Page 8 - AVALON 2023 - Day 1 | DAILY NEWS

© US Navy

BALLOONING TENSIONS – CHINESE BALLOON

IS EMBLEMATIC OF GREATER THREATS

China continues to brazenly deny that it it had hit the mother lode of surveillance. 2021 discussed missions such as scout-
is using a fleet of high-altitude balloons to After all, for years nobody bothered about ing, surveillance, communications relay (if
conduct surveillance and intelligence-gath- ‘innocent’ balloons meandering overhead. satellites are knocked out), air defence and
ering missions all around the world. Indeed, Furthermore, if one is destroyed, China can guiding airstrikes. Perhaps other possibili-
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is simply play the ‘meteorological balloon’ ties are as motherships for drone swarms
or for launching missiles.
sticking to its mantra that ‘the balloon in card and blame force majeure.
question is a Chinese unmanned civilian Balloons do offer an alternative to satellites.
airship used mainly for meteorological The fact is that China has been caught red-
handed, and the communist regime cannot They can loiter for hours, have no infrared
research purposes’.
bear to admit that it has been illegally vio- signature, have minimal radar cross-sec-
However, American examination of the bal- lating the sovereign airspace of foreign tions, and are far cheaper to deploy than
satellites. Chinese balloons have some
loon as it floated over North America, and countries. degree of manoeuvrability, although they
recovery of debris from coastal waters off are ultimately at the mercy of winds.
South Carolina after the shoot-down on 4 China’s marauding balloons have been
February, will show that this was definitely launched from both Hainan Island and near After than F-22A fighter splashed the
a spy balloon with a payload approaching Siziwang Banner in Inner Mongolia. Chinese balloon, Senior Colonel Tan Kefe,
one tonne.
One interesting facet of this very public epi- PLA spokesman, warned, ‘We…reserve the
The US DoD unequivocally noted, ‘These sode is who made these balloons. The US right to take necessary measures to deal
with similar situations.’
balloons are all part of a PRC fleet of bal- government has added six companies to
loons developed to conduct surveillance its sanctioned entity list, and they include This is a solemn tit-for-tat threat from
operations, which have also violated the state-owned CETC and Beijing Nanjiang Beijing. It is likely that American military
sovereignty of other countries. These kinds Aerospace Technology. Obviously, this pro- assets flying over the South China Sea, East
of activities are often undertaken at the gramme is characteristic of the deliberate China Sea and Taiwan Strait, particularly
direction of the People’s Liberation Army military-civil fusion that China is pursuing. unmanned ones, are now at risk from a
[PLA].’ malevolent PLA.
Surveillance balloons are very much inte-
Indeed, the PLA has been blithely flying bal- gral to PLA efforts, and various articles As Rear Admiral Mike Studeman, com-
loons across the sovereign airspace of the have been published in the PLA Daily to mander of the US Office of Naval
USA and more than 40 countries for at least promote their utilisation. For example, one Intelligence, warned latterly: ‘I’ll be very
several years, according to American offi- article in early 2020 noted how near space honest with you. It’s very unsettling to see
cials. One crashed off Hawaii four months ‘has become a new battleground in modern how much the US is not connecting the
ago, and they have been seen over diverse warfare’. It predicted, ‘In the future, balloon dots on our number one challenge … It’s
places like Asia, the Pacific and South platforms may become like submarines disturbing how ill-informed and naïve the
America. in the deep sea, a silent killer that brings average American is on China. I chalk this
terror.’ up, if I could summarise, into a China blind-
These balloons represent a massive pro- ness. We face a knowledge crisis and a
gramme by the PLA, which probably thought Another article published on 24 December China blindness problem.’

8 | FEBRUARY-28-2023 WWW.GBP.COM.SG/DAILY NEWS