Well, I don't mean shooting down U-2s, since we don't fly those anymore,

I mean, I get what you're saying. It's not likely that we fly U-2s over anywhere we aren't on extremely convivial terms with. I care about this stuff entirely too much and one thing I can say with certainty: the US really likes an asymmetrical frontier. We're somewhere between 250k and 300k rounds per insurgent killed in Afghanistan, depending on how you ask. That's around three metric tons of ammo. It was argued during the Vietnam War that we could have paid every man, woman and child in North Vietnam $57k a year to put down any weapons and declare us the victors and come out fiscally ahead (pretty much the way the Treasure Fleets worked, incidentally). We know SR-71s/A-12s never flew over the USSR because it didn't take long for the USSR to make some truly hot-shit missiles. We know the SR-71s/A-12s overflew China... until they got some truly hot-shit missiles.

'member this?

We have zero fucking reason to fuck around with balloons. The overwhelming political sentiment in the US towards China is "take their money and slap their bitch asses down if they forget their place." China, on the other hand, is busily establishing themselves as the only transcendent empire in the history of mankind and if you disagree on any level you're an enemy of the people. Dollars to donuts: Chinese spy satellite overflights are a known quantity in the US intelligence community. If the Chinese actually wanted to learn something new they'd have to get creative. On the other hand the United States had launched something like 6,000 espionage balloons by the time Xi was a Party member so it's safe to say we cut that shit out ages ago or else little boys would have US Spy Balloon trapper keepers the same way they have SR-71s.

I guess I'm curious why they kept tempting fate with the U-2 when Powers was shot down in 1960.

Proxy bullshit?

The intelligence gathered by the Black Cat Squadron, which included evidence of a military build-up on the Sino-Soviet border, may have contributed to the U.S. opening to China during the Nixon administration by revealing the escalating tensions between the two communist nations. Shortly after Nixon's visit to Beijing, all reconnaissance flights over the People's Republic ceased, and the Black Cat Squadron was officially disbanded in the spring of 1974.

The incursive shit we did against Soviet Air Defense was really fucking hairy. Provocative AF. As soon as it became clear that things could escalate we scaled back... but only riiiiiiiiiight up to the edge. Mostly.

Flight "double Oh Seven are you shitting me"

So we poked China with Taiwanese pilots because (1) we could deny we had anything to do with it (2) We could pretend we weren't doing it just to piss off the Russians. But as soon as we figured out that the Chinese were saltier at the Russians then they were at us, we quit cold turkey and that's pretty much where we spent the rest of the Cold War.

Dude how long do you think it takes to ride an ejected pilot's chair with parachute down from 70k+ feet? That's gotta be like something around 30 minutes.

A while, yeah. I think terminal is somewhere between 20 and 30 feet per second at sea level but probably a fuckton more that high up. Chute might not even do anything for the first 10-20k feet. They're definitely gonna have time to suss you out.

btw, I love the stories of the SR-71 in its heyday, when they'd be like "missile locked on to us, sir". "OK, full throttle", and that was the end of that. U-2slow would've been the meme.

I think there's a lot of bravado there. These guys?

Mach 8.

A lot of the US' cloak of invincibility comes from knowing who to pick fights with. I think we decided to up our anti-foo-fighter game in 2018, and we needed an excuse to pop some pigeons. 'cuz here's the thing - soon as those things start shooting back we're in a whole new ball game.

This whole kerfuffle, my guess, was "are you fucking kidding me with these balloons" followed by "well shit maybe we get lasers now." All the rest of it is posturing.