This week, U.S. Air Force General Glen VanHerck, the commander of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), spoke of a “domain awareness gap” in saying that the U.S. had failed to detect previous Chinese spy balloons.
Published reports have indicated that the four previous Chinese balloons–one early in the Biden administration and three during the Trump administration–had overflown Guam and the states of Hawaii, Texas, and Florida.
While NORAD said that it detected the most recent balloon over the Aleutian Islands on Jan. 28, it is likely that it would have remained unknown, had it not been for the closure of airspace around Billings, Montana on Feb. 1, the sharp eyes of the Billings Gazette editor and a photographer, and the publicity that resulted.
The “domain awareness gap” may feature relatively low-tech, cheap, high altitude balloons, which, if they lack significant metal materials, may be able to avoid radar detection, as such balloons’ radar cross section is that of a small bird.
Defense Daily will update this article with any input received from NORAD.
A year and a half ago, VanHerck said that the modernization of the U.S.-Canadian North Warning System (NWS) should include the ability to detect bombers, low-flying cruise missiles–which may be hypersonic, and small drones (Defense Daily, Aug. 17, 2021). He did not mention balloons.
A successor to the 1950s Distant Early Warning (DEW) line, NWS, first fielded in the late 1980s, consists of 25 Lockheed Martin [LMT] AN/FPS-117 long-range radars and 36 short-range AN/FPS-124 radars. NWS provides early warning of possible incursions into U.S. airspace and covers nearly 3,000 miles across North America from the Aleutian Islands in southwestern Alaska to Baffin Island in northeastern Canada.
NWS was designed to detect relatively high-flying bombers, and VanHerck said in 2021 that “ideally, we would like to go to an advanced system–over-the-horizon radar.”
“The North Warning System is limited in its distance…which doesn’t allow us to see far enough out away from the homeland,” he said. “There’s proven technology today that would give us domain awareness. I think it’s crucial, as we create new systems, that we don’t make them singularly focused. Any new systems that we create must be able to not only detect bombers, but cruise missiles and even small UAS, to be affordable and usable.”
A month before VanHerck’s discussion of NWS in 2021, Air Force Lt. Gen. Clinton Hinote, the service’s deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements said that the U.S. and Canada needed to modernize NWS and had delayed that modernization “for too long” (Defense Daily, July 27, 2021).
NORAD modernization has been a topic of conversation among President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The issue also came up in a Feb. 10 meeting between U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand at the Pentagon, DoD said on Feb. 10.
“Canada and the U.S., working through NORAD, tracked the recent Chinese surveillance balloon that violated the sovereignty of both countries,” the Pentagon said.
The U.S. and Canada are collaborating to upgrade NWS with “Crossbow,” which the Canadian government has described as a “network of sensors with classified capabilities, distributed across northern Canada” (Defense Daily, Feb. 9).
James Fergusson, the deputy director of the Centre for Defense and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, suggested in a paper in January 2020 that the cost to modernize NWS could be $8 billion to $11 billion–split 60-40 between the U.S. and Canada.
VanHerck said in 2021 that the use of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) is critical to efforts to modernize analog processes at NORTHCOM and NORAD.
“If a radar detects a bomber approaching…the first step would be the controller that detects it, picking up a telephone to talk to the command center, who would then pick up another telephone to talk to either the CONR [Continental U.S. NORAD Region], the ANR [Alaska NORAD Region] or CANR [Canadian NORAD Region],” VanHerck said at the time. “We have two sectors as well…Finally, it will get to my headquarters through another phone call, which would take minutes to do that. That’s not good enough, in my mind. Imagine having a single pane of glass to see that all real-time and globally collaborate on response options. That’s where we’re going.”
During the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia used spy balloons. In 1955-56, Pres. Eisenhower authorized the launch of hundreds of reconnaissance balloons to gauge Russian and Chinese strike capacities, but the balloons proved of limited utility, as just a few dozen were not shot down and recovered, and the U.S. embarked upon the U-2 surveillance plane and CORONA intelligence satellite programs.