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The Post has an article up that provides a bit more detail on earlier Chinese balloon incursions. The gist seems to be that they’ve skirted U.S. territory a number of times and crossed into U.S. airspace but not as extensively as what happened in this case. The “briefly” in that earlier reference was the key. In a nice bit of additional detail, Florida and Texas were earlier targets.
How do these pieces fit together?
One simple explanation presents itself.
It’s another one of these surveillance balloons skirting and perhaps skimming U.S. territory but the Chinese lost control of it. I’m no expert on high altitude balloons. But I think when a balloon is at 60,000 feet, if it gets picked up in the jet stream you can’t necessarily just put it in reverse and pilot it back to China.
Reports suggest it first entered U.S. airspace over the Aleutian Islands. Great powers run all sorts of surveillance efforts just outside the territorial waters of rival powers. They sometimes probe into rival territory. This is pure speculation. But maybe they simply lost control of this balloon. Once it’s over U.S. and then Canadian territory you’re probably not going to do a controlled landing. Flying a surveillance balloon in a long sloping arc across the entire United States just makes no sense from any intelligence collection standpoint. The combination of risk to reward is just entirely upside down.
It’s a decent explanation to the question David Ignatius posed: why and why now? Maybe just bad timing.
