The accusations of the governments of the United States and Canada about the presence of an alleged Chinese spy balloon in their respective territories has brought back to the forefront a system for gathering intelligence information that refuses to disappear in the face of more modern and less invasive strategies such as the use of satellites.
The first recorded use of hot air balloons for military purposes dates back to 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 1,000 feet –some 300 meters– and were used for observation, as recorded in a historical report of the U.S. National Park Service.
At that time they were considered cheap, discreet and practically unreachable from the ground, although their real explosion came in the 20th century, during the First World War, and also in stages such as the Cold War, when the political struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States also extended to the field of intelligence and technological progress favored the absence of a crew.
The use of satellites made balloons partly obsolete, but their use would have revived. In fact, the U.S. Department of Defense would also have increased in its most recent stage the investment in this type of systems, as noted by the news portal Politico in 2022.
Analyst Peter Layton, from the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia, explains that the miniaturization of technological equipment encourages the use of balloons, which weighing less «can be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch» than satellites, reports CNN.
Another expert, Blake Herzinger of the American Enterprise Institute, also points out that this type of system leaves little trace, making it difficult to track. Satellites, on the other hand, are 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 period of time and, being located inside the Earth’s atmosphere, they have a different kind 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 alleged Chinese balloon flew over Montana at more than 40,000 feet –about 12,000 meters– and posed no risk to the population or to air navigation. The authorities have not given details on the technical characteristics of the balloon, although its size would have discouraged any possible shoot down because of the possibility of a rain of debris over populated areas, reports Bloomberg agency.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
