The Chinese Balloon Was a Necessary Wake-Up Call

The United States tends to react to unexpected events with a combination of fear, political recrimination, and bravado—not a particularly effective mix when it comes to evaluating and responding to potential crises. Despite widespread expressions of concern, some warranted and some hyperbolic, the Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over Montana (and tracked across the country before a fighter jet shot it down over the Atlantic) did not represent a crisis. In fact, it was a gift from Beijing: a necessary wake-up call about the shortcomings in the United States’ national defense.

The unsettling identification and downing of four objects in late January and early February should be a 9/11 moment for homeland defense—one in which, thankfully, no lives were lost. The 9/11 attacks revealed major gaps in defense against terrorism, including insufficient tracking, sharing of data, and coordination among the responsible agencies. Beijing’s blunder in allowing its spy balloon to enter U.S. territory has brought to light similar gaps, laying bare the inadequacy of the United States’ continental defense. While the borders and cities of many U.S. adversaries are protected by layered air and missile defenses, those of the United States are not. As a result, it cannot count on seeing—and thus on being able to respond adequately to—a range of threats in the event of conflict that go well beyond spy balloons, including cruise and hypersonic missiles, and even armed drones.

PRISONERS OF THE PAST

After 9/11, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (or NORAD, the binational U.S. and Canadian command responsible for aerospace warning and defense) altered its procedures and tuned its systems to focus on ensuring that a terrorist attack by air would never happen again. The Cold War was over, and some policymakers and observers assumed that the United States no longer had to worry about peer adversaries. Terrorism was the new and enduring threat, and the mantra was “We’ll fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here.” That approach was reflected in Department of Defense prioritization and investment. Homeland defense procurement programs were canceled, and funds were diverted to programs, such as IED-resistant vehicles, designed for counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Recent events have shown that terrorism is not the only threat to the U.S. homeland. Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine shattered not only the 75-year peace in Europe but also Americans’ sense of security, particularly when the Kremlin has threatened nuclear escalation. Relations with Beijing have also deteriorated to a 40-year low, punctuated by the threat of Chinese aggression against Taiwan and other regional allies and covert activities within the United States. Great-power adversaries do not plan to hijack airliners and crash them into buildings. They have invested in a wide array of capabilities, ranging from drones to conventional cruise and other missiles, designed to threaten the homeland in the event of a conflict.

The balloon revealed that the United States is not prepared for this. Simply put, the country lacks the capability to consistently detect and identify threats before their arrival in U.S. airspace. The balloon itself did not pose a physical threat—though its ability to loiter in proximity to sensitive sites makes it a surveillance concern—but missiles obviously do. The balloon served as proof of what some military leaders have been warning of for some time: a gap in the United States’ homeland air and missile defense systems. As a study published last summer by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded: “The United States today has precious little to detect, track, identify, or intercept cruise missiles and other aerial forms of attack on the U.S. homeland.”

Terrorism is not the only threat to the U.S. homeland.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration, aware of this gap, proposed—and Congress approved—funding for four new over-the-horizon radars that will be operational by 2027. This investment marks the first significant injection of money in the air defense of the homeland since the end of the Cold War, and it is a good step toward closing surveillance gaps, but it is just a start.

The most immediate task at hand is determining how to respond to the objects now being identified and shot down, at tremendous cost—nearly half a million dollars per missile. There are a lot of objects in the skies: a recent intelligence community report to Congress notes that U.S. military pilots reported nearly 250 “unidentified anomalous phenomenon” sightings between March 2021 and the end of 2022. It appears that about half of these were balloons or balloon-like objects; most were probably some of the thousands of weather balloons released daily by governments and private entities.

President Biden charged his national security adviser to lead a task force to develop clearer guidelines for responding to unmanned, unidentified objects. The announced approach, however, appears more focused on preventing a repeat of the balloon episode than on addressing fundamental shortcomings in air defenses. The president offered a single, vague phrase—“and improving systems to detect them”—regarding the more significant vulnerability revealed by the balloon.

LOOKING BUT NOT SEEING

There are two basic problems with U.S. air and missile detection capability. The first is geographic: ground-based homeland air defense radars, relics of the Cold War, are oriented northward to detect Soviet bombers using polar approaches to North America or inward to detect a hijacked airliner. This has left vast areas largely uncovered, and U.S. adversaries know this. Further, these ground-based radars were never designed to look for today’s low-altitude, stealthy cruise missiles, such as those operated by Russia. Objects that approach the United States from directions other than the Arctic, including balloons that cross the Pacific or cruise missiles launched by air or sea, are not likely to be detected—and it is nearly impossible to deter or defend against a threat that you cannot see. Washington should prioritize the expansion of NORAD’s sensor network to cover the full range of approaches.

Second is antiquated technology. Because these radars are decades old, their processors have limited computing power—roughly the equivalent of the console that powered the Pac-Man video game in the 1980s. The system can process only a limited amount of data, so it filters out objects that don’t match the expected profile of a threat: too high, too low, too fast, too slow. The three unidentified objects shot down this month were discovered because these filters were removed and greater computing power was brought to bear, allowing radar operators to see things that they would not have in the past. This is a temporary fix at best. New radars are needed to provide a more permanent solution. In the meantime, low-cost enhancements to existing radars can make a difference.

Yet radars alone will not solve the challenge of detection. Integration and the application of advanced computing techniques are needed to make sense of the data flowing in from a variety of sources. Today, NORAD operators, working with decades-old technology, are forced to monitor and make sense of data on as many as 15 separate screens, each providing only part of the picture. The professionals engaged in this task, however well trained and experienced, are being asked to perform small miracles every day even under normal circumstances. With the significantly expanded data flow after removing filters on the radars, plus data that will come from new sensors, their job becomes unsustainable without integration.

HARD CHOICES

The U.S. government must close the yawning gap between reality and expectations. Both the 2018 and 2022 National Defense Strategies list defense of the homeland as the top priority, but little has been done to make that goal anything more than aspirational. Average Americans reasonably expect that the U.S. military can track not only Santa Claus—a joyous tradition for NORAD duty officers—but every potential threat in North American airspace. To bridge this gap, Washington must shift some funds from offensive systems to defensive ones and build an array of new sensors capable of detecting all airborne threats to the continent.

Improved sensors are a necessary start, but an ability to detect threats alone is not sufficient and does not constitute a defense. It’s one thing to scramble fighter aircraft to down a nearly stationary balloon and quite another to respond to a barrage of incoming stealthy cruise missiles. The approach and equipment that have served the United States well in defending against a terrorist attack by air since 9/11 are ill suited for defense against a peer adversary. Once detection is improved, policymakers must then make difficult choices about what to protect and how to protect it.

Unfortunately, it is impracticable and unaffordable to place an impenetrable dome over every square inch of U.S. territory. Washington will need to prioritize areas for defense and determine to what degree each will be defended. That prioritization must guide investment and should be based on the intersection of what is most critical to the nation and what the intelligence community assesses adversaries intend to and are able to attack.

In a sense, Beijing gave the United States a gift in the form of a balloon. That balloon, although likely harmless, should be a wake-up call, one that policymakers cannot ignore.