Close up of the balloon being shot down by an F-22 with a single AIM-9X missile
It is amazing how so many people are defending Biden claiming he shot the balloon down "when it was safe". How gullible are people? The balloon was shot down close enough to our shore lines so that people could take video's from their backyards and post them on Twitter. Did anyone notice how the balloon came straight down? Wind might carry it a bit but otherwise it came down in a relatively small area. And btw, if the winds were blowing from the East, it might have carried the debris back onto the shore. Which means it could have been shot down over an isolated area of Montana, or the Aleutian Islands without any risk of harming anyone. That excuse was lame the minute they rolled it out. But how quickly some people believed it without any common sense or critical thinking.
Also, the idea that somehow the US stopped the balloon from collecting any information is also hogwash. We have no idea if that is true or not. Perhaps they thought they were somehow jamming any radio signals, which is possible, but there is no way of knowing if the Chinese employed some sort of jamming counter measures to ensure their signals were secure. The Chinese know about jamming too. Why would they send a balloon knowing it would be jammed? Or maybe they were testing our radio jamming capabilities? Until we recover the debris and analyze it we have no idea if any efforts to jam the signals were successful. Perhaps the device employed some kind of laser communications system that was bouncing signals off a Chinese satellite. At 60k ft there would be less atmospheric interference to do something like that.
The point is, it was very risky to allow that balloon to traverse the country. We could have and should have shot it down when it was over the Pacific in US waters. Then the Chinese would know we aren't messing around and we will defend our borders. But then again, we have a Democrat in the White House.
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