Suddenly, U.S. president Joe Biden and Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, are decisively shooting down new "UFOs" that purportedly wandered into their national airspace.  They are doing so with personal verve and command, displaying their sudden prowess as defenders of their nation's respective airspace borders.  Don't believe it.

The manner in which the press releases were written indicates that the writers went out of their way to make the story about the president and prime minister, and about their newfound leadership, as well as positioning NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) as suddenly now on top of its game.

NBC declared, in its headline story, "Trudeau ordered takedown of unidentified object in Canadian airspace," that "Canada's leader" had bravely ordered fighters to intercept a UFO.  American and Canadian military aircraft were "scrambled" and "successfully shot the object down."  NBC then reports:  "'I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,' Trudeau tweeted" (evidently with a commanding pair of thumbs on his iPhone).

The Biden report by the New York Times was even more determined to get the P.R. message right: "The Friday shootdown showed Mr. Biden taking direct and forceful action far more quickly."

In public relations, these are traditional ways of engaging in "bridge and spin" topic management, by overwhelming their prior failures as commanders in chief with sudden, and convenient, opportunities to replay their previous responses, with rewritten and crafted acts and statements.  Modern electoral government is a highly scripted activity; it is not an institutional culture that is inherently poised for spontaneous action.

This is the great risk that the public faces with elected leaders who are otherwise merely legacy political ideologues like Trudeau or proxies like Biden: when actual national security requires actual civilian leadership, they are unprepared or unqualified, or both.  They are not trained in leadership or military operations or strategy.  They are completely dependent, especially in Biden's case, given his obvious mental dysfunction, on an unorganized cabal of various advisers and handlers.  And those political appointees are not directing their attention to national leadership or national security or national defense, but to private interests that can be affected through government institutional manipulation.  For them, national security is merely national theater.

I'm not saying that various objects may not have been intercepted in national airspace.  What I am saying is that it is possible, and meaningfully probable, that these are crafted or embellished stories designed to assuage the critics of two obviously compromised civilian commanders.  Moreover, a "UFO" in this context may be "unidentified," but it is not unidentifiable.  All flying objects can be identified.  They may be, or may remain, "unidentified" to the public, but to the military, and to military commercial contractors, they all fit in one of several traditional categories of operations.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung wrote clinically on the UFO phenomenon back in the early 1960s, not in flattering language, concerning their representation as psychic phenomena beyond what physical properties they may possess.  In the case of North America's political leadership, the "unidentified object" is indeed the symbol of their vacancy in command and capacity.

Matthew G. Andersson is a former executive adviser in the Aerospace and Defense practice of Booz Allen Hamilton and is a jet-rated airline transport pilot.  He has testified to the U.S. Senate on aircraft in the National Airspace System.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.