Multiple sources report the escape of a giant unmanned military surveillance blimp from military custody today:
The U.S. military has two giant unmanned surveillance blimps it uses to watch the East coast from a base in Maryland. And one of them escaped its tethering Wednesday and floated aimlessly over Pennsylvania, downing power lines and cutting off electricity for tens of thousands of residents.
The incident started shortly after noon, when the blimp became detached from its anchor, NORAD said. Two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled to ensure it didn’t collide with other aircraft. By the late afternoon, the dirigible had come down to the ground, but not before leaving a trail of damage in its wake.
Not surprisingly, privacy concerns have been raised about this example of yet another military technology being turned on American civilians (emphasis mine):
Hovering over the busy Baltimore Washington corridor the appearance of the balloons quickly raised privacy concerns among civil libertarians, and others, who feared they could be used to spy on U.S. citizens.
The aerostats have a radar capable of detecting airborne objects from up to 340 miles away and vehicles on the surface from up to 140 miles away — as far south as Richmond, as far west as Cumberland, Md., and as far north as Staten Island. The Army declined to say what size vehicles can be sensed from those distances.
And in 2013, defense contractor Raytheon touted an exercise in which it outfitted the aerostats planned for deployment in suburban Baltimore with one of the company’s most powerful high-altitude surveillance systems, capable of spotting individual people and vehicles from a distance of many miles.
This latest incident comes at an interesting time, given tonight’s GOP debate and the current BMG front-page thread regarding the CISA bill.
Now that Mitt Romney appears to be actually fading back into the obscurity he so richly deserves, perhaps it’s time to update our image of the canonical blimp.
I was hoping this would be a request for a Jeb! blimp!
And the Pentagon was trying to harness it for some more useful purpose. …
I may be biased on account of growing up in suburban NYC, where air defense now seems like something that ought to exist, so I am more grumpy that the entire JLENS program is an expensive failure— another instance of faisco induced by the military’s penchant to build systems BEFORE they finish designing them.
Well, more design is perhaps needed for this system — for example, some way to dump the helium by remote control, and some way to jettison the tethers from the aerostat rather than drag them across the landscape.
Still, the premise of mooring these in Aberdeen MD is strikingly reminiscent of a memory from my childhood in suburban Washington DC. The military built a square three-story watch tower on the school grounds behind my house. It was perhaps 25 feet on each side, maybe less. It was basically an enclosed stairway with a flat open platform on the top and railings all around. While we grade schoolers weren’t allowed near it during school, we all played in it when we could — it (“the fort”) was the focal point of many games of “Army” and “Cowboys and Indians”. The doors were never locked.
The tower was built as part of an “inner defense” ring around Washington DC. The premise was that neighborhood volunteers were, at the first sign of attack, supposed to run to the tower, climb it, and telephone somebody or other to alert them if they saw any Russian bombers or missiles. Seriously!
The tower was rather quickly handed over to Civil Defense (“CD”), and fell into disrepair. It was torn down, leaving behind a square concrete foundation for us to continue using as our “fort”.
The premise offered by the NSA is that today’s Aerodrome will allow enemy cruise missiles to be detected — sounding very much like the “mission” that produced my childhood “fort”. Presumably these would originate from home-ground terrorist cells sleeping in the Amish country or something — I certainly hope we don’t need a blimp floating over MD to warn us of missiles launch from the Middle East.
The entire exercise strikes me as either Pink Elephant powder (see, no pink elephants — it’s working) or a transparent lie to cover its actual intent.
Call me cynical, but I assume the latter.
LOL