China’s military has shown growing interest in high-altitude balloons

BEIJING – As China and the United States tussle over what

Washington says was a Chinese surveillance balloon over US territory,

dozens of documents point to China’s surging interest in using balloon technology for military purposes.

China’s foreign ministry has repeatedly described the balloon that drifted over the US as an errant scientific craft. But Chinese military researchers have recently argued in publicly available papers that such aircraft should be further developed and deployed in specific missions.

One paper, published in April by researchers in a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) institute, focused on “special aircraft”, said one of the useful military applications of balloons was to test enemy air defences.

“(The balloon can) induce and mobilise the enemy’s air defence system, providing the conditions for the implementation of electronic reconnaissance, assessment of air defence systems’ early warning detection and operational response capabilities,” the researchers wrote.

That paper and several other articles by PLA-controlled publications also point to keen interest from the Chinese military in studying how the US and other countries used balloons militarily in the past, as well as a clear intent to close the gap in the field.

Balloons are also used for scientific purposes, such as weather monitoring, including by the likes of the China Meteorological Administration.

While US officials say China has more discrete and sophisticated ways to gather intelligence on its rival, such as its network of spy satellites, the PLA paper also said the low cost of using balloons was one of the reasons China should further deploy them.

“In response to the growing threat posed by ground-based air defence systems to air attack forces, it is necessary to use cheap air balloons to create active and passive interference to effectively suppress enemy air defence early warning systems and cover air attack forces to carry out their missions,” it argued.

The PLA paper appeared in Shipboard Electronic Countermeasure, a journal owned by a Chinese state-run shipping conglomerate that publishes articles on topics that include signals-jamming and electronic warfare.

“In order to shorten the gap with foreign countries when it comes to air-drift balloons, and to prevent China from being attacked by such weapons, we should actively carry out... research on related operational issues to enhance our military’s offensive combat capability,” it said.

Some regional security analysts say balloons could also gather data on the upper atmosphere useful for China’s missile programmes, or be used for high-resolution photography to supplement intelligence material available via satellites. REUTERS