As you may have heard, yesterday the military shot down yet another unidentified flying object in U.S. airspace over Lake Huron, marking the fourth such takedown in the past two weeks. At the risk of dashing my colleague Jack Butler’s hopes, all four objects were terrestrial (and almost certainly Chinese) in origin, as opposed to alien. And that raises its own set of significantly more urgent questions.
Since it seems exceedingly unlikely that China suddenly decided to launch a “balloon offensive” for the first time last month, the logical conclusion is that they have been spying on American domestic defensive and offensive capabilities in this manner for quite some time. Only the United States’ reaction has changed, which sparks the question: why? Some might suspect that we are engaging in so many high-profile shootdowns over the past two weeks as a show of geopolitical force, or for domestic political consumption (i.e., to show that Biden is “tough on China”). Perhaps. But what if the actual — and far more disturbing — answer is simple incompetence? What if we genuinely didn’t realize our high-tech airspace defenses (i.e., NORAD) were being successfully penetrated by asymmetry-exploiting low-tech means for years now? (Or, to be even more cynical, what if we tacitly knew this was happening but were unwilling to acknowledge or get serious about addressing it?) It would certainly explain the notable uptick in “UFO stories” over the past several years — quite the coincidence, isn’t it — and also call severely into question our national preparedness for a hot war against the Chinese.
If you believe reporting from the Washington Post, that indeed seems to be the case here, or at least a significant part of it. According to this story about Saturday’s (different) Alaska shootdown,
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that sensory equipment absorbs a lot of raw data, and filters are used so humans and machines can make sense of what is collected. But that process always runs the risk of leaving out something important, the official said.
“We basically opened the filters,” the official added, much like a car buyer unchecking boxes on a website to broaden the parameters of what can be searched.
In other words, America created the world’s most technologically sophisticated geostrategic advance-warning defensive system to guard its airspace and then put it on the wrong setting. And in so doing allowed our enemies to exploit our blindness for an unknown period of time, with an unknown amount of data collected. What else have they learned about our blind spots? What other backdoors and vulnerabilities are we asleep to, simply because we have not bothered testing our systems outside their expected parameters?
I would tell you not to lose sleep over this, but then again I wrote this sentence at 2:22 a.m., so that would make me a hypocrite.