Where Is The Payload?
In the world of intelligence, the key is to ask questions. Perhaps the most important of those questions is “Why?” When a Middle Eastern flight school student attending a class in Florida on flying airliners says he does not need to know how to land it pays to ask “Why”?
In recent weeks we have seen a spate of sightings and shootdowns of what appear to be balloons over the United States. The available evidence suggests these objects are coming from China.
The first object shot down was a large balloon with some sort of array hanging under it. Two of the subsequent objects appear to have been similar if not identical. They were octagonal and much smaller. One had a “gondola” of some sort hanging under it. The other had lines hanging down with nothing attached.
Why?
Assuming for the sake of argument that the two octagonal objects were of the same design, where is the gondola from the second object? Was it dropped or lost? If it was dropped where is it?
What payload could such a gondola carry? Where is that payload? If we assume that the payload could include sensors where are they? What are they sensing?
And, for all of these questions, why now?
The emplacement of sensors by balloon is not new. It has been done for many years. A balloon moves to its target on the predictable winds at high altitude. Then it descends, becomes almost static, and releases its sensors, which are designed to fall to earth and begin working.
The object without a payload was intercepted at only 20,000 feet much lower than the other objects; almost as if it had descended already to drop its payload.
The balloon emplacing such sensors would be deliberately small and hard to detect. That fits the description of the octagonal objects in question.
The sensors would be emplaced near strategic targets. The octagonal object that no longer had a payload on it was shot down over Michigan but had apparently passed over Montana earlier. That would take it right over our ICBM fields and also the bases housing many of our most advanced long-range bombers.
Suppose for a moment you were Xi Jinping and you were getting ready to take action against Taiwan. Assume that American long-range bombers based in the continental United States were a big concern of yours. Imagine that you were able to put in place sensors communicating via satellite with Beijing that would tell you when American air crew alert rosters were activated. Such alert rosters operate via open commercial cellphone networks. They are not secure.
Detection of the activation of such alert rosters would not tell you targets or payloads. It would tell you that crews were being brought in and given flight times give you a number of critical hours of warning. That might be all you would need to take action to preempt an American response.
The U.S. military has emplaced sensors by air for many years. In Vietnam literally, tens of thousands of sensors were emplaced along the Ho Chi Minh trail as part of the Igloo White Program. The Army currently has a project underway designed to employ high-altitude stratospheric balloons to drop electronic sensors into denied areas. Such sensors can be disguised as almost anything.
Seems like there are a lot of questions that need answered and quickly. True to form, though, the White House is moving quickly to bury the entire issue. In a statement earlier today it was announced that the objects shot down were likely “commercial or benign”.
9/11 was first and foremost a failure of imagination. We were stuck in the static world of preparing to handle hostage takers who would seize an aircraft, land it and begin to negotiate. Our entire doctrine was built around the idea that a flight crew should offer no resistance, get the plane on the ground, and allow hostage rescue forces to perform their mission.
It never occurred to us that our doctrine made it ridiculously easy for a handful of individuals to seize control of an aircraft and use it as a flying bomb.
The same might be said of Pearl Harbor. All our war plans were based on the idea that the Japanese would move into East Asia and allow us the time to mobilize and fight our way across the Pacific pursuant to War Plan Orange. We never thought about the possibility that the first shots would be fired on our soil and that we would begin the war having already lost a large portion of the Pacific fleet.
We have perhaps learned nothing. We continue to act as if the enemy is required to plan and fight on our terms. No such requirement exists.
We need answers. We need to understand what is happening. That starts with asking questions.
Here’s one. Where is the payload?
Don’t we pay a whole slew of intelligence agencies to ask these questions? Or are they too busy playing politics.
Just as journalists were taught (long ago) who, what when and where. The four legs of a story. It seems personal gain and power are all that matters now. Surely we are destined for a fall. 2024 will be far too late to change course.