News World The spy balloon, a conventional tactic to gather intelligence information

The spy balloon, a conventional tactic to gather intelligence information

The accusations of the governments of United States and Canada about the presence of an alleged Chinese spy balloon in their respective territories has once again brought a system for gathering intelligence information to the fore that refuses to disappear in the face of more modern and less invasive strategies such as the use of satellites.

The first use of hot air balloons for military purposes of which there is evidence, it dates from 1794, during the French revolutionary wars, and they arrived in the United States in the following century, coinciding with the Civil War. They could reach an altitude of a thousand feet — just over 300 meters — and were used for observation tasks, as stated in a historical report by the US National Park Service.

At that time they were considered cheap, discreet and practically unreachable tools from the ground, although their real explosion came already in the 20th century, during the First World War, and also in stages such as the Cold War, when the political struggle waged by the Soviet Union and The United States also extended to the field of Intelligence and technological progress favored the absence of crews.

The use of satellites made balloons partly obsolete, but their use would have resurfaced. In fact, the US Department of Defense would have also increased investment in this type of system in its most recent stage, as the Politico news portal pointed out in 2022.

Analyst Peter Layton, from Australia’s Griffith Asia Institute, explains that the miniaturization of technological equipment encourages the use of balloons, which weigh less “may be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch” than satellites, the chain reports. CNN.

Another expert, Blake Herzinger, from the American Enterprise Institute, also points out that this type of system leaves little trace, which therefore makes it difficult to trace. The satellites are against more predictable, since they depend on following the same orbit.

Compared to satellites, balloons offer the advantage of concentrating on the same territory for a longer time and, being located within the Earth’s atmosphere, they have a different type of range. In fact, Layton suggests as a hypothesis that the last balloon detected in the United States could be collecting information on communication systems and radars, inaccessible from space.

According to the Pentagon, the supposed Chinese balloon flew over Montana at more than 40,000 feet – about 12,000 meters – and did not pose any risk to the population or to air navigation. The authorities have not given details about the technical characteristics of the balloon, although its size would have discouraged any possible demolition due to the possibility of debris raining down on populated areas, reports the Bloomberg agency.

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