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China’s balloon blunder shows the shortcomings of its national security apparatus - Atlantic Council

atlanticcouncil.org · 1,301 words · saved by 1 readers

The composition of China's security structures indicates that the military did not want to disrupt a major diplomatic moment and thought the balloon would be undetected.

Beijing’s decision to fly a reconnaissance balloon over the United States on the eve of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China was a serious error that probably stemmed from both operational miscalculations and bureaucratic shortfalls. Assessments of Beijing’s decisionmaking must be tentative because its internal processes are opaque, but the composition of China’s national security apparatus highlights factors that probably contributed to the misjudgment. These factors suggest that operational planners assumed the United States would not identify the balloon as a Chinese platform

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