The Daily - Why the U.S. Keeps Shooting Objects Out of the Sky

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Last week, after the Air Force shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon, examination of its wreckage revealed that it could not only take images, but also scoop up radio and cellphone communications.��The balloon, the U.S. military said, was part of a bigger global program by China to collect information about military operations.Since then the U.S. has shot down three other objects from the skies over North America — apparently without knowing much about them.Guest: Julian E. Barnes, a national security reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: The U.S. and Canada are investigating three unidentified flying objects shot down over North America in recent days. Militaries have adjusted radars to try to spot more incursions.A timeline of the unidentified flying objects that have been brought down this month.Here is what we know about the objects and the Chinese spy balloon.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. The United States has now shot down four objects from the skies over North America, in most cases without even knowing what they were. what they were today. My colleague, Julian Barnes, on why the U.S. is suddenly shooting first and asking later. It's Tuesday, February 14th.

Julian, this was a very strange few days. I mean, one object shot down out of the sky, sure. Two, maybe. But by the time you get to four objects shot out of the sky by the U.S. military, it almost felt like we were in the territory of cinema. It just was surreal. Yeah, it really had a sci-fi, espionage, thriller feel to it once we got to the fourth shoot down. Yeah, it just felt almost supernatural. So I want to talk about how we got to this moment where all these things are being shot out of the sky.

So bring us back to last week when the U.S. had just taken down the first of these objects, this Chinese balloon, which we had understood, despite vehement Chinese denials, to very much be a spying balloon. So pick up the story from there. So what happens after Air Force F-22 shoots down that very large Chinese surveillance balloon is that the Pentagon and FBI go to the scene and start collecting parts of it.

And they start releasing information about it. They decide that they're going to educate the public about what they learned over its multi-day journey across the United States. They had learned that it could not just take images, but it also could collect what the U.S. calls signals intelligence. That means it could scoop up radio and cell phone communications. It could pick out the location of cell phones. This was a relatively sophisticated device. Wow. Then we learned that it wasn't a loan. It wasn't a one-off. It was part of a bigger global program by China

to do surveillance against the United States, against U.S. allies, to collect information about military operations. They realized going back to 2019 that there's been a whole parade of these, that there's been, during the Trump administration, at least three times that Chinese surveillance balloons have come into the United States,

just for brief times, not for long periods of times. But it puts this incident in a much bigger perspective. This is part of a global surveillance program. Right. This balloon was not the beginning of something. It was maybe the middle or the end, whatever. It was not the first. That's right.

And it's in this moment that the U.S. military detects another incursion. Hmm. This time it's over Alaska. Last Thursday, they send up F-22s to take a look. And the pilots see a round object. It looks like a balloon. Hmm. Intriguing. Could it be another Chinese surveillance balloon?

Nobody is certain. But on Friday, as that balloon is headed out of U.S. airspace, Breaking as we come on the air tonight for the second time in less than a week, The White House makes the decision to take it down. The U.S. military has shot down a suspicious high-altitude object flying in American airspace. But it doesn't pop. It doesn't deflate. It doesn't act like a balloon. Instead, it breaks apart. Something falls to the ground.

We have no further details about the object at this time, including any description of its capabilities, purpose, or origin. Huh. So they have clearly decided to shoot this thing down before necessarily really knowing what they're working with. Absolutely. They shot it down not knowing what it was. Okay, so what happens next? On Saturday, the day after the Friday shootdown, there's another one.

Yesterday, NORAD confirmed that an unidentified object entered unlawfully Canadian airspace. This one's over the Yukon Territory in Canada. And this time... I give the order to take it down. Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, he orders it shot down. Canadian and American fighter jets were scrambled and an American F-22 successfully shot down the object.

This one looks more like a balloon. It deflates. But they still don't know exactly what it was. We don't know whether it has any connection at all with the Chinese surveillance airship. We don't know if it has any connection to the object that is now off the northern coast of Alaska. So we've had two shoot downs. And then there's a blip, a blip over Montana. Like something shows up on the military's radar. Fighter jet were sent up into the skies in Montana on Saturday to try to track down a possible object. But then on Sunday morning, the blip is over Wisconsin,

and then Lake Michigan, and then Lake Huron. Ultimately, there was concern because of the heights that this object was flying at, 20,000 feet, which could pose some threat to civilian aircraft. It looks different than the other objects. It's octagonal. It has strings coming off of it. They do not know what it is. But once again, they order it down. But certainly so many questions for this administration, unidentified object after an unidentified object entering U.S. airspace. And there's

questions about where they came from and what exactly it all means. It's this very weird moment of deja vu. That's right. I mean, we do not have military action by fighter jets over the U.S. and Canada most days. This is not something that happens on an average day. And all of a sudden, we have four things taken out of the sky. What's going on? What is happening?

Right. I mean, quite literally, that is the only question anyone's asking. What in the holy hell is going on here? Exactly. And there's lots of theories, but nobody knows. But what are those theories in this moment by Sunday after one, after another, and another, and another? So there's the theory that this is a bunch of surveillance balloons,

that these are smaller versions of what was shot down on February 4th and that they're sent by China or somebody else and that they are either trying to provoke the United States or they're trying to probe defenses or they are trying to show that they can keep sending balloons even after their first one got shot down. Right. A very logical sounding theory. Yeah, that's possible.

But the other theory is that this is nothing terribly important. That this is not a foreign power trying to spy on us. That this is just debris. These are just airborne trash. Like, it's old weather balloons. It's old high school science projects. Who knows? You know, it turns out that we think of the skies

as being, you know, relatively clear, right? But that's not the case. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff up there that pilots see, that people think are UFOs sometimes, but it's clutter, it's garbage, you know? And so it is possible that U.S. stealth aircraft

took down a component of an important and widespread Chinese surveillance effort. And it is also possible that we used a $200 million aircraft to collect some garbage. But what we do know for sure is that by Sunday, the U.S. stance had changed. The U.S. was being hyper-aggressive. It was going to take out anything it saw in the skies. We'll be right back. Julian, by Sunday night, the question, for me anyway, was, are there suddenly a lot more objects entering to care more about these things and shoot them down in light of the Chinese spy balloon?

What exactly had changed over the past week? Something did change after the spy balloon. The U.S. started changing how it looked in the skies and what it was looking for. It tweaked its radar system. It changed the parameters of the radar so it would pick up more objects. And so now, all of a sudden, because they changed the system, because they made it more sensitive, they're seeing a lot more intrusions or a lot more things that look like intrusions. Right. I'm having this metaphorical vision of kind of a telescope where it's a little bit fuzzy, but the minute you keep sharpening it and turning it and adjusting it,

suddenly you're going to see everything a lot more clearly. You're going to see a lot more. You're saying basically our entire system for looking out into the sky went through something similar and we started to see a lot more and see it a lot more clearly. That's right. The radar, like your telescope analogy, can be tuned. They can pick up just the most important things, or they can pick up a lot of things. But when you change the sensitivity, you're going to get a lot more false positives, things that look important, but really aren't. So why then, if the U.S. knows its system is

more sensitive and therefore is going to be picking up a lot of stuff, some of which may matter, some of which might not, are we deciding to shoot almost all those things out of the sky if some of them might be fairly harmless? What exactly is the calculation there? I think the calculation may be somewhat different in each of the incidents. But what sort of unites them is an abundance of caution. They do not want to let these things get away. They want to take a look at them. But to do that, you've got to take them out of the sky.

They also don't want to have a situation where if it is a Chinese surveillance device, that it can float over the U.S. or Canada for any length of time. Right. And at the same time, though, it seems kind of hard to divorce this decision making from the reality that when it came to that first Chinese spy balloon, President Biden and his administration was very heavily criticized, mostly by Republican lawmakers and even some Democrats, for letting it not just enter our airspace, but stay in our airspace, float over state after state after state. stay in our airspace, float over state after state after state. In your conversations with people in the military and in the intelligence community, is there an acknowledgement that

that dynamic has changed as well? Well, look, people in the military and in the intelligence agencies wanted to keep looking at that first Chinese spy balloon. They thought that observing it over time and then taking it down when it was over water was both the best for intelligence collection and the safest for people on the ground. But there's no doubt that that decision opened the White House and President Biden up for criticism. Right.

So all these other objects have come into that political environment where there is now a bias toward action. There's a bias toward taking them down. Right. Which might not have existed in the absence of that political pressure. It feels like shooting every object that crosses into our airspace out of the sky, which is the precedent we have created here, could get pretty complicated and pretty dangerous pretty fast. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're taking very expensive aircraft with very sophisticated missiles and shooting them at things that we don't even know what they are. I mean, there's all kinds of dangers in that. Dangers, you know, that there could be an accident, that the missile could miss.

So it's really important to figure out what these things are pretty quickly so we do not just go for days and days taking down every radar blip that appears over Montana or Lake Michigan. But there would seem to be another significant way in which this could get dangerous, Julian, and that's if the United States has similar devices over a place like China. And by doing what we have done over the past week, we are now encouraging our rivals to shoot down our spying devices, if they are spying devices. And so are we entering any kind of tit-for-tat cycle that could escalate if we have comparable devices out in the world? It's a rule of spycraft that what one country does to another is then reciprocated, right?

Right. So if you shoot down a spy balloon, well, they're going to be looking for a spy balloon to shoot down. The key thing you don't want to do is you don't want to escalate, right? Like I shoot down your spy balloon, you take down my satellite. Well, that's a different precedent. You've all of a sudden risked not stabilizing the situation, but making it far worse. But to go back to that question, does the U.S. have comparable devices over a place like China that will quite likely invite the reciprocation you just described?

The honest answer for me is we do not completely know. China has alleged that the U.S. has a program to send spy balloons over its territory, and the U.S. says that's completely false. You know, for the most part, the United States keeps its spying way up in space with satellites and just on the edge of international waters with our reconnaissance planes. We have spy blimps, the J-lens, and we'll not put them in your territory. We'll put them just outside your territory. So we don't know exactly what the U.S. sends over China. What we do know is that the U.S. is trying to avoid entering their territory, confining their activities just to their borders or satellites in space.

Got it. Which means that if China were to try to reciprocate, it might need to escalate. That's the risk. That's the danger. So, Julian, where does this all end? Does it even ever end? Because it looks now like we're on path to keep shooting down an object we see that might or might not be a spying device from a foreign country like China. Is your sense that right now there is a kind of shoot-to-kill order on these objects if they enter our airspace? To get past this moment, we have to figure out what these objects are. And once we figure that out, we can readjust what we're doing. We can either learn which ones are surveillance devices and dangerous and which ones are trash, or maybe they're all trash and we can ignore them all. But until we learn about each of these incidents, we're going to be possibly trapped in this cycle of sending up fighter jets and shooting things that we don't understand. And nobody should feel particularly comfortable

when the Air Force is flying and shooting down stuff that they don't know what it is. Hmm. So are we talking days here, weeks, months of us needing to get to the bottom of that and therefore taking down objects day after day after day? Well, the four objects we've shot down have all landed in difficult places to get to. One is under the ocean off South Carolina. One is on frozen ice in the Arctic Ocean. One is in a remote area of the Yukon Territory. And the last one is underneath a great lake. So it's going to take some time for divers and military personnel to get to this and see if there's anything they can collect.

But that said, this is a top priority of the FBI, of the Pentagon. And so I think we're going to have answers in days and not weeks. Got it. But in the meantime, if you're the U.S. military, you are hoping that shooting these objects down sends a very strong message to the world that the U.S. has zero tolerance when it comes to these kinds of incursions. So does that discourage rivals like China from sending a balloon ever again into our airspace? And if that's the case, is it a worthwhile outcome of having shot down these objects? That's a good point. If you were confused before this month about whether the U.S. would mind if

you sent a spy balloon over its territory, you've got your answer now. Like, do not do that. do that. I mean, look, there was a situation where the U.S. was unaware of a lot of this activity, or when it became aware, it decided it was going to watch it and not destroy it. And so maybe the Chinese thought that the U.S. was going to tolerate some of this intrusion. But we're past that point now. We are reinforcing this principle that you cannot come into our airspace uninvited, and that we will defend it. And so, if you didn't have the message, you got it now. Well, Julian, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you.

On Monday, after we spoke with Julian, a spokesman for the Biden administration said that the three objects shot down by the U.S. military since Friday lacked communication signals or the ability to maneuver themselves. But the spokesman, John Kirby, deflected questions about whether President Biden has created a new policy for when to shoot down such objects. Where we go from here, he said, we just don't know. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

Here's what else you need to know today. America's latest mass shooting occurred at the campus of Michigan State University, where a gunman killed at least three people and injured five others. The shooting comes on the fifth anniversary of another school shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, where 17 people were killed. And the Times reports that Congressman George Santos of New York, who has admitted to lying about much of his resume, failed to account for how he used more than $365,000 in campaign funds. Experts on campaign finance said that a failure to document spending on that scale, 12% of his campaign spending, represented remarkably sloppy bookkeeping

and the absence of campaign finance controls. Today's episode was produced by Muj Zaydi, Will Reed, and Diana Nguyen. It was edited by Rachel Quester, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Winderlein.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.