Balloons aren’t the only thing they’re up against.
Photographer: Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The US ‘Domain Awareness Gap’ Goes Way Beyond Balloons
If a major conflict breaks out with China, America’s once-vaunted defense industrial base will be exposed as a comatose geriatric, not a sleeping giant.
That phrase “domain awareness gap” — a perfect example of Pentagonese, lacking only the acronym DAG — transported me back 36 years. The story then wasn’t a giant white balloon over Montana. It was a small white Cessna in Red Square.
I was a graduate student researching a doctoral dissertation in Hamburg and supplementing my meager scholarship by freelance writing for the Daily Telegraph. My routine in those pre-internet days was to toil in the archives for part of the day and then check the newswires for any German stories that might be of interest to English readers. But May 28, 1987, was doubly unusual. First, I had my wisdom teeth extracted. I had chosen the only French dentist in the phone directory, as the movie Marathon Man had put me off German ones. He had opted for local anesthetic and brute force. It had been an exceedingly bloody and painful business, leaving my mouth so swollen that I could not speak.