Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) on June 20 introduced H.R. 4229 to direct the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to conduct a study and submit a report “on the effects of unmanned free balloons on aviation safety and how both the Department of Defense and Federal Aviation Administration might boost awareness of unmanned free balloons over United States airspace,” according to a summary of the measure in the Congressional Record.
Reps. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) and Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) co-sponsored the bill. Sherrill, a former U.S. Navy SH-3 Sea King helicopter pilot, and Gimenez serve on the House Armed Services Committee’s tactical air and land forces subcommittee and on the HASC readiness panel. Sherrill and Gimenez are also members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
On June 21, a Sherill amendment in an en bloc package on the House Armed Services Committee’s draft version of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill said that the FAA “plays an integral role” for the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command’s (NORTHCOM) mission “and holds primary responsibility for issuing guidance and rules for domestic aircraft, unmanned aerial systems, manned balloons, and unmanned, free flying balloons, the last of which is being increasingly used for hobbyist and research use and which current federal regulations do not currently mandate any type of locational or altitudinal electronic, digital, or radio emissions.”
“Current regulations mandate passive observance and manual communication with local air traffic control, contrary to recent mandates requiring active emissions from manned balloons and unmanned aerial systems,” per Sherrill’s amendment. “With this type of balloon increasingly being used, it could lead to unnecessary NORAD and USNORTHCOM analysis and actions detrimental to readiness as the organization respond to domestically launched non-threats.”
The Sherill amendment directs NORTHCOM to consult with the FAA and brief HASC by July 26 next year on how “unmanned, free flying balloons with and without onboard emissions technology are monitored, deconflicted, and reacted to by both organizations”; an assessment of the number of unmanned, free-flying balloons that “have caused officially recognized airspace incidents over the past 5 years and the current state of the commercial, public, and non-profit user community on their involuntary use of emissions technology for geolocational and altitudinal awareness or reasons why they do not use such technology: and a discussion of improving real-time awareness of such balloons.
In April, the House passed legislation calling on DoD to submit a classified report on the incidence of the violation of U.S. airspace since Jan. 20, 2017 by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and requesting a report from the State Department, the Director of National Intelligence, and the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations on a strategy for mobilizing global opinion against Chinese balloon surveillance (Defense Daily, Apr. 20).
The measure also requires the Commerce Department to consider export controls for U.S. technologies used by the People’s Liberation Army in aerospace programs for intelligence and reconnaissance purposes.
Introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on Feb. 24, H.R. 1151–the Upholding Sovereignty of Airspace Act or the ‘‘USA Act”–would require the reports within 180 days of enactment. The bill is now before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The House passed the bill on Apr. 17 on a vote of 405 to 6.
“According to the Department of State, surveillance balloons owned and operated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have entered United States airspace multiple times since 2017 and have violated the airspace of more than 40 countries across 5 continents,” the bill said.
H.R. 1151 permits the White House to impose sanctions, including the seizure of U.S. property and U.S. visa blockage, for any “PRC individual the President determines is directly managing and overseeing the PRC’s global surveillance balloon program.”
In February, Raytheon Technologies [RTX]-built AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles fired from fighter jets took down a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina and three other unidentified objects off the coast of Alaska, in the Yukon territory of Canada and over Lake Huron (Defense Daily, Feb. 16).
In a June 8 letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Gimenez referenced reports that China has established an espionage base in Cuba and urged Austin and Blinken “to prevent efforts from anti-American adversaries from establishing a base to conduct espionage, cyberattacks, or other threats to the homeland – only minutes away from the mainland United States.”
U.S. Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), suggested that NORAD has adjusted the filters of its North Warning System (NWS) radars to be able to detect and follow slow, stratospheric balloons, which are also less susceptible to infrared detection as temperatures are dozens of degrees below zero at such heights.
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 Soviet bombers, and VanHerck said in 2021 that “ideally, we would like to go to an advanced system–over-the-horizon radar” (Defense Daily, Aug. 17, 2021).
“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.”
The House Armed Services Committee’s draft version of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill funds a $55 million wish list request by NORTHCOM to accelerate testing of the Over the Horizon Backscatter (OTH-B) radar to field OTH-B radars within the next five years rather than within a decade (Defense Daily, March 30).
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 between President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The issue also came up in a Feb. 10 meeting between 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 at the time.
The U.S. and Canada have been 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) in a NORAD Pathfinder initiative is critical to efforts to modernize analog processes at NORTHCOM and NORAD.
VanHerck said in 2021 that NORAD has applied Pathfinder to analyze the raw data from the NWS radar sensors. The AI/ML in Pathfinder has led to significant improvements for NWS’ advance warning, he said then.
During the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia used spy balloons. In 1955-56, President 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. then embarked upon the U-2 surveillance plane and CORONA intelligence satellite programs.