Meh. Complaining about the cost of shooting this down is pretty silly. F22s are already flown on a daily basis. And munitions are spent regularly in training excersises. It would cost far more millions to set up a training excersise even half as valuable. But that is just the cost of maintaining a capable fighter fleet.
There's probably been sports event flyovers that have technically cost many times this.
For the pilots, it was - the US achieved air superiority quite quickly.
Whatever point you’re trying to make, you lost it along the way. The outcome of of the afghan war was not ideal, but that was not caused by a lack of pilot training, that is an absolutely absurd thing to argue.
This sort of calculations are slightly silly. F22s take off for training flights all the time, having one training flight switch to operational does not affect the cost.
It’s similar for using missiles. The opportunity to shoot a real one at a real target is good training.
Those things costs this money perhaps, but it’s not a useful way to think of it this way for such a case.
I think the implication is not that the cost in this specific case was very high. I think the point was that there is an assymetry in cost. So, if someone wanted to have balloons over the USA, it would be much cheaper for them to try than it would be for the USA to stop them. By the time someone starts sending 1000's of balloons, the costs to destroy them may add up.
Threats that are few in number and great in number are handled by different sorts of countermeasures. If China really did flood the west in balloons, then alternate measures would be used to handle it, perhaps measures that aren't public.
High altitude balloons are very fragile (you need to wear gloves to avoid getting oils on them because those can dissolve the balloon material causing them to prematurely burst). I'm sure there's many counter measures that could be used if needed.
I mean it would be pretty easy to figure out who it was, if at nation state level enact things like embargos against them which would cost them quite a bit more. If not at nation state level they'd likely be taken care of much more quietly.
China already does something similar to Japan. They fly hundreds of flights a year around Japanese airspace, forcing Japan to constantly scramble jets just in case. This tires their pilots, puts wear on their planes, and costs a ton of money.
You could also just be trying to apply logic to someone with a low-cost, nonsensical argument. The irony being that it's the same sort of attack you're describing, but on your brain.
Are you serious? This is like looking at a F1 car and going "oh yeah, that's super cheap. Go carts only cost a couple thousand dollars". DoD says that the payload of the balloon is as long as three buses lined up end to end. The balloon itself is likely bigger than many office buildings. A state of the art sensor suite is going to run in the millions. Claiming you can get all that for sub 50k is laughable.
You've left out the cost of the payload, which is probably substantial.
If I weren't retired, I'd be interested in reverse-engineering it. I'm sure NASIC will be all over it, but we (the general public) will never get the details of what the payload was really doing.
It's you who doesn't understand. We don't care how much the target costs. We care about how much not taking it down can cost us.
We stand to learn a lot from capturing the surveillance platform. This alone is priceless. We send a message that Chinese aircraft that violate our airspace and leave in tact. If data was stored onboard, it's possible that we prevented a large cache of surveillance data from making it back to China.
So that $400,000 missile had a benefit that is hard to quantify, but is easily in the multiple millions of dollars.
Your argument makes no sense. Let's say a sniper is in a building and is about to fire on a high value target. Before he can fire, we hit that building with a missile to take him out. According to you, we paid $400,000 to take out a sniper and his $1 bullet. The truth is that we spent $400,000 to protect a high value asset that may have been worth far more.
Laser weapons were not highly effective against fast objects like ICBMs, but a slow moving weak object like a balloon should represent a pretty easy target.
