Poll: Should We Be Freaking Out About The Chinese Spy Balloon?

Very depressing poll results!

I think the Beatles had a song “you don’t always get what you want”.

Should have been another choice:
No, but we still should have shot it down over the water near Alaska.

Do we need to freak out? Clearly no. What we need is to have some level-headed people take a good look at how this was handled, and based on lessons learned, make a plan for the next time one of these things comes floating our way. Hopefully the recovery operation will yield some useful intelligence about the capabilities of the ballon.

You have to admit we could use more accurate weather forecasts.

Apparently now it has been stated by Pentagon Officials that the American military had a “domain awareness gap” that allowed three other suspected Chinese spy balloons to transit the continental United States undetected under the Trump administration, the Pentagon general responsible for providing air and missile defense over North America said on Monday.

I “served” in a HAWK ADA missile outfit in the 60’s, that was the real Cold War days. The Pentagon allowed overflights for two reasons: 1) debris would impact civilians (GI’s OK), 2) shooting them down would give them more intel that the overflight would. We (the ADA) knew that we were a target and that if the balloon went up we were dead men, so we really, really wanted to shoot the @#$^’s down. Never did get to bring real one down, just target drones.

The AF used a missile to shoot down a balloon. Now the Chinese know it is cheaper to put up a balloon than for the US to shoot one down.

Perhaps they were probing our ability to detect and destroy a weaponized balloon. What if this ballon had been carrying a nuclear weapon designed to generate a wide area electromagnetic pulse? I wonder what the impact would be and how we would respond as a nation.

These poll results “appear” to have the same validity as national voting. How can over 1500 poll takers say it was a mistake to shoot down a communist countries balloon over the United States? Trolls or bots must be awake during the midnight hours. AvWeb, love you but……..your polls have no credibility.

I like my “crow” well done. Apologies for mis-reading the distractors for the poll.

Patronizing. Signature to Paul’s style, facts littered with a marathon of sarcasm, twice as long as it needs to be. Yes, the balloon is a big deal, just like a lot of other things deserving attention that people brush off.