A senior U.S. general in charge of taking down a Chinese spy balloon stated on Monday that the military had not noticed prior spy balloons until the one that surfaced on Jan 28.
The Pentagon stated during the weekend that Chinese spy balloons have flown over the U.S. at least 4 times, 3 of which took place during President Trump’s tenure and one during President Biden’s.
VanHerck claimed, “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap.”
Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command in the U.S. Air Force, stated that the latest spy balloon was 200 feet tall and carried a payload weighing a few thousand pounds.
Gen. VanHerck added that U.S. intelligence was able to determine the past flights through “additional means of collection” of intelligence, but did not provide additional information on the sources, whether it be cyber espionage, telephone intercepts, or human intelligence.
Senior U.S. officials have offered to provide the former administration with details about the previous balloon overflights during President Trump’s term. Republican Rep. Michael Waltz, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, stated on Sunday that the Pentagon informed him of multiple Chinese balloon incidents that occurred in recent years, including over Florida.
The U.S. Air Force shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the South Carolina coast on Saturday, a week after it entered U.S. airspace and sparked a public espionage incident that worsened U.S.-China relations.
Gen. VanHerck did not rule out the possibility of explosives on the balloon, but stated that he did not have any evidence to support it.
However, this risk was taken into consideration in his decision to shoot the balloon down over open water. The mission involved multiple fighter and refueling aircraft, but only an F-22 fighter jet from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia took the shot, using a single AIM-9X supersonic, heat-seeking air-to-air missile.
The debris was collected from an area of roughly 1,500 meters by 1,500 meters and a number of military vessels are assisting with the recovery. The U.S. Coast Guard announced a temporary security zone in the waters off Surfside Beach, South Carolina, where the balloon was shot down.
The condition of the payload of spying sensors carried by the balloon after it crashed into the ocean is unknown, which will determine the success of the shoot-down from an intelligence-gathering perspective.
National security experts are now saying that the spy balloon’s path may have been a strategy to better map out and understand the location of U.S. missile silos and other artillery.
According to the Daily Wire, Director of the Hudson Institute Center for Defense Concepts Bryan Clark said that the balloon may have not been “a direct threat” but could have allowed China to “obtain close-up visual imagery from different angles.”
“That could improve China’s ability to target U.S. missile silos and better understand the construction and layout of U.S. bomber bases in places like Montana and North Dakota where the balloon is flying,” Clark said.
It is never true when the democrats and their news media lie about Trump, but how many lies does it take before the weak minded citizens realize they are and have been lied to, how many times?
IF Donald J. Trump were able to show that cheating made him lose an election in any state in any court, then a rational person might believe his claim to have won the 2020 presidential election.
But Trump didn’t. Not in any case, not even one of them——and Trump had more than 60 lawsuits about the 2020 election.
Also, Barr and Wray and Raffensperger and Trump’s last acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, and Trump’s own department of homeland security and the head of Trump’s own re-election campaign ALL say that there is no evidence the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
And, it is a truly nutty notion that Trump—–the former owner and operator of Trump University, who deceived all three wives and said that he believed the word of Vladimir Putin—–is telling the truth about the 2020 presidential election being stolen, and the courts are wrong, AND Barr is wrong, AND Wray is wrong, AND Raffensperger (who voted for Trump twice) is wrong , AND the head of Trump’s own election campaign is wrong, AND Trump’s last acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, is wrong. No they are not wrong. They are conservatives who know the facts.
Trump is lying about the 2020 presidential election.
I don’t know why the CCP sent a spy balloon over the US. All XI had to do was ask his comrade Joe Biden to let him look at the classified document in his possession.
All this speculation could have done a great deal of damage to our country and that is exactly why Biden smiled as a response to the initial questioning.
He’s trying to destroy us with every decision he makes and we do absolutely nothing!!!
What has happened to us? All the guts went far left. What a pitty. And we sit and sit and sit and complain
How about IMPEACHMENT? The DEMS were certainly not hesitant to initiate that on Trump and he was working in our favor! God help Us.