IdahoMtnSpyder
Active member
I think waiting was the smarter way to go.
When the military first saw it they probably weren't sure what it was. It took a day or two to figure that out.
If they shot it down over the US hundreds, if not thousands, of scavengers would have converged on the site and who knows what kind of valuable pieces would have been sold as souvenirs and maybe even to Chinese shills. That would have hampered learning as much as possible about the Chinese technology than if we could get our hands on the whole thing, or as much as would be recoverable.
The US military more or less admitted they jammed the payload's capacity to phone home so whatever intelligence it gathered never got back to the Chinese. Hence, no harm resulted from letting it float.
The military probably wanted to let it to gather as much intel as it could so we could better understand what sort of intel the Chinese were really after.
IMO there was a lot more on the upside than the downside by letting it float. Biden's order to make sure it landed without harming citizens was a ruse for the real reason for letting it float.
pps:
opcorn:
:2thumbs:
