New facts about the game theory of balloons

But it turns out that China’s effort has been underway for more than a decade. According to a declassified intelligence report issued Thursday by the State Department, it involves a “fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations” that have flown over 40 countries on five continents.

That is from the Washington Post.  And:

Balloon operations obviously make sense for the Chinese. The United States has military bases in Japan and elsewhere from which it can launch daily flights by P-8 and other surveillance planes that fly perilously close to Chinese airspace. China doesn’t have similar options.

The frequency of these American “Sensitive Reconnaissance Operations,” or SROs, has increased sharply from about 250 a year a decade ago to several thousand annually, or three or four a day, a former intelligence official told me. China wants to push back, and collect its own signals; it wants its own version of “freedom of navigation” operations. Balloons are a way to both show the flag and collect intelligence…

Let’s look at another tit-for-tat motivation: China claims in its internal media that the Pentagon has aggressive plans to use high-altitude balloons, in projects such as “Thunder Cloud.”

It turns out the Chinese are right. Thunder Cloud was the name for the U.S. Army’s September 2021 exercise in Norway to test its “Multidomain Operations” warfighting concept, following a similar test in the Pacific in 2018, according to the Pentagon’s Defense News.

Here is my previous post on the game theory of the balloons.  Worth a reread.