In The Line, yet another incursion into NORAD air space, and no, this isn’t a re-post from last week:
Holy jumpin’ Jeepers, folks, we’ve got more balloons!
On Friday, the Americans shot down another unidentified flying object — gulp — off the coast of Alaska. By Saturday, NORAD was reporting yet another one, this time over Canadian territory. NORAD jets scrambled, and an American F-22 destroyed the object over Yukon. Canadian military teams are now en route to recover the wreck and find out what the hell we are shooting at.
This was an exciting enough little pick-me-up on Saturday, but it wasn’t done. Later that night, another air defence emergency was declared over Montana, and American F-15 jets were scrambled out of Oregon to intercept an object that had been detected on radar. They were not able to find anything, and as of press time, NORAD has said only that they will continue to monitor the situation.
A few points we’d make about a truly bizarre series of stories.
The first is that there’s nothing wrong or particularly embarrassing about an American plane defending Canadian air space. NORAD is a joint bi-national command. Missions are tasked to the first available aircraft. That might sometimes mean a Canadian jet defending U.S. territory. It’s happened! On Saturday, the object was closer to American bases in Alaska than the nearest CF-18 base in Alberta. There probably is a conversation worth having about whether Canada should maintain a small alert force of jets further north, better able to respond in the future. That’s expensive and logistically complicated, but may still be worth considering. For now, the system functioned as intended. So we say, quite sincerely, thanks, America. We appreciate the help.
That being said, we do think this is a useful reminder that the long and repeated delays by Canada to both replace the aging CF-18 jets and modernize NORAD with new sensors and capabilities were reckless and dumb. It was obvious that the CF-18s needed replacing when Stephen Harper took office, but we only got that underway in recent months. NORAD, for its part, functions well as an institution but needs upgraded technology. That project also should have begun many years ago. In both cases, we delayed because we didn’t want to spend the money and because defence projects in this country are almost always politically fraught. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the weird series of aerial intruders is a useful reminder that neglecting your own defences is never a good idea. We are realists about Canada’s ability to field a massive military, but our geography, in so many ways a blessing, does impose a few costs back on us. It’s not easy to patrol and police such massive territories, especially with a relatively small and concentrated population. But we have to do it. It’s what being a country means. Too often, we haven’t. We hope that changes. With the NORAD modernization announced and the F-35s ordered, perhaps we’re finally making right some of these failures. We hope so. But we are jaded, friends. We admit that.
Our final point is an appeal to calm. We don’t really know what the hell is happening with all these aerial intruders either, but there could easily be a pretty mundane explanation. Radar sets have programmable software filters that are intended to avoid cluttering up the scopes with too much information. Without these filters, clouds, snow storms and birds can cause returns that may look like planes and missiles. One way of filtering out such clutter is by establishing a minimum speed for flagging an object. Balloons are likely normally below that minimum. Your Line editors suspect that part of what is happening right now is that we’ve adjusted those filters, and are suddenly seeing things that were already there all along.
Is that better, or worse? We don’t know. We can make that argument either way. In any case, that may be what’s happening.
Or hell, maybe it’s aliens, and Canada and the U.S. just declared war on a more sophisticated race that travelled across the vastness of the stars only to end their journey by being murdered by Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. We doubt it, to be honest. But it’s been a weird few years already, no?
