In some cases, governments may want information on enemy troop positions or movements. They may also want information on other aspects of their enemy’s capabilities. For example, several U.S. officials expressed concern that one suspected target of the Chinese spy balloon was Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, which houses nuclear missile silos.

Countries care about gathering information on each other because it can give them an advantage over their rivals. But rivals having more information is not always a bad thing.

In political science, we often think of conflict as a bargain over how to divide something – be it territory and resources, or policy and political control.

War often happens when states cannot agree on dividing these types of things. The problem is that war can be an inefficient way of resolving disputes because it destroys resources – both wealth and often human lives.

Why, then, do countries fight wars?

One argument is that countries may have different information from their opponents. They may overestimate their capabilities or underestimate those of the opponent.

Because countries generally have an incentive to bluff or act stronger than they really are, they also have the incentive to gather private information from their rivals.

Espionage may then serve the purpose of making the probability of war less likely by preventing miscalculations. It lets governments gain information about each other without pressure from hawkish groups to escalate confrontations.

We know also know from our research that the U.S. sometimes willingly shares information about its own capabilities with rival militaries as a way to deter them from initiating conflict.

Before the balloon incident, much of the increasing tension between the U.S. and China had been relatively abstract or remote in most Americans’ eyes. But a Chinese spy balloon drifting directly over U.S. is a material object people saw with their own eyes.

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