The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Balloons, UFOs and Jets – Musk Misogyny

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard start the program with a debrief on the high-flying objects over North America that dominated the news. What is really at stake when it comes to air defence over the continent? For Munk Donors, the second half of the show features a discussion about Elon Musk’s disturbing tweets this week and whether Twitter has reached the point of no return in terms of having the interest, let alone the ability, to host meaningful public discourse. To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast, consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by the Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website in just a few. simple clicks, triple W the monk debates.com. Look for the Friday focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griff is here, the chair and executive director of the Monk Debates.

Welcome to this, the regular Friday Focus podcast. This is our weekly program where we dig into the big issues and ideas in the news, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. We do this each and every Friday with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, how are you today? What are we? We are getting to the middle point of February. It feels like we're, I don't know, are we past the midpoint of winter? Can we say we're in the home stretch? I think we are definitely by the time I get to February the 15th, Reddard, as soon as that date passes, the home stretch.

Clocks are going to spring forward. Days are going to get longer. Sun is higher in the sky. Winters behind us. Okay. Well, on the first half of the show, let's talk about things in the sky, because it's been a kind of wild week or so, flying objects, rumors of UFOs, Russian jets, buzzing North America off the Alaska West Coast, Canada musing about finally joining US missile defense, continental missile defense. So many issues here, Janice. Let's go back to root causes. What's triggered this new kind of, I guess, awareness of a vulnerability and uncertainty about American, North American airspace and its security. Bear with me for a second while I take you on a little bit of a walk here,

members. We have a traffic jam. Just think about this for a moment. We have a lot of cars on the road. So once auto traffic reached a certain volume, we put in place right. regulations. 99.9% of us stop at a stop sign and definitely stop at a red light. And we know which lanes we drive in. We have the same thing in the air, right? We have air traffic controllers and we have a regulatory institution that's in Montreal. That's headquartered in Montreal.

A cow sets the traffic lanes. We have no such thing in space. Add one more factor to this, Space activity is now increasingly commercial project. Private companies can throw satellites into the air. We are approaching a bad traffic jam in space. That's what played out over this last week and made everybody set up. A lot of this though, Janice is suborbital. So we've got, you know, balloons, planes. it seems like if you wanted to apply some kind of malicious intent here, analysis that China and Russia too are, what is it, trying to create anxiety, trying to invagal their way into this fireproof attic that we like to call Canada and our sense of security. same with Americans. We know that their sense of national security is very different than many other countries because they are so removed from the rest of the world.

Is there a method here behind these incursions, especially the Chinese balloons? Because from a Psyops perspective, I think the Chinese had a terrific week. They did. They did. And the key word you just used, Rudyard, was sub or. orbital, right? So the in-between space, a great place to send up a balloon. Why would you bother to send up espionage balloons? Because you see more in suborbital space and then you do in space, at least right now. I can assure you that resolution will get better and better and better

and it won't matter much for much longer. But that's the advantage of balloons. Now, let's walk Back to this balloon story, it was not intended to fly over North America. So it wasn't a calculated sciops. Oh, my God, to make everybody stand outside, train their necks and watch the balloon across. It blew, of course, even the United States admits now it wasn't destined for North America. But, wow, when a misfired by China, everybody's watching. that balloon, frankly, the government had no choice as public apprehension grew to shoot it down. What do they then do?

predictably, they tighten the radar sensitivity. They heighten it. Oh, we missed that balloon. We missed balloons before. We can't afford to do this again. They make the radars more sensitive and they start picking up private stuff, private balloons. We don't know exactly what they are yet, but private stuff that was completely non-lethal. Damned if you do.

Damned if you don't. We need some regulation. We need tagging. So you have truck lanes, right? Okay. We need lanes in space and suborbital lanes where you say, I'm sending this thing up. It's designed to do this. And we need some traffic.

regulation. And the reason I make such a point in this, Rudyard, it's common, if space is getting very, very crowded and suborbital space is getting very crowded, and the regulators are lagging inevitably way behind. But that's what this story really is. It seems like, though, Janice, a little bit of Kabuki theater going on here. You know, the extent to which, you know, the military loves, you know, showing off, I guess, why people spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, you know, funding these complicated air defense jets and other systems. I mean, I had a, I don't know, it was a weird week. I had a feeling like the Biden administration, our own government, almost trying to lean into this balloon story, the Russian jet incursion. trying in a sense to amp it up in terms of their ability to respond and forcefully, you know,

defend the continent and project our sovereignty. I guess that's typical. I guess that's part of the playbook. I just wonder if it's all a giant distraction. Well, you know, let's talk about espionage for one minute because that's what this was. It was an espionage balloon that was flying over sites that had nuclear installations. That was the real issue for the military. Now, first of all, as soon as they identified that balloon, Rudder, they turned off all the signals from the nuclear installations as it passed over.

The balloon wasn't able to pick up very much. Secondly, let's just remember this. U.S. jets travel up and down the Straits of Taiwan all the time and have espionage capability over Chinese territory, right? All the time. And there's not a thing really trying to do about that because they are not going to shoot down a U.S. plane that is effectively. picking up signals, intelligence, as well as other things.

So espionage is everybody's game. Everybody is doing it all the time at every level. From the phone you're using right now, to the computer I'm using right now, it's all the time. The half-life government, there's no government to survive, so foreign balloon line over.

Just imagine if the balloon, that started in British Columbia, and instead of going south, it had gone east and flown over Canada. Can you imagine the outcry in this country about a government that couldn't protect our airspace and our sovereignty? Talking about not protecting airspace, what did you think of the decision that this object was shot down over Canadian territory by an American jet? I mean, is that just bad, you know, logistics and positioning of our own fighter jets and our inability in this instance to respond to this perceived threat? I mean, I get it. There's a lot of coordination between the two militaries vis-a-vis NORAD, but this contention of the prime ministers that he ordered the object to be shot down. I mean, as far as I understand, no U.S. pilot or U.S.

military commander receives orders from anything other than an individual in their chain of command, and the top of the person of that chain of command is Joe Biden, not Justin Trudeau. Well, you know, I think there is one, I never got really worked up about any of this. It was highly, it was entertaining as the week went on. But there is one serious takeaway from this, Rudyard. Norad is an integrated. defense structure. And Canada has actually bumped up in a significant way

its investment. It actually has a Canadian commander, by the way. Canadians don't know that, but it's a tightly integrated command structure, and it doesn't matter if you're Canadian or you're American. There's usually one of they rotate out, but right

now we have a Canadian commander and there's an American number two. But they make joint command decisions. It doesn't really matter. But what does that say to Canadians? Look how short response times are, if something serious were really to happen, right? North American space, both in space, suborbital, in the air, it's integrated. There's no way to think about defending over North America without an integrated command structure.

And that's only going to get more and more and more so. that's not a best thing. Is missile defense the next natural step here? Because this is a liberal government and a liberal party that has long opposed Canada joining. Now we're hearing a different tune

out of Ottawa from this prime minister that yes, in fact, it's time to consider becoming part of missile defense. Maybe explain to listeners quickly what that is because it's not maybe as innocuous as it sounds,

that it could involve staging missiles in Canada. These are defensive missiles that would be aimed at, hypothetically, North Korean, Russian, Chinese, intercontinental ballistic missiles. So what, so Canada does have, especially the liberal party, ever since Paul Martin, frankly, you know, from the Martin days in the 90s,

we said no to missile defense. but that was a reasonable decision to make at that time because there were still longer response times, right? You were fundamentally still thinking about hostile aircraft coming over the horizon. We had longer times to respond than we do now. You look back at these last 25 years, the response time are so short. were a missile to leave a launch pad and arrive in a North American destination. North Korea now has the capacity to strike the West Coast of both the United States and Canada,

although I can't imagine that Canada would be a target, frankly, of North Korea. But the defense structure is integrated, so it makes perfect sense, really, now, to reopen this discussion. But the issue really is, Rudyard. do you duplicate or do you integrate? That to me is always the issue. So when we're in integrated command structure, what is it that we can provide that will really help and make a difference in improving the performance of that structure?

Not clear that we have to replicate exactly what the United States is doing. Let's put a different eye. Let's just for the sake of argument, I can hear the howls of our listeners. When I say this, what about what maybe it is more effective to open up our airspace to U.S. missile defense doesn't take much to extend the range. It might be a better buy and a better bargain and we contribute in different ways. But then, Richard, you might be saying, how is it okay for a missile to be shot down over Canadian airspace on a U.S. command with a U.S. missile. That's the real issue. My final point on this is I just, I think this whole missile defense concept is in some ways a dangerous one and it's up to this point. It's been a

complete technological failure. Even the most advanced American anti-missile systems that are targeting intercontinental ballistic missiles have an appalling rate of success. In fact, and And these aren't even targeting what are called Mervs, multiple reentry vehicles. Now you have the Chinese and Russians, you know, leaping ahead of us in terms of hypersonic missiles. I just find missile defense to be a kind of doctor, strange love kind of concept of somehow that there's survivability of nuclear exchange between, you know, strategic adversaries like China, the United States and Russia. It's not. We're all dead. there is no day after at a scenario where you'd actually need to rely on a system like this.

And, you know, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars. And look, I guess, you know, if it makes the Americans happy and it's about greater, you know, continental cooperation, and we can do side deals on trade and other things. Maybe there's a reason to do it. But don't fool ourselves into thinking that this action. in any material way increases your security and safety in the context of what these systems are meant to defend, which is that horrible worst-case scenario of global thermonuclear war. Listen, I couldn't agree with you more, Richard.

Okay. I'm one of those who just finished a long rant, a written rant about this. The nuclear taboo is absolutely critical. There's no safe use of tactical nuclear weapons. or anything. What keeps us safe is, and we're seeing this play out right now in the real world, in Russia and the United States over Ukraine, you reinforce that nuclear taboo and you relentless. There's no safe, no missiles going to protect us.

But here's the other side of the story. Right close to the ground, not suborbital, not in space, but right close to the ground. Look how effective missiles have been for the Ukrainians. in shooting down and intercepting. The technology, it has, you know, Ukrainians are shooting down between 75% to 90% of the incoming missiles that Russia is targeting at their infrastructure. It's a remarkable performance.

The 10% that are getting through are doing horrific damage, but it's remarkable. So the technology is actually very low to the ground, the rocket technology is really improving in a capacity to recognize. We're in a really fast evolving. Against, though, you know, slow-moving cruise missiles, these are not hypersonics. And the Ukrainians are using S-300s where actually is an older Russian air defense system.

They don't have the Patriots there yet. But look, we'll continue to follow this issue, Janice. So we've got to take a break in order to squeeze in as we promise our two top. in half an hour or a little bit more. So when we come back after this short break, we'll be talking to our monk donors about a topic that got me fired up this week. So stay tuned for that right after this break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast.

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