Trial balloon

I've been picking up tidbits here and there. Here's my guess. I think the Chinese noticed a hole in our surveillance. It wasn’t useful for offense unless they wanted to start a bio-war, but it was dandy for loitering surveillance. So they did balloons–and our radar, tuned for fast stuff, missed the slow. Somebody eventually spotted one, with the results we know.

In the back rooms some analyst took a hint and started scanning old satellite images, and found that the Chinese had been doing this for a while. Now there are some extremely egg-faced people trying to hide behind the scenes (“You never told us to look for balloons, just nukes!”).

The responsible parties have adjusted their monitoring to spot balloons now, and are seeing lots of things they had been missing before: amateur stuff, research systems where a grad student never got around to filing the flight paperwork, and the odd spy probe here and there.

And to prove that they’re taking the bogeys seriously, they’re shooting them down as fast as they see them. The "never mind" over Lake Michigan suggests that the retuned systems are picking up a significant number of false positives too.

I wondered if the turbulence from a jet, or from its engine, would stress a balloon's fabric inside its lines enough to make major tears, but it occurred to me later that getting that close would put the jet in range of explosives on the balloon; so maybe not such a great idea. But bullets deflate balloons slowly and Sidewinders are expensive--can you think of some better anti-balloon devices? The Flying Ginsu is a bit small, and maybe not great at high altitudes, but something that split up into a whole bunch of short-range flying ginsus might do the job. Or a drone with a retro-rocket in the nose to make a nice blast of hot gas with little burning particles in it to burn through a wider area of the fabric. Proximity detection is a bit of a problem either way.

UPDATE: Chain shot or bolas bursting from the rocket when it got close enough to the balloon would do the job. They needn't be big or strong--given that they have to fall down sometime smaller would be better.

UPDATE*2: The destruction aspect of the problem is easier than a couple other technical aspects: how to home in on and reliably figure the correct stand-off distance on an object that almost isn't there--balloon skin. There's a logistical problem too--we don't generally equip fighters with anti-balloon rockets, so loitering fighters are probably not ready for it.

If you deploy a bola too soon the air resistance on the wire/chain will pull the weights close, losing the wide-cut possibility of the weapon. (From Quora: "Bolo rounds, consisting of multiple balls connected by wire, are sometimes found from boutique ammo makers. They are most effective for separating fools from their money.")