Pentagon Declines to Answer If It Shot Down $12 Balloon with $400k Missile

The F-22 costs more than $50,000 per flying hour to operate. The USAF flew the F-22 for approximately 28,000 hours in FY2021; but that $1.4bn expense is less than 1% of their annual budget.<p>We&#x27;re talking about a $400K missile so much, why?

They didn&#x27;t recover the object...so they wouldn&#x27;t be able to answer either way. I&#x27;m surprised they couldn&#x27;t do a visual inspection and say yep...it&#x27;s a pico balloon. And if it was, I&#x27;m pretty impressed a missile can hone in on something like that.

Why did they blow up the balloons instead of trying to capture them in one piece and perhaps study them? What if they had something dangerous on board that could spread everywhere in the air upon getting blown to pieces?!

If you find you&#x27;re angry about a large government wasting half a million dollars, then you&#x27;ll be really angry when you find out how much it actually wastes.<p>And then when you find out that government waste is a fraction of the waste in private enterprises, well, you probably won&#x27;t be angry about that at all.<p>Because the personality that rages at public waste never seems to be all that concerned with the much greater level of private waste.

Two $400K missile a shot were needed to bring down one balloon at the target price range $12 to $180. The first sidewinder missile missed.

Zero Hedge is an even less reliable source of information than the narrator in the blog’s favorite book (or, more likely, movie).

This is how American military was defeated with absolute humiliation by Talebans and Vietnamese. The opponents simply overwhelm your expensive toys with cheap counter measures. Even American soldiers like Deltas and Rangers couldnt afford to get slaughtered by untrained enemy combatants in the hundreds of thousands. Imagine China flood American skys with a million balloons with fentanyl powders. How effective is American patriots and THAAD and F35 going to defend against that? No wonder American was defeated in Afghanistan after spending 10T ISD and 20 years there. This obsessions with wonder weapon is one of the reason how Hitler loss to Stalin Russia. Guess Americans have to relearn that lesson.

Both zerohedge and Snowden are sources that you should basically never be listening to. They are intensely unreliable and Snowden’s essentially a state mouthpiece for the Russian government at this point.

using a laser would be a much more practical weapon against a balloon. Anyway, Bing better stop sending up those balloons.

Where&#x27;s Frank Luke when you need him?

It was only $400K?<p>Must have been one of those old icky missiles that desperately needed replacement anyway.<p>U.S. defense spending will OBVIOUSLY have to go up:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;16&#x2F;ukraine-war-defense-budget-taiwan&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;16&#x2F;ukraine-w...</a><p>Military spending as percentage of GDP:<p><pre><code> World total 2,113 2.2 100% </code></pre> 1 United States 801.0 3.2 38%<p>2 China 293.0 1.7 14%<p>3 India 76.6 2.4 3.6%<p>4 United Kingdom 68.4 2.1 3.2%<p>5 Russia Russia 65.9 3.1 3.1%<p>I mean, we&#x27;re only spending 1&#x2F;3 of all the money spent on military in the world!! How lame is that?<p>We need to shoot down those weather baloons with $1M missiles!!!