When it comes to aerial invasions, Montanans haven’t been this incensed since Flathead County Sheriff Duncan McCarthy in 1944 confiscated an Imperial Japanese “Windship Weapon” designed to set western forests ablaze during World War II.
“Shoot. It. Down.” That was the three-word battle cry of retired Navy Seal commander-turned-Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke earlier this month after a 200-foot Chinese spy balloon was first spotted floating across Big Sky Country.
“In Montana we do not bow. We shoot it down. Take the shot,” demanded Zinke, shooting from the hip perhaps but entirely permitted when our chief military adversary is violating U.S. sovereignty before our very eyes.
As it was, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, head of the nearby U.S. Northern Command, advised against downing the surveillance balloon anywhere over the continental United States.
Thus the Chinese airship – configured we’re told with electro-optical sensors, advanced digital cameras, propellers and a rudder to speed up, slow down and make turns – hovered however closely to 150 missile launch facilities in eight Montana counties: Cascade, Chouteau, Fergus, Judith Basin, Lewis and Clark, Meagher, Teton and Wheatland.
What new intelligence China might have gleaned from its stratospheric flight through U.S. airspace isn’t known. Surely with its sophisticated spy satellites and other proven intelligence gathering capabilities, the communist superpower had some prior understanding of Montana’s aging (circa 1960s) Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system. Which obviously doesn’t make the balloon’s intrusion or the separate UFO that followed it into Montana airspace this past weekend (eventually shot down over Lake Huron) any more acceptable.
Fortunately, when the Chinese balloon was first detected off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, where strategic missile defenses and tracking devices are found, unspecified steps were taken by the Pentagon to render any aerial tour of the United States useless (let’s hope so, given the balloon ultimately explored 11 states).
Another option discussed by our military was to beam false data into the balloon’s sizeable technology bay – a high-altitude malware attack if you will.
The only silver lining to all of this balloon business is that Americans have been awakened to the serious security threat posed by China. In fact, the Chinese are currently (read rapidly) expanding their long-range nuclear missile capabilities, with three new missile fields recently identified in western China capable of housing more than 300 multi-warhead ICBMs.
(Montana’s missile silos are already slated for a much-needed upgrade, and none too soon).
The unacceptable irony to all of this is that Americans have grown far too dependent on China. To put it in perspective, the Chinese are making 80 percent of the 75 million products sold by Walmart. And as U.S. consumers gobble up the cheaper goods, millions of Americans lose their jobs.
Investors from China, meanwhile, are keeping busy becoming stakeholders in major U.S. companies: General Motors, Hilton Hotels, and AMC cinema, to name just a few. The General Electric Appliance Division is now entirely owned by the Chinese.
All told, Chinese financial interests have acquired tens of billions of dollars of assets in at least 40 U.S. states and territories and counting. And as we speak 252 Chinese companies are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and NYSE American.
All the more reason to tip your cowboy hat to the lone U.S. military officer who warned this month that a Chinese company’s plan to build a corn mill within proximity of Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota “presents a significant threat to national security.”
John McCaslin is a longtime print and broadcast journalist and author.