US Shuts Airspace Over Lake Michigan, Cites “National Defense”

Seems the balloons are coming pretty fast.

The NOTAM over Lake Huron appears to quite large and cover almost 1/4th of the Lake pic.twitter.com/FTfDy0elt0

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) February 12, 2023

🚨#BREAKING: Canada has just Closed a section of Airspace over the Great Lakes and near the U.S/Canadian Border due to an “Active Air Defense Operation”. pic.twitter.com/NFCRR4ACCr

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) February 12, 2023

Clearly if the Commies are swarming our skies with balloons, they need to be shot down. But while balloons are cheap, AIM-9X missiles are expensive as are F-15 and especially F-22 sorties. Reserving air supremacy fighters for swatting balloons over Canada or Montana means they can’t be deployed elsewhere for roles more requiring their capabilities. The ability to take out balloons *cheaply* is needed. A suggestion: instead of expendable missiles launched from advanced fighters, how about reusable missiles launched from cargo jets, or modified corporate jets? Missiles such as AQM-37C. This missile was a target, and some variants were fitted with a parachute recovery system. The AQM-37C was capable of Mach 4 flight up to 100,000 feet. The AQM-37 series is now long out of production and no longer in service, but the design has worked for fifty years and could be certainly updated. It could be rebuilt for precision command guidance or some onboard guidance; it could be meant to simply dart through the balloons envelope, or blast over it real close while spewing out small submunitions. Build them in vast numbers for economies of scale; build variants for other roles such as surface attack, recon, whatever, to spread the cost and utility around. If you’re *real* good, build them for in-flight snatching; if you are *extremely* good, build them to be snatched by the launch aircraft.