Of UFOs, Biden and the Balloons from Beijing
Why is NORAD suddenly so trigger happy, and what's the Biden Beijing Balloon Story really about
Four shootdowns by North American Aerospace Defense Command in just a couple of days? What’s going on?
First, the things we know:
China has lots of ways to spy on us better than balloons.
In fact, according to an official DoD report, the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army have more than 250 spy satellites, and NASA recently reported that they launched 4 new space-based surveillance platforms in less than 48 hours.
Strange that they would use a slow, visible, lighter-than-air platform leveraging 200-year old technology familiar to the likes of the Montgolfier brothers if they have literally hundreds of far more sophisticated means to execute technological espionage missions against their Number One Adversary.
There are various potential reasons to use a balloon over a satellite, having to do with loitering time, Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) frequencies and a platform’s physical proximity to the site you are trying to scoop up intelligence data from. But when you have more than 200 ultra-high-tech spy platforms circling the globe, the point isn’t what China could pick up: it’s what we did as a National Security enterprise to react, and how that can be used against us.
The fact that a massive, slow-moving military surveillance platform, launched by America’s most significant strategic-level enemy, was able to traverse the whole diagonal swath of the United States unchallenged is the coup.
Remember, the 200 foot wide spycraft was only shot down once it had left the territorial landmass of the United States, reinforcing for Beijing that America, under Biden, is afraid of confrontation. Even confrontation with an unmanned and unarmed balloon.
The vacuous excuse used by the Pentagon that it waited until the craft was over the ocean in case debris landed on anyone on the ground, is undermined by the fact that once embarrassed, the Biden White House decided to shoot down 3 other aerial vehicles over our territory and the territory of our northerly neighbor, Canada, or “Canadia” if your prefer (just ask Karine Jean Pierre).
Note, this is first time ever, since its creation, that NORAD has engaged militarily over the skies of North America.
More disturbing than the US Air Force deploying $400,000-a-shot missiles to take down mere balloons because the White House is embarrassed, is the way in which the engagements were sold to the American people.
During the Sunday NORAD presser - strangely not done in person with a senior officer at the Pentagon podium, but on a teleconference (yes i’m serious, I listened in live) - General Glen VanHerck, the officer in charge, when asked, did not rule out “aliens” or extraterrestrial involvement behind the three neutralized UFOS.
Given the almost immediate clarification and retraction by the Pentagon and then the White House the following day, I expect that to be the last press conference the good General holds. At least without being on a very short leash.
More troubling were the word of Van Heck’s boss Monday afternoon, right after he landed in Brussels for a NATO summit.
According to the former Raytheon board member, Lloyd Austen, who now happens to be the Secretary of Defense, the most powerful military in the world doesn’t know what these craft are, where they came from, or why there are here. This despite having shot them down. Which is strange, to say the least, because you’re not supposed to blown things out of the sky above America unless the “UFOs” are taking hostile action or endangering civilian aircraft. (Of which there are very little over the uninhabited Yukon or Lake Huron).
So Biden is embarrassed, the Pentagon is told to do something, and NORAD gets trigger-happy. Not very reassuring. Unless you’re Xi Jinping.
Just think about the last 10 days from his perspective, from the perch of a man who recently made himself dictator for life, in the world’s biggest Communist state, the head of a regime that wants to displace or destroy America.
China has been steadily on the rise since Kissinger naively convinced President Nixon to open toward Beijing, and the intellectual and business “elites” were sold the moronic idea that liberalizing trade relations with a one-party prison state would inexorably also lead to China’s “political liberalization.”
Instead, in the last 50 years, thanks to the greed and short-sightedness of US businesses and the naivety and moral turpitude of the political class, China has risen militarily and economically to peer competitor status with the US while remaining a vicious one-party regime that uses all the tools of Socialist authoritarianism to stay in power, including labor camps and the ethnic cleansing of undesirables. But hey, Nike gets to make and sell you cool trainers, am I right?
To quote Leon Trotsky - or was it John Lennon? - “You may not be interested in war; but War’s most definitely interested in you!” Mark Miley, the seditious and traitorous Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs may have confessed to colluding with Communist China and being their inside man against President Trump, but his public assertion that China’s just great, “not our enemy” at ll, doesn’t really matter if China thinks we are theirs.
And they do. And they’re not really shy about it.
In 1999, to senior PLA colonels published an officially endorsed guide on how to take down America so that China could take it’s rightful place as the World’s lone hegemonic power. The strategic “how-to” manual, UNRESTRICTED WARFARE, is the guide to how China can systematically weaken and eventually defeat a much stronger USA.
The work, shaped as it is by oriental conceptualizations of war very unlike our own nation-state-based and Clausewitzian ones, doesn’t see war and peace as dichotomous, or opposed to one another. China, is always at war, deploying economic might, intelligence means, and psychological tools, even when they’re not actually launching military campaigns. For a summary of just how different the Chinese way of war is see my second book, Why We Fight, published after my time in the White House based upon what I learnt there, and this shorter piece for Military Review.
From Fang Fang inveigling herself under the bedsheets with future Congressman Eric Swalwell, to propaganda-peddling Confucius Institutes across America selling anti-Americanism, and spy balloons floating over our Minuteman missile silos, China is at war with the United States 24/7.
When the paratroopers land on Taiwan is just a question of timing. And according to my former White House colleague, and our former Defense Attache in Beijing, it will be very soon, while Biden is still President. After his disastrous rout in Afghanistan and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing’s balloon has found Biden wanting. Beijing will act unless we take action. Now.
What should that action be? I asked that question to a man who has been fighting Chinese authoritarianism his whole life, a man who understands.
Gordon G. Chang knows what has to be done, and this is what he said recently on AMERICA First:
Immediately, all 4 of Communist China’s consulates in America must be shut down.
The Ambassador should be called onto the carpet by the State Department and issued an official démarche.
Then a federal ban must be implemented on the purchase or ownership of US land by the Chinese state or its front companies, which have been scooping up real estate across America, especially in the vicinity of military bases and other sensitive sites.
And lastly the Commander-in-Chief must issue an unequivocal statement that America will not permit any military action to be take against an independent Taiwan.
Biden will do none of the above. Why? Perhaps someone in Congress can ask his son Hunter.
So until 2024, buy some MREs. And gold. And ammo.
You can never be too sure.
Dr. G, I thank God for people like you who tell it as it is. It's even better that you're an independent thinker and help me check my assumptions. It was good to see you at CPAC. I hope to get another opportunity to spend time with you.
Dr. G, this may not apply to this article, but your graphic arts team needs to make a “mashup” of Mayor Pete and Alfred E Newman (MAD magazine), and sell it on t-shirts. “What me worry?”