Why is the US military getting ready to launch new spy balloons?

The US military has prioritised deploying high-altitude balloons that can carry out surveillance

By Jeremy Hsu
30 August 2024



A high-altitude balloon launched by the US Army Pacific in the Philippines in 2022 as part of an exercise to strengthen cooperation between the two nations

The US military is planning to launch balloons that are capable of providing high-altitude surveillance. It comes after the nation scrambled fighter jets to shoot down a Chinese balloon as it drifted through North American airspace last year.

Modern balloons can use artificial intelligence to predict and ride wind currents while operating at altitudes around 18 kilometres, or even higher, in Earth’s stratosphere for commercial and military purposes. Those heights make them hard to track and engage while also requiring expensive air-to-air missiles to shoot them down, says Lawrence Stutzriem at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, a think tank in Washington DC.

Now, the US military has fast-tracked the development and deployment of such high-altitude surveillance balloons through its Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve programme, according to Breaking Defense.

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Meanwhile, the US Army launched high-altitude balloons from Guam and the Philippines during military exercises with US allies in the Pacific in June. The military service has also been looking for radar and communications sensors weighing less than 7 kilograms that can be carried by high-altitude balloons, according to an Army notice published in July.

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