The US shoot down a Chinese spy balloon
“The balloon spotted this week over Montana wasn’t the first time the US has detected Chinese balloons on its soil — previous incursions took place during the Trump administration,” Bloomberg reported.
“Instances of this type of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years,” Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said in a statement published online on February 2.
The balloon discovered this week appeared deliberately provocative, said Dean Cheng, senior adviser to the China program at the US Institute of Peace.
“This is a way to test how the other side reacts, not in a military sense. But politically, what do you do about it? Remain silent? If in fact there were more and it is not the first time, then an interesting question arises. What happened to the previous ones? Did we knock them down?” he said, according to CNN.
What the former Trump administration says about spy balloons from years past
Well, a top national security official in former President Donald Trump’s administration said none of the Chinese spy balloons were near any sensitive sites.
Other senior national security officials in the Trump administration said they personally had no knowledge of any Chinese surveillance balloons over the United States during Trump’s four years in office and did not believe Trump was briefed.
Unlike previous cases, this bubble persisted in the continental US. The balloon initially left US airspace on Monday, only to be spotted again on Tuesday over northern Idaho. President Joe Biden was briefed that day and asked his military commanders to work out options for responding.
The one spotted this week lingered over Idaho and Montana, home to sensitive US nuclear missile silos and research facilities.
The US also believes the Chinese have tried to buy property near the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, where the government conducts sensitive military research and development.
Officials believe the Chinese balloons are able to photograph the facilities from different angles than satellites, providing a unique advantage.
Spy balloons have reportedly been detected near sensitive US installations over the past 5 years
Although former Trump administration officials deny that they knew about the existence of any spy balloons or, if there were, that they were not near sensitive infrastructure, the Associated Press wrote, citing a defense expert, that the spy balloons of The Chinese have been detected near sensitive sites in Hawaii, where there is a large US military presence, for the past five years.
“Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Chinese surveillance balloons have been seen several times over the past five years in various parts of the Pacific, including near sensitive US military installations in Hawaii,” he said. wrote the Associated Press, according to Forbes.
The Chinese government was using the balloon to “oversee strategic places” in the US
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the balloon shot down by the US over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday was being used by the Chinese government “to monitor strategic locations in the continental United States”, reports CNN.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday authorized the Pentagon to shoot down the surveillance balloon “as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives,” Austin said after the military shot down the plane on Saturday.
“The Department of Defense developed options to bring the balloon down safely over our territorial waters while we closely monitored its path and intelligence-gathering activities,” Austin continued, adding that military leaders coordinated with the Canadian government on the mission.
“Today’s deliberate and lawful action demonstrates that President Biden and his national security team will always put the safety and security of the American people first by responding effectively to (the People’s Republic of China’s) unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” said Austin.
