There was that time in 2021, for example, that the United States army accidentally stormed a sunflower oil factory in Bulgaria.
That same year, the Italian armed forces erroneously blew up a chicken coop in northern Italy.
A bit farther back, in the Battle of Karansebes of 1788, the Austrian army accidentally attacked itself, resulting in some 10,000 casualties.
Now, another bizarre military stunt has been pulled on the world stage — but on purpose.
On February 4, a US fighter jet shot down what the United States insists was a Chinese “spy balloon” off the coast of South Carolina; according to China, it was merely a weather balloon that had blown off course. The airborne object was taken out with a Sidewinder missile — which, at $400,000 a pop, was also the weapon of choice a week later as the US military went about frenetically shooting up more unidentified stuff in the sky.
Belligerent and huffy pronouncements ensued from the US political establishment, and President Joe Biden refused to apologise for downing the Chinese balloon — while Aviation Week floated the suggestion that one of the unidentified items might have been a cheap balloon reported missing by the Northern Illinois Bottle cap Balloon Brigade, a hobbyist club.
READ ALSO: Russia sends Soyuz rescue ship to International Space Station
In response to the fate of the Chinese balloon, China’s top diplomat Wang Yi categorised US behaviour as “almost hysterical” and urged the US “not to do such preposterous things simply to divert attention from its own domestic problems”.
To be sure, the US suffers from an abundance of terrestrial issues that are rather more existentially perilous than a balloon off the coast of South Carolina. These range from the lack of a functioning healthcare or education system to the ongoing epidemic of homelessness to the fact that mass shootings might as well be declared an official national pastime.
On February 18, a gunman in a rural Mississippi town fatally shot six people — the latest episode in a never-ending horror show. But, hey, China is the real threat to American “safety and security”.
It meanwhile bears emphasising that, even if the Chinese balloon was indeed conducting surveillance rather than meteorological operations, the US reaction is still pretty “preposterous” given the country’s own stellar track record of surveilling everyone and everything in the world. This includes decades of particularly aggressive spying against China itself, from the Cold War era of U-2 spy planes up to the present day.