The Chinese balloon incident has not only caused an intense scuffle between the two planetary superpowers.
His flight cut short by a shot from an American fighter has revealed that out there, high up, there is intense aerostatic activity, or at least that's what China, the United States and other countries denounce.
These devices have the potential to be used in the civil, military and also dual fields, and the great powers show a growing interest in incorporating them into their surveillance and defense systems.
After the downing of the balloon two weeks ago, Washington accused China of executing a program at the service of the People's Liberation Army (the Chinese Army) that sends surveillance balloons around the world.
The artifacts have recently penetrated the airspace of various countries on five continents, according to US Defense sources.
China, on the other hand, defends that the downed balloon was a device intended for "mainly meteorological" research that lost its route due to the west winds.
Beijing regretted the incident - which would amount to an apology - but also responded with a dart that revealed the existence of even more balloons, in this case American: those from Washington penetrated the airspace of the Asian giant on up to 10 occasions in the last year, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said last Monday.
Since the incident, the aircraft appear to have abandoned their stealthy flight.
The Government of Japan has denounced that it suspects at least three incursions since 2019. And the skies of Taiwan, the self-governing island whose sovereignty is claimed by Beijing and which receives military support from the United States, would have been crossed by Chinese military balloons "very frequently" , as reported by
the Financial Times
this week, citing anonymous official sources.
The Ministry of Defense of the enclave immediately assured that all the detected aircraft were for meteorological purposes and did not represent a threat.
And on Thursday, Taiwan's military authorities found the remains of a suspected Chinese meteorological artifact on one of its islets in the Strait of Formosa, off the coast of mainland China, one of those disputed bits of land in the deepest region. sensitive part of the geopolitical theater of Asia Pacific.
Stratospheric balloons are capable of flying high enough to avoid being shot down by anti-aircraft weapons, and they move slowly, making them difficult to detect.
"It's a gray area of operation," explains Dr. Lin Ying-Yu, an assistant professor at Tamkang University (Taiwan) who specializes in the capabilities of the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
Unlike satellites, focused on capturing images, these devices are intended to collect what in military jargon is called C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance).
Through sensors located on these balloons, the PLA (People's Liberation Army) would try to "collect electrical information" coming from radio and communications, especially from US forces while conducting exercises, adds analyst Lin in an online meeting with correspondents. foreign.
“Stratospheric balloons can act as quasi-satellites in a war,” says Wang Haili, a PLA air force colonel retired from service in 2019, citing a US Hudson Institute article.
Wang has spent years teaching and researching national security issues and has authored numerous scholarly articles in publications such as the People's Liberation Army National Defense University Magazine.
He receives EL PAÍS at the headquarters of the Taihe think tank, based in Beijing, but makes it clear that his vision is a personal opinion that does not represent Taihe or Beijing.
"A very deep problem"
The ex-military goes to an old Chinese proverb to explain the balloon incident.
"When a leaf falls, we know autumn is coming."
The blade would be the downed Chinese artifact;
the fall, to the current moment that the Sino-US relations are going through.
“Although it is a minor matter, it reflects a very deep problem,” says Wang, in whose opinion the crisis shows that there is a problem of confidence in China on the part of the United States – which never gave credence to Beijing's explanations.
Wang explains that some countries have projects that use balloons for military reconnaissance, but admits that it is impossible to know which states and the content of the programs, because it is a "military secret" in most cases.
He is unaware of the existence of security and defense projects related to this equipment in China.
But he affirms that the country does have civilian scientific research projects.
There is no public trace of civil programs, such as the tests carried out in September by the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), with a "quasi-space" scientific balloon that rose to an altitude of 30 kilometers with a payload of 1.2 tons, according to a news item from the agency.
The interest in these artifacts in Defense circles in Beijing is deduced from secondary sources.
"In recent years, some countries have made great efforts regarding the use of military balloons," says an article published a year ago in the
Daily of the People's Liberation Army
, the newspaper of the Central Military Commission, the highest military organ of the Communist Party, chaired by the country's president, Xi Jinping.
The text analyzed the battlefield advantages of these slow aircraft in a world of hypersonic velocity projectiles, and recalled the relevance of the US forces' Thunder Cloud (2021) military exercise, in which "high-altitude balloons were tested ”, according to the US Army website.
Washington has also shown a growing interest in this field.
It intends to increase the budget to 27.1 million dollars (about 25.15 million euros) in 2023, according to
Politico
in May 2022. “High-altitude balloons, which fly at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet [ between 18,288 and 27,432 meters] would be added to the extensive surveillance network of the Pentagon and could be used to track hypersonic weapons”, assured the US media.
The National Defense Strategy, released by the United States in October, stated that over the past two decades, China has made “spectacular progress in developing conventional and nuclear ballistic and hypersonic missile technologies and capabilities,” closing the gap with the United States.
The report makes no mention of the balloons.
The British Ministry of Defense has also launched a stratospheric balloon program for "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance", whose devices are developed by the Sierra Nevada Corporation.
The next phase includes a 60-day test flight, according to an October statement from the company, which also develops civilian equipment.
Retired Colonel Wang explains that in today's warfare format, where technology allows fighting to take place "beyond line of sight," balloons can play a reconnaissance role.
"Any military force must solve the problem that it needs to find the target as soon as possible, and then strive to have more time to counterattack."
This problem, he adds, has been exacerbated by the increasing development of hypersonic missiles.
Stratospheric balloons have the advantages of low cost, long flight duration, wide vision, and difficult detection.
“From a military point of view,” he adds, “the Americans can develop high-altitude balloons and get as close as possible to the Chinese border, while cooperating with ground-based radar, space satellites, and other means, in order to detect what relevant weapons that may pose a threat as soon as possible.”
In any case, he believes that the aerostatic skirmish will soon be over.
The episode is "a small wave in the vast ocean of relations between the two superpowers," she says.
He believes that in recent days, both China and the United States have shown their attitude to put down the "incident" as soon as possible.
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