The 2001 April 1 Event in Subic Bay, South China: A US Navy Marine Vehicle Collision That Was Not Designed to Intervene with China

Editor’s Note: Beth Sanner is a former deputy director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration, a position where she oversaw the elements that coordinate and lead collection, analysis, and program oversight throughout the Intelligence Community. In this role she also served as the president’s intelligence briefer. She is a professor-of-practice at the Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland and a CNN national security analyst. The opinions she gives in the commentary are of her own. You can read more opinions on CNN.

China initially expressed regret at what it claimed was a civilian airship that had crossed into US air space. But its response has hardened since the balloon was shot down. The Pentagon said that China refused a request from the Secretary of Defense to talk to his counterparts in Beijing after the shoot down. There’s no idea whether the Chinese stance will lead to months of severed communication between the rivals, or whether the rhetorical posturing will make them reengage, after they’re done with the posturing in the South China Sea.

The US Navy underwater vehicle was seized in the South China Sea just 50 nautical miles from Subic Bay in the Philippines, and hundreds of miles from China. Although Subic Bay was the largest US naval base in Asia until disagreements over lease costs led to a withdrawal in 1992, US sailors might return to the base in the Philippines as part of a counter-measure. The incident was widely believed to have been a message to President-elect Donald Trump, just two weeks before his inauguration and several weeks after he angered Beijing by taking a congratulatory call from Taiwan’s president. Beijing agreed to return the craft three days later, but never apologized and accused the US of spying.

The most memorable and instructive example dates back to the presidency of George W. Bush. On April 1, 2001, two Chinese fighter jets harassed a US Navy EP-3 surveillance plane over international waters near China. One collided with the EP-3 and crashed. The EP-3’s pilot managed to regain control of his heavily-damaged plane and made an unauthorized emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. The 24 crew members were held for 11 days before US officials were able to negotiate their release.

Had any damage or loss of life resulted when China downed the unmanned US craft, Chinese authorities would have quickly placed both blame and liability on the US. Protests would have erupted in front of the US Embassy and China’s Ambassador to the US swiftly withdrawn.

Republican politicians have implied that the overflight of US territory by a balloon is a national security catastrophe, but in fact it is not.

Biden’s frank comments also served as an important milestone in the increasingly tumultuous competition between the US and China. For much of the past 20 years, US policy had been designed to usher China into the global system as a competitor but not an adversary, including with its entry into the World Trade Organization. But China’s huge economic growth and increasingly diplomatic belligerence has many Americans now considering that approach a failure. China feels that the United States is attempting to check its rightful place as a world power by talking about establishing guardrails for the relationship and trying to protect the Western-led international system.

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen is a professor at Arizona State University as well as a vice president at New America. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” His views are his own in this commentary. CNN has more opinion on it.

My father worked on a program in the US Air Force to send balloons into Soviet airspace when he was a lieutenant.

He was assigned to Headquarters Air Material Command in the early 20th century. There he worked on the “Grand Union” project, which deployed balloons that carried cameras over the then-Soviet Union. They were launched from Turkey.

The program that my dad worked on was kept secret but has been declassified since it happened seven decades ago.

One source familiar with the FBI operation said the analysis and reconstruction of the balloon’s payload will ideally determine whether the airship was equipped with the ability to transmit data it collected in real-time to the Chinese military or whether the device contained “stored collection” that China would later analyze after the device was eventually recovered.

The US and its rivals now have spy satellites which can take photos. They can do full-motion video! They can take thermal imagery that detects individuals moving around at night! When the skies are clear, they can spy on pretty much anything, with a resolution of centimeters.

Commercial satellite imagery is now so cheap you can buy your own close-up photos of Russian battle groups in Ukraine. Just ask Maxar Technologies; they have built up a rather profitable business on this model, which was just acquired two months ago for $6 billion by a private equity firm.

Are the Alleviated Sights of Flying Objects Identified as Chinese Balloons? Comments on the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office

But it may help explain, at least in part, an element of a little-noticed report published by the US Office of Director of National Intelligence last month.

This raises some interesting questions about the work of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: Could some of the balloons they identified be from China? Could some of the unexplained Sights of Flying objects that they assessed be Chinese balloons?

But China has arguably done much worse. The work of hackers who stole design information about the F-35 fighter aircraft is one of the reasons why the US is accused of benefiting from China’s build of its own new generation of fighters. China denied responsibility for the OPM hacking, and called the F-35 theft report “baseless”.

The surveillance program, which includes a number of similar balloons, is in part run out of the small Chinese province of Hainan, officials tell CNN. The US does not know the precise size of the fleet of Chinese surveillance balloons, but sources tell CNN that the program has conducted at least two dozen missions over at least five continents in recent years.

One official familiar with the intelligence says that roughly half a dozen of the flights have been within US airspace.

And not all of the balloons sighted around the globe have been exactly the same model as the one shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, that official and another source familiar with the intelligence said. These people said that there are multiple variations.

The Washington Post reported that there was a link between the balloon and the broader program.

One defense official said that the US used technical capabilities provided by National Security Agency and others to gather real-time information on what types of signals the balloon was emitting as it traveled.

The investigators will be looking at what digital signatures it left to see if they can help the US track this type of balloon in the future. The commander of US Northern Command, Gen. Glen VanHerck, acknowledged to reporters on Monday that the US had a “domain awareness gap” that allowed past balloons to cross into US airspace undetected.

In a statement Friday, the Chinese government expressed its regret over the downing of the vessel by the US but maintained it was a weather balloon thrown off course.

But multiple defense officials and other sources briefed on the intelligence say the Chinese explanation isn’t credible and have described the balloon’s path as intentional.

This elite team consists of agents, analysts, engineers and scientists, who are responsible for both creating technical surveillance measures and analyzing those of the US’ adversaries.

OTD personnel, for example, construct surveillance devices used by FBI and intelligence community personnel targeting national security threats — but they also are responsible for managing court-authorized data collection and work to defeat efforts by foreign intelligence agencies to penetrate the US.

One member of the House Intelligence Committee said there were a number of reasons why they wouldn’t do that. We want to collect it, and you should be able to see where it is going.

A defense official said the US has procedures – akin to a kind of digital blackout – to protect sensitive locations from overhead surveillance, typically used for satellite overflight.

The Second State of the Union Address of the U.S. President, Xi Li, and the Implications for China and the United States

Biden called out Beijing on Tuesday before millions of viewers in the US and around the world as diplomatic tensions with China soar and new details emerge of an expansive Chinese balloon surveillance program.

Moments later, in an ad-libbed addition to his speech, Biden specifically named Xi, as he slammed autocracies and argued for the superiority of democracies.

If you could name a world leader, who would change places with you? Name me one!” Biden said of his Chinese counterpart, whom he last met in Indonesia last year and has known for years. The president was almost shouting at the end of a sentence that could be seen as disdainful of China’s stunning economic emergence at a time when Xi’s aura has been damaged by mismanagement of Covid-19.

Biden’s speech mostly concentrated on domestic issues. While the United States is confronting another nuclear rival: Russia, he gave his address. He said that the Western effort to counter President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would be defended as long as it took.

Biden has repeatedly said as president that he would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack – in an apparent rewriting of the long-held policy of strategic ambiguity on the issue – only for officials to insist the US stance hasn’t changed.

His remarks on Russia immediately proceeded those on China, making it impossible to miss the symbolic synergy between his policy toward both nations as he laid out what might be seen as a Biden doctrine of standing with democracies against autocracies and increasing attempts by nations like Russia and China to apply their power outside their borders.

Biden tried to downplay the effect of what US officials considered abrazen act by Beijing, sending an intelligence gathering balloon across several US states with signs that it loitered over key military installations.

“The idea shooting down a balloon that’s gathering information over America and that makes relations worse?” Biden talked about his second State of the Union Address in an interview with PBS NewsHour.

Biden administration officials said that the meeting was not canceled but delayed until a later date. The date hasn’t yet been set.

Asked by CNN this week if US officials had any indication as to why China would commit such an overt act, Biden laughed off the question. “They’re the Chinese government,” he said.

Biden administration officials claimed they were able to move quickly to mitigate any intel collection capacity of the balloon, and have countered that they will end up benefiting from the ability to collect information about the balloon and Chinese intelligence capabilities in their recovery from the Atlantic Ocean.

The House will vote Thursday on condemning the Chinese Communist Party for using a high-altitude balloon over the United States, according to the office of the majority leader.

Biden, according to senior administration officials, was not briefed until three days later, on January 31, when the balloon crossed out of Canada and into the continental United States. At that point, Biden asked the military to present options “immediately” to shoot the balloon down, officials said.

The Recovery of a Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon from the US Air Force Base: An Accidental Violation of the China-Russian War on Ukraine

He told the story of how US officials warned China not to provide military support to Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, as he shared that with the Chinese president.

The photos of the recovery effort of a suspected Chinese spy balloon were released Tuesday by the US Navy.

On Monday, Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told reporters that the balloon was roughly 200 feet tall and carried a payload weighing more than a couple of thousand pounds.

“[F]rom a safety standpoint, picture yourself with large debris weighing hundreds if not thousands of pounds falling out of the sky. That’s really what we’re kind of talking about,” VanHerck said on Monday. “So glass off of solar panels, potentially hazardous material, such as material that is required for a batteries to operate in such an environment as this and even the potential for explosives to detonate and destroy the balloon that could have been present.”

VanHerck said the time frame was well worth it because it allowed them to assess what kind of capabilities existed on a balloon and what type of transmission capabilities existed.

The balloon was shot down by a single missile from an F-22 fighter jet outside of Langley Air Force Base. The operation was carried out by active duty, Reserve, National Guard, and civilian personnel, according to the Navy’s photo captions.

“The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to force majeure – it was completely an accident,” another statement from the Foreign Ministry said.

The situation resulted in a postponed visit for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing, which had been expected to happen within days of the balloon’s sighting.

China admitted ownership of the balloon on Monday, saying it was used for flight tests and had “seriously deviated” from its flight course “by mistake.”

China is a responsible country, according to Mao Ning. “We have always strictly abided by international law. We have informed the people that were involved and handled the situation in a way that did not bring about any threats to any countries.

The Presidential Investigation of the Chinese Spy Balloon Timeline Lack-Urgent-Action Report uncovered by the Defense Intelligence Agency

CNN has learned from military and intelligence officials that the Defense Intelligence Agency sent an internal report about a foreign object that was headed toward US territory on the day the suspected Chinese spy balloon entered America’s airspace.

The report – also known as a “tipper” – was disseminated through classified channels accessible across the US government. Top defense and intelligence officials were not immediately alarmed by it, according to sources. Sources familiar with the report said that the White House was not made aware of the DIA report, and President Joe Biden was not briefed on it.

Instead of treating it as an immediate threat, the US moved to investigate the object, seeing it as an opportunity to observe and collect intelligence.

During a closed door briefing on Tuesday, Senate staff repeatedly pressed military officials about who knew what – and when. On Wednesday, Rubio and Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Biden’s top defense and intelligence officials raising questions about the administration’s decision-making after the balloon crossed into Alaskan airspace.

Defense officials said that the NORAD fighter jets were sent to identify the balloon when it entered US airspace near Alaska on January 28.

As the balloon passed over US territory, officials argued that the benefits of gathering additional intelligence on the balloon outweigh the risk of shooting it down.

Military officials said it was not surprising that the president wasn’t briefed on the balloon until January 31, given the expectations.

As more information about the administration’s decision-making process on the balloon has continued to trickle out, Congress has taken a keen interest.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/politics/chinese-spy-balloon-timeline-lack-urgent-action/index.html

Alaska, not Alaska, but the continental US: what does it teach us about science? An aide’s warning on the “Sparadistron”

“There are still a lot of questions to be asked about Alaska,” a Senate Republican aide told CNN. “Alaska is still part of the United States – why is that okay to transit Alaska without telling anyone, but [the continental US] is different?”

The image of the pilot and the balloon in the cockpit is so famous, that it’s already gained legendary status in NORAD and the Pentagon.