After talking to his government sources, Peter Zeihan thinks that we won The Great Balloon War, having gained valuable insights by capturing Chinese tech, and that the entire episode is another symptom of high level CCP dysfunction.
Some takeaways:
“What the Chinese were technically trying to do: They were doing overflight of a lot of our military bases, specifically our ICBM launch facilities, because the Chinese are new to having a nuclear deterrent.”
“Remember that as early as the 1970s, the United States had over 30,000 nuclear weapons, about one-third of which would have been deployed by missile. Now, with arms control treaties and the post-cold war environment, we have slimmed that down to just a few hundred.” Here Zeihan is wrong. The declared number of nuclear warheads the United States possesses is 3,750, but those numbers don’t count tactical nuclear weapons. Including those yields an estimate in the 5,500 range, though some 1,800 of those are slated for dismantlement.
“But the United States has a deep bench of experience in building and maintaining these things and the Chinese simply don’t.”
“Balloons are big, they’re slow moving, you can’t maneuver them very well, they’re obvious.”
He reiterates his theory that Xi has purged any possible successor and surrounded himself with slavish yes-men.
“It just never occurred to me that they could be that dumb. Well, turns out the rampant stupidity that is taking over decision making in Chinese policy has now reached a bit of a break point.”
“The Chinese have lost the ability to coordinate within their own system.”
“The Americans were reaching out to the Chinese, and the Chinese refused to take the call because they didn’t know what to say, because they couldn’t get directions.”
“The bureaucracy is seized up…there’s really only two types of people left: Those who will do nothing unless they are explicitly instructed to do something, or those who are True Believers.”
He doesn’t think that the Chinese got anything from balloon observation of our missile silos they couldn’t have gotten from satellites.
“The whole time U.S. hardware was tracking that balloon, tracking its emissions, taking digital renderings of the entirety of the structure, and, oh yeah, yeah, just just so we’re, clear this one’s not a weather balloon, this thing was 300 feet wide. That’s a big ass balloon. That’s like an order of magnitude bigger than weather balloons.”
“The equipment that was hanging from the bottom of the balloon, the payload was bigger than an Embraer [jetliner], and there were long range antennas and listening devices and computing capacity and solar panels on this thing, along with some propellers.”
“The diplomatic system seized up because the truth was so obvious, but the Chinese diplomatic corps had no idea that this was going on.”
He asserts that it we shot it down over Montana, there’s a good chance people would die, which is simply not the case, since there are vast stretches of Montana with very minimal population. (See also: the Columbia explosion.)
“We’re getting a better look at spy equipment out of China, and their capabilities, and their emissions, and how they handle information, and what they’re looking for, as a result of this incident than normally you would have gotten after a one or two year probing effort using more traditional methods.”
Zeihan and his sources either missed or omitted a more likely explanation for China’s spy balloon, mainly that they were more interested in signals intelligence and threat response communication than photographing ICBM silos (though they might well have done some of that too). Because radio waves bounce off the ionosphere, that’s the sort of information you can’t get from satellites. Maybe the point of the exercise was intended to see what sort of signals they could capture when we scrambled assets to take a look at them.
Still an incredibly stupid thing to do, but more purposely stupid than Zeihan gives them credit for.
Among the things a balloon can do that satelltes can’t, besides signals intelligence, is active radar, at low enough frequencies to get some some ground penetration. Maybe even “stingray” style monitoring of mobile device IMEI & IMSI numbers to pull off some extra-territorial arrests of political enemies.
Zeihan is pontificating way outside his area of expertise, here. He’s also acting as a conduit for whatever line of BS the Pentagon wants out there, and I don’t trust them one bit. After all, did not Milley say that he’d assured the Chinese that he’d warn them before Trump did anything “unfortunate”?
Odds are that nothing we’re being told about this is true. Look at the voids in the information, and look at the things they’re studiously ignoring.
Still haven’t seen much at all about that train derailment on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border. I guarantee you that that is probably the biggest domestic story of 2023, and they’re hardly covering it.
Asking why Buttigieg, the Department of Transportation, and FEMA aren’t up there doing 24/7 duty around the cleanup would probably be something a real national news media would be doing. Since we don’t have one, this is going to “sneak up on us all”, and who knows where it ends. I did some judicious reading today, in one of my industrial safety handbooks. That accident has potential to basically turn that whole area for fifty-sixty miles around into a giant Love Canal or Times Beach superfund site.
yeah, he plays down the SIGINT claiming any electronic emissions we would normally release were buttoned up. Feels like an explanation he was told to put out.
I’ll still watch his stuff, but this … dunno. He makes zero mention of the additional bevy of shoot-downs – one helluva omission on his part. he does say he likes to wait on subjects he’s not knowledgeable about, but to not mention it altogether? Hmm
My own thoughts on this first balloon:
I’m on the side of not shooting it down immediately, because it posed less a threat than a counter intelligence opportunity. The notion that it posed a danger if shot down over land is silly on face value. But the notion it posed a threat by continuing to operate (at least when above FL550) by gathering intelligence or hypothetically carry weapons is also silly to me. I buy Zeihan’s comment that we could see and monitor what it was doing including counter SIGINT, and I trust our military that if it was a more serious threat it would be shot down. We should be able to easily jam it from sharing intel without shooting it down. I know others will disagree.
I find interesting the excitement about the nuclear sites in Montana. Personally, I’m more concerned about the balloon gathering SIGINT near operational MOAs, particularly in Alaska, but that’s me. As for the nuclear sites, any missiles at those facilities would need to fly over Russian airspace to reach China. They are essentially not a threat to China without initiating a potential nuclear exchange with Russia. Maybe China wants to know how to build their own, but I suspect there is easier ways to get that information.
Finally, while I understand and agree with some of the skepticism regarding Zeihan’s conclusions and my own; I do agree with Zeihan this tells us much more about the operational and institutional problems that now exist within the CCP. While I’m cool with lampooning Biden and his Administration over this, I do think it is a bigger embarrassment for Xi on the world stage. Flying this balloon was a dumb idea. That said, now that we are willing to expend AIM-9s to shoot them down, I’d launch a few more smaller ones. If I was Putin, I’d flood the skies with them. For that reason, I’m not sure we won.
Y’know… It’s funny how everyone wants to apply the “precautionary principle” everywhere but the places they should. Your average leftist gun-grabber will tell you that your weapon is a potential threat, so they must confiscate it.
Yet… When it comes to things like this, that are actual real unknown threats you can’t easily quantify, they’re all “Well, what harm is it doing?” These are the precise places you need to apply the precautionary principal, because you don’t know what you don’t know. China may have worked out some neat new quantum effect that this balloon is exploiting; all you need to know is that it’s violating our airspace in a suspicious manner, because the nature of its directed flight path being right over the missile fields? That’s a telling thing; this wasn’t accidental, and it’s not innocuous.
No idea what is going on here, but whatever it was, that balloon should have been shot down the minute it entered our airspace over the Arctic.
The thing about Zeihan is that he is dependent on his contacts for his work.
Which means that if they really, really want a particular story spun in some way, he is told that will use that spin or the contacts he needs will no longer return his phone calls.
Thus there are stories he will never cover, even when he knows the reality, because it would be career suicide.
Not saying you should shun him, but just keep in mind that he’s a channel for certain kinds of deep state spinning.
I’m having trouble wrapping my arms around this because what Zeihan pegs as the primary downsides to the Chinese here, namely an intel bonanza for the US from the equipment, and the diplomatic fallout from the US side…
… are screamingly obvious downsides to anyone, Chinese or American, from the get. You telling me they were surprised that this had a strong likelihood if not a virtual guarantee that this would be shot down? A freeking balloon?? Gathering intel for an adversary?? And that any country so overflown in this manner would respond with outrage? (Frankly, far more subdued from the US than I am seeing or is merited.)
I was sort of a mind that this whole thing was just to demonstrate brazen contempt for US leadership, which obviously means the tech would be pedestrian, and the Chinese leadership would be fully prepared for an aftermath, but Zeihan is saying the opposite on both counts.
Of course, that is what he is being told, so…. ya takes it as ya gets it. Ten plus years ago or so, I would be inclined to think that if that’s what his military/intel sources are telling him, then that’s basically the deal, at least big picture wise. Ten plus years ago.
Today, those days are long gone. So thanks Peter, but I know virtually nothing right now that I didn’t know before wandering into this page.
He left out how hard the Chinese were laughing when they realized we could not or would not shoot down their spy balloon but we spent millions shooting down our own balloons. Always left out of this discussion of spy balloons is who told Canada NOT to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon.
At. 60k feet, I understand the use of a missile on the first balloon, but it seems like a complete waste of money for the subsequent ones. The F16 has a ceiling of over 50k feet. and possesses a built in 20mm gun with a 2k feet range. Those “objects” were between 20k and 40k feet altitude, so that literally “shooting them down” is easily accomplished. I know the military’s love of “good training”, but at even $200k+ for a training missile, much less $400k+ for a standard version, this was an enormous waste of money. Training applies to gunnery skills, too.
Among the things a balloon can do that satelltes can’t, besides signals intelligence, is active radar, at low enough frequencies to get some some ground penetration. Maybe even “stingray” style monitoring of mobile device IMEI & IMSI numbers to pull off some extra-territorial arrests of political enemies.
Zeihan is pontificating way outside his area of expertise, here. He’s also acting as a conduit for whatever line of BS the Pentagon wants out there, and I don’t trust them one bit. After all, did not Milley say that he’d assured the Chinese that he’d warn them before Trump did anything “unfortunate”?
Odds are that nothing we’re being told about this is true. Look at the voids in the information, and look at the things they’re studiously ignoring.
Still haven’t seen much at all about that train derailment on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border. I guarantee you that that is probably the biggest domestic story of 2023, and they’re hardly covering it.
Asking why Buttigieg, the Department of Transportation, and FEMA aren’t up there doing 24/7 duty around the cleanup would probably be something a real national news media would be doing. Since we don’t have one, this is going to “sneak up on us all”, and who knows where it ends. I did some judicious reading today, in one of my industrial safety handbooks. That accident has potential to basically turn that whole area for fifty-sixty miles around into a giant Love Canal or Times Beach superfund site.
yeah, he plays down the SIGINT claiming any electronic emissions we would normally release were buttoned up. Feels like an explanation he was told to put out.
I’ll still watch his stuff, but this … dunno. He makes zero mention of the additional bevy of shoot-downs – one helluva omission on his part. he does say he likes to wait on subjects he’s not knowledgeable about, but to not mention it altogether? Hmm
My own thoughts on this first balloon:
I’m on the side of not shooting it down immediately, because it posed less a threat than a counter intelligence opportunity. The notion that it posed a danger if shot down over land is silly on face value. But the notion it posed a threat by continuing to operate (at least when above FL550) by gathering intelligence or hypothetically carry weapons is also silly to me. I buy Zeihan’s comment that we could see and monitor what it was doing including counter SIGINT, and I trust our military that if it was a more serious threat it would be shot down. We should be able to easily jam it from sharing intel without shooting it down. I know others will disagree.
I find interesting the excitement about the nuclear sites in Montana. Personally, I’m more concerned about the balloon gathering SIGINT near operational MOAs, particularly in Alaska, but that’s me. As for the nuclear sites, any missiles at those facilities would need to fly over Russian airspace to reach China. They are essentially not a threat to China without initiating a potential nuclear exchange with Russia. Maybe China wants to know how to build their own, but I suspect there is easier ways to get that information.
Finally, while I understand and agree with some of the skepticism regarding Zeihan’s conclusions and my own; I do agree with Zeihan this tells us much more about the operational and institutional problems that now exist within the CCP. While I’m cool with lampooning Biden and his Administration over this, I do think it is a bigger embarrassment for Xi on the world stage. Flying this balloon was a dumb idea. That said, now that we are willing to expend AIM-9s to shoot them down, I’d launch a few more smaller ones. If I was Putin, I’d flood the skies with them. For that reason, I’m not sure we won.
Y’know… It’s funny how everyone wants to apply the “precautionary principle” everywhere but the places they should. Your average leftist gun-grabber will tell you that your weapon is a potential threat, so they must confiscate it.
Yet… When it comes to things like this, that are actual real unknown threats you can’t easily quantify, they’re all “Well, what harm is it doing?” These are the precise places you need to apply the precautionary principal, because you don’t know what you don’t know. China may have worked out some neat new quantum effect that this balloon is exploiting; all you need to know is that it’s violating our airspace in a suspicious manner, because the nature of its directed flight path being right over the missile fields? That’s a telling thing; this wasn’t accidental, and it’s not innocuous.
No idea what is going on here, but whatever it was, that balloon should have been shot down the minute it entered our airspace over the Arctic.
Or you can throw caution to the wind and shoot down $12 balloons with $400k missiles.
The thing about Zeihan is that he is dependent on his contacts for his work.
Which means that if they really, really want a particular story spun in some way, he is told that will use that spin or the contacts he needs will no longer return his phone calls.
Thus there are stories he will never cover, even when he knows the reality, because it would be career suicide.
Not saying you should shun him, but just keep in mind that he’s a channel for certain kinds of deep state spinning.
I’m having trouble wrapping my arms around this because what Zeihan pegs as the primary downsides to the Chinese here, namely an intel bonanza for the US from the equipment, and the diplomatic fallout from the US side…
… are screamingly obvious downsides to anyone, Chinese or American, from the get. You telling me they were surprised that this had a strong likelihood if not a virtual guarantee that this would be shot down? A freeking balloon?? Gathering intel for an adversary?? And that any country so overflown in this manner would respond with outrage? (Frankly, far more subdued from the US than I am seeing or is merited.)
I was sort of a mind that this whole thing was just to demonstrate brazen contempt for US leadership, which obviously means the tech would be pedestrian, and the Chinese leadership would be fully prepared for an aftermath, but Zeihan is saying the opposite on both counts.
Of course, that is what he is being told, so…. ya takes it as ya gets it. Ten plus years ago or so, I would be inclined to think that if that’s what his military/intel sources are telling him, then that’s basically the deal, at least big picture wise. Ten plus years ago.
Today, those days are long gone. So thanks Peter, but I know virtually nothing right now that I didn’t know before wandering into this page.
He left out how hard the Chinese were laughing when they realized we could not or would not shoot down their spy balloon but we spent millions shooting down our own balloons. Always left out of this discussion of spy balloons is who told Canada NOT to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon.
Zeihan is regularly way out over his skis. His opinions outside a narrow economic competence are destructive nonsense delivered with confidence.
At. 60k feet, I understand the use of a missile on the first balloon, but it seems like a complete waste of money for the subsequent ones. The F16 has a ceiling of over 50k feet. and possesses a built in 20mm gun with a 2k feet range. Those “objects” were between 20k and 40k feet altitude, so that literally “shooting them down” is easily accomplished. I know the military’s love of “good training”, but at even $200k+ for a training missile, much less $400k+ for a standard version, this was an enormous waste of money. Training applies to gunnery skills, too.