China’s big balloons for Biden gave America an unwelcome Valentine gift

The Chinese so-called “weather balloon,” for better or for worse, after crossing American airspace from Alaska to the Atlantic, has exposed serious limits on the ability of the United States to intercept or even detect foreign surveillance activities on American soil, or in this case, above it. We’ve now seen at least three smaller balloons, so far of undetermined origins, and it seems likely that many more were coming into American airspace “under the radar” — literally. Who knows how many similar surveillance devices have been entering American airspace undetected for years, or perhaps decades?

Sending President Joe Biden a big balloon two weeks before Valentines Day, and then sending more to follow, may or may not have been the Chinese idea of a joke, but if it wasn’t deliberate, it sure caused a lot of laughter.

It’s not the Americans who are laughing. People are laughing at us.

What’s worse is this isn’t the first balloon. These balloons have been coming for years and the people who should have known didn’t, or at least weren’t briefed. The worst-case scenario would be that nobody may have known at all about some prior incursions. The main reason we detected three new balloons following the cross-country overflight was a top-level decision to adjust our detection capabilities to track much smaller objects.

Near the top of the list of those who should have known about the earlier balloon incursions is former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Pompeo was understandably furious when he learned that similar Chinese balloons had entered American airspace on his watch during the Donald J. Trump administration, and initially disputed that it had happened at all.

Quoting Pompeo: “I certainly never became aware that there was a three-bus-size floating device coming across our country for five days — either as CIA director or Secretary of State… I’ve talked to others who were on my teams, they don’t know anything about it either.”

Why wasn’t Pompeo told? That’s a legitimate question. Current information, which may change, indicates that the previous balloon incursions were brief, in at least some cases weren’t identified as being Chinese surveillance activities, and apparently were never pushed up the information chain to the point that Pompeo and other senior officials even knew what was happening.

Pompeo is likely planning to run for president. If he doesn’t run for president he will likely run for another office. He’s not going to put his reputation on the line by publicly going out on a limb to say things he doesn’t firmly believe to be true.

He apparently thought he was calling President Joe Biden’s bluff by saying, in essence, “This didn’t happen. There were no Chinese balloon incursions on my watch.” But it’s now pretty clear there **WERE** balloon incursions. The conclusion seems unavoidable that nobody at the lower levels of the intelligence community realized what these balloon incursions were until now, when they went back, analyzed the data, and said, “Oh no!”

The result is a former senior cabinet official has public egg on his face because lower-level people didn’t realize what they were seeing, and therefore didn’t see a need to brief Pompeo or his immediate subordinates who could have made the decision to push this up the chain and get it to him.

Why Pompeo wasn’t told isn’t the only unanswered question about this incident.

The trajectory of the so-called “weather balloon” included a curiously large number of major American military installations. Some have been widely reported; others have not. Some of those lesser-reported flybys were in Missouri, where after passing Whiteman Air Force Base, home of the US Air Force’s stealth bombers with nuclear carrying capability, the “weather balloon” came very close to Fort Leonard Wood, home of the US Army Engineer School, Military Police School, and CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Nuclear and Radiological) School. However, just a few dozen miles north Fort Leonard Wood, the balloon changed trajectory, made a strange backwards circle to the west, and then moved to the east, overshooting our county, missing Fort Leonard Wood, and moving eastward where numerous rural Missouri residents saw the balloon and photographed it.

Coincidence? A wind direction change at just exactly the right time? An intervention to take control of the onboard propeller system to make sure it didn’t get too close to Fort Leonard Wood?

We’ll probably never know for sure. The Chinese aren’t talking, and the CIA and the United States military have good reasons not to say too much about what we can and cannot do to intercept and interfere with foreign communications to their intelligence assets.

What we do know for sure is nobody except the Chinese were happy that a surveillance balloon got close to multiple major American military installations.

Unfortunately for us, but perhaps intentionally for the Chinese, this balloon incursion has turned into a huge black eye for the United States, and not just for President Joe Biden. This isn’t the first time, but if Pompeo is to be believed — and I think he’s being straight in his statements — the United States government either never detected previous incursions or never forwarded the relevant information to senior leaders.

Intentionally or otherwise, President Xi has scored a huge propaganda coup. The United States is believed, usually correctly, to have technological superiority over all our adversaries and potential adversaries, but the Chinese were able to do this, and do it repeatedly over a period of years, without the United States government recognizing what was happening or enabling senior leaders to respond.

What will Taiwan think? What about the Philippines? What about South Korea and Japan? All those countries rely on the United States to protect them from China, but it’s now clear for everyone to see that the United States doesn’t even know what China is doing when they’re doing it in our own airspace.

Perhaps this was merely a lucky break for President Xi when a surveillance balloon got blown by the winds out of its planned trajectory and ended up in American airspace, not for a brief period like prior incursions, but for a long period of time. Perhaps the Chinese decided, “As long as it’s there, let’s see what we can do with it,” and sent it on a mission to overfly a long list of American military installations.

Or perhaps President Xi was deliberately sticking a big middle finger into the face of President Biden.

Again, we’ll likely never know for sure. It’s part of Chinese military doctrine, and has been for two thousand years since the era of Sun Tzu, to capitalize on deception, to seek to appear strong when one’s position is weak, and to seek to appear weak when one’s position is actually quite strong.

That’s very different from modern American military doctrine of seeking to present an ability to use overwhelming force to deter potential adversaries from even attempting to cause problems for America.

The difficulty with American military doctrine is that a perception of unassailable power can be popped like a balloon, or in this case, by the incursion of a balloon.

Our government has repeatedly stated since the balloon showed up that we have the ability to keep it from providing information to the Chinese, and that most of what the balloon could collect from ten to twelve miles above ground was what satellites are collecting anyway from near-earth orbit in outer space. The damage done by this balloon in terms of actual military intelligence gained by the Chinese likely won’t be much. American military intelligence experts say publicly that we have learned a great deal about the Chinese balloon surveillance program that we did not previously know, and we may have gained more military intelligence than the Chinese did. That’s at least one ground for the argument that the Chinese didn’t plan this incursion, and that the balloon was supposed to stay near the Alaskan coastline but got blown inland by weather conditions.

But in the world of public opinion, scoring a propaganda coup cannot be underestimated. Small and poor Third World countries all over the globe are looking to China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a way to obtain Chinese investment in their countries when the American government either won’t cooperate or demands conditions that dictatorships and kleptocratic regimes will not meet.

This balloon incident will reap dividends for China throughout the Third World. It may well give Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea and Japan serious worries as to whether America is reliable.

Put bluntly, it’s not just a balloon. And we’ll be dealing with the political consequences of this incursion for years, even if the intelligence gained by the Chinese is negligible.

Stuff happens. Mistakes get made. I get it.

But this has exposed a massive problem. It shows our allies and our adversaries that America is not the invincible and all-knowing superpower that we project ourselves to be, and that will have consequences.

My personal read on this — there were too many “screwups” for this to be an accident. I think this was either:

1) a deliberate middle finger stuck by the Chinese into President Joe Biden’s face, or

2) unexpected weather conditions carried a surveillance balloon into American airspace and caused the Chinese to say, “Okay, it’s there, thanks to prevailing winds we can’t get it back over the Pacific Ocean, the Americans are going to see it sooner or later, so let’s set the balloon on a course to overfly lots of sensitive American military installations to see what we can find out as long as it’s going in that general direction anyway.”

When American military doctrine centers on convincing our allies and adversaries that we are ten feet tall, know just about everything worth knowing, and will respond with massive force to any attack, this balloon incident popped the impression of American power we have worked very hard to create.

Deterring our adversaries just got a whole lot harder.