Bice’s spy balloon obsession careens into ‘domain awareness gap’

This week, U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice acted like she never heard of the Cold War. She was absolutely shocked that a Chinese tactical aerostat, or spy balloon, permeated U.S. airspace, and she demanded answers, but only the ones she wanted — nothing too inconvenient for Republicans.

The Chinese spy balloon is the Hunter Biden’s laptop of 2023, except for the fact that, according to U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Hunter Biden’s laptop is also apparently the Hunter Biden’s laptop of 2023. A low-information content consumer like Bice gets talking points from Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and runs with it, logic and reason be damned. 

“We just passed @HouseGOP‘s bill condemning the #CCP‘s spy balloon, which was a brazen violation of U.S. sovereignty,” Bice tweeted on Feb. 9. “I’m eager to investigate why Biden allowed this national security threat to go on for so long. We must stand firm against China’s increasing aggression.”

Bice is pretending like President Joe Biden invited China to enter the Albuquerque Balloon Festival. Yes, a Chinese spy balloon flew over Montana before being destroyed by U.S. forces. That is a major incursion, and the U.S. needs to discover how five of these balloons — two during the Biden Administration, three during the Trump Administration — were able to breach domestic airspace. 

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“As the NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America,” said the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, U.S. Air Force General Glen VanHerck, in a briefing last week over the balloon. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”

“Domain awareness gap” is military intelligence speak for knowing all your vulnerabilities. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” Smaug’s failure to protect the “large patch in the hollow of his left breast as bare as a snail out of its shell” is a “domain awareness gap.”

One of humanity’s worst traits is that we are all about exploiting our opponents’ domain awareness gaps. When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 AD, they were successful because Rome had a domain awareness gap, possibly from too much lead in their wine, but every sneak attack before or since was executed successfully because the attacked party was not aware. 

This includes the time in 1960 when the U.S. sent CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers into Soviet airspace in a high-altitude Lockheed U-2 spy plane. The U.S. thought it had exploited a domain awareness gap, but then a surface-to-air missile took Powers down over what is now Yekaterinburg, Russia. The U.S. claimed Powers was piloting a weather plane that strayed off course. Everyone always blames the weather. 

Bice does not want to investigate the three times the Trump Administration missed a Chinese spy balloon traversing the contiguous 48, and instead would rather use this against the Biden Administration. That’s why her social media is now powered by the rancorous tone of endless complaint that colleagues like Jordan have employed so tirelessly. 

By all means, the domain awareness gap should be fully investigated, but Bice is behaving like an unserious person right now. She’s as obsessed with balloons as a 4-year-old at a parade, tweeting out a post from Fox News about the Biden Administration removing its tactical aerostats from the southern border and how that is another disaster.

“Biden is fine with #CCP balloons over the mainland, but not American ones,” Bice or someone working for her tweeted on Feb. 10. 

Right. Biden ordered an F-22 to shoot down the balloon. It did. He is not fine with it.

But then again, Bice might be suffering from a domain awareness gap. 


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George Lang has worked as an award-winning professional journalist in Oklahoma City for over 25 years and is the professional opinion columnist for Free Press. His work has been published in a number of local publications covering a wide range of subjects including politics, media, entertainment and others. George lives in Oklahoma City with his wife and son.