It definitely looks like something ballistic tears through the balloon:

Link 4

In two other cases, the equipment carried in the balloons was determined to be destroyed. The one other balloon was undamaged. The average munitions expenditure was high: 1.4 air-to-air missiles (AAMs), 26 unguided rockets, and 112 cannon rounds per balloon. This kind of weapon use is not necessarily a problem if a large balloon is involved, but it becomes very expensive if there are several hundred of these balloons and it’s not known what kinds of payloads they carry.

The story on the previous balloons, the way they're telling it now, is "we were aware of them but unaware of what they were." Mattis was briefed and made the call not to discuss UFOs with Trump. I'd make that call, too.

The latest yuge balloon seems like quite the stupid play by China. Certainly, the Chinese reaction to the U.S. reaction has been laughably stupid, at least.

There's a great Nova called "Astrospies" that's technically about the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a spying complex that was basically killed by the KH-9 before it ever flew. In it, they make the point that the entire impetus for spy satellites was (1) Sputnik (2) Frank Powers because the USSR was very, very proud of satellite overflight of the whole goddamn world and very, very salty about aircraft overflight of portions of the USSR. As a consequence, Eisenhower asked Edwin Land if he'd be cool fading into obscurity having never worked on anything public ever again while also underpinning the whole of the United States' electrooptical intelligence satellite program. Ed Land, being Ed Land, said 'fuck yeah, fam' and then basically got released from purgatory upon the advent of the CCD.

There's also a great book called Deep Black that speculates about the then not-publicly-disclosed NRO and their missions. It's fuckin' great. The author interviews Hans Mark extensively about the NRO and Hans Mark is all "well if the NRO existed they'd probably work something like this" while Hans Mark was busily running the NRO. Anyway. William Burrows (no not that one) makes the point that the more spy satellites the better because it gives you disclosure in a "cold" war. You're much less likely to freak out about stuff you know about than stuff you don't.

once more I am imploring everyone to read this article dammit

Annnnyway. The US and USSR had this shit figured out - spy planes bad, satellites annoying but, you know, precedent. China? China signed zero of those treaties and were invited to none of those parties because they were busy genociding intellectuals so...

...I'm sure the argument was made that balloon overflight is an "easier to ask forgiveness than permission" situation followed by "fuck forgiveness and we need no one's permission."

What blows my mind is, as of this morning anyway, most of the speculation is that the payloads are mostly electro-optical. The point being that yeah, your resolution is no better than what you'd get from a semi-decent spy satellite but which is more expensive, satellites or balloons? I'm not entirely on board with this because (A) if all you care about is cameras why do you have a 40ft long array for "solar panels" (B) why the fuck are you bothering with 500lbs of solar panels when a fuckin' 8lb lithium battery will power all your electrooptical bullshit for weeks and weeks and weeks.

So I think they aren't really saying what the things really are, which is 4g sniffers.

You tell me - what orbit would you park a spy satellite in? Google tells me about 200 miles up and I'm too lazy to fact check. Black body decay from a 4G cellular antenna at 200 miles? nuthin'. Black body decay from a 4G cellular antenna at 13 miles? NOW we're cookin'.

So look. We've been sniffing all foreign communications into and out of the United States since 2003. We've been sniffing anything over-the-air for a fuckton longer. So the Chinese can righteously say "but but but you're listening to everything we do and you keep banning Huawei and it's just not fair HRRRRNNNGGGGHHH!" and be absolutely right?

And be Chinese and feel entitled to level the playing field?

And quickly discover that Americans are disinterested in level playing fields.

"grab every 4g communication" is a keenly Chinese approach to surveillance. "What are they gonna do, shoot it down" is a keenly Chinese attitude to discovery. And it is quintessentially Chinese policy to overreach and then double down.

I doubt we're going to learn about what sort of shenanigans the US intelligence community now feels justified to pull. I'll bet it's a lot. And we're already asymmetrical AF against the Chinese.