There’s much gnashing of teeth about why so little is known about the three objects that have been shot down over the United States and Canada since a Chinese spy balloon was destroyed in the Atlantic Ocean. I suspect the answer is that the Chinese figured out a way to exploit “near space,” an area that American defense planners have not concentrated on. See Chris Buckley’s excellent story here. It seems they may have had a consistent program of exploiting the elevations above 40,000 feet. We’re only just now recognizing it.
If the Chinese have, in fact, picked a hole in American defenses, that would explain why the Pentagon has been so restrained in its commentary and analysis. Think of the political exposure–the GOP would howl in righteous indignation that the Biden Administration has left America vulnerable. “What’s happening now is you have low-end technology being used to harass America,” Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence officer, told the New York Times here. “It is a high-impact, low-cost way for China to do this, and the more you look up in the sky, the more you will see.”
If all this is true, it represents a completely undiscovered avenue for Chinese espionage against U.S. and world targets. As co-author Michael McLaughlin and I document in “Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia are Undermining Our Democracy and National Security,” available on pre-order on Amazon, the authoritarian allies have deeply penetrated the Internet and the Information Technology systems connected to it. They have penetrated tens of thousands of computing systems as a result of the Log4J, SolarWinds, and Microsoft Exchange attacks in late 2020 and 2021. They are using our social media to confuse and divide us. The Chinese in particular have stolen so much technology that they have been able to create a peer competitor to the U.S. military. They have stolen so much data about Americans that they are able to create rich profiles of their finances, travel and health. TikTok has emerged has a major avenue for the Chinese to play mind games with Americans. We have allowed ourselves to be swamped. The Chinese balloons and other objects are just the latest manifestation of that.
