This is not about “the US military cannot identify”.

These case reports happen often because one person filmed something and perhaps that one person didn’t know what it was. The video then gets saved and catalogued as unidentified. The video is then so lacking in information and context that it is literally impossible for people to later figure out exactly what object it was. AARO (and before them the UAP Task Force) has been investigating a lot of these case reports and many of them get resolved as “balloon-like objects” or “objects consistent with a balloon”, because the video is consistent with it being a balloon but they want to avoid stating definitively that they know the object was a balloon. If I recall correctly something half of the imagery that gets reported as UAP in the US military ends up falling into the “likely/definitely birds and balloons” bucket.

It is foolish to dismiss this, it’s simply a fact that balloons and birds are a common underlying cause for sightings which are reported to AARO as UAP. There have also been other cases where videos recorded of airplanes have been reported to AARO and they were able to figure out that it was airplanes. It’s not that “the US military doesn’t know what airplanes look like”, it’s that one person operating an IR camera in the military recorded a video and didn’t know what it was, so they reported it as being an unidentified aerial sighting. And then it gets put in this bucket of reports called “UAP sightings”. And maybe never gets resolved because there’s not enough information there to do anything with it.

Unique observation conditions definitely can and do make those difficult to identify in some cases. Omniscience in all cases does not follow from success in routine cases.