't even plausible.
Some of them aren't even like physics
wouldn't allow some of it.
So just stow away, file away the people
who were really sensationalist about this.
Anyway, it's just a thought. Y'all have a good day.
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