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Evidence needed, particularly for the framing.
Whether the Russians believe it was an American puppet/satellite is irrelevant to whether it was an American puppet/satellite. This presupposes that the framing of puppet/satellite is accurate, which is a model that rejects or diminishes the autonomy of other actors to act without American approval or foreknowledge.
I am not the sort of cultural chauvenist that presumes the Americans are the most important factor in the decision-making of American allies.
If air-monitoring is way beyond competence and sophistication, then much more difficult categories to monitor- such as surface-vessel and submarines- are even further beyond, thus furthering the incentive to using them rather than methods where a lower-level of competence would allow detection.
This is trying to have it both ways- that the actors involved are simultaneously incredibly capable but also incompetent.
This undermines the claim of the inability to track, as it shows that they were tracked, but not acted upon at the time, but upon revisiting the available data were able to identify the at-the-time overlooked data. As a model for the Baltic space, this would support the importance of not having aviation data available for re-looking if you were trying to do a secret operation.
This is the conspiratorial argument trying to have it both ways: the simultaneous claims of hypercompetence beyond realism but incompetence in in select areas as needed to sustain the conspiratorial claims.
So, the fact that US failed to act on what were likely spy blimps flying overhead for years undermines my claim that they'd be too incompetent to have a program that'd correlate flight radar data and actual radar data ?
Do I have it right ? The fact of demonstrated incompetence* undermines my claim of their incompetence?
*there's a statement by Mattis claiming they 'knew about the balloons' but didn't tell Trump because his reaction could've been 'too combative'. Honestly have no clue why airforce intercepting unmanned suspicious manmade objects would ever require presidential authorisation so it seems like bullshit.
Not like anyone's getting hurt, so why even ask ?
Yes. It's the difference between ability and willingness. The argument that no one would notice is based on inability, even as the pipeline provides a willingness.
Since you claimed a different sort of incomptence not implied by the first, yes.
If you have no clue it would probably not make sense, sure.
Allegedly, a risk of hurting people from falling debris was the basis for shooting down the balloon over the east coast, and not over the mid-west.
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