The secret U.S. effort to track, hide and surveil the Chinese spy balloonNearly a year later, Biden administration officials say the threat was exaggerated, but U.S. military officials contend that too little has been done to detect high-altitude spy balloons.
A U.S. Air Force U-2 pilot looks down at the Chinese spy balloon as it hovered over the continental United States on Feb. 3, 2023.US Department of Defense/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesDec. 22, 2023, 8:18 PM CST
By Courtney Kube and Carol E. LeeWASHINGTON — On a Friday evening last January, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the Air Force commander in charge of defending American airspace from foreign intrusion, called President Joe Biden’s top military adviser, Gen. Mark Milley.
U.S. intelligence officials had just notified the general that for roughly 10 days they had been tracking a mysterious — and enormous — object flying over the Asia-Pacific, VanHerck told Milley. The object had crossed into U.S. airspace over Alaska and VanHerck said he planned to dispatch military jets to fly alongside it and assess what it was.
The previously unreported Jan. 27 phone call between Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and VanHerck, the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, set off an eight-day scramble inside the Biden administration. American officials faced an unprecedented challenge: a Chinese spy balloon the size of three school buses flying across the continental U.S.
The spy balloon exposed an increasingly brazen China’s competitive advances miles above the Earth and brought the most critical relationship in the world to one of its lowest points in recent history.
Nearly a year later, U.S. relations with China have not fully recovered and officials from the two nations have apparently not discussed the incident in detail. And an American effort to create global norms in unregulated spaces above the Earth has largely stalled.
VanHerck, meanwhile, warns that the Chinese balloon program remains active and that the U.S. has failed to develop the systems it needs to detect high-altitude spy balloons before they pose a threat.
“It exposed significant gaps, long range gaps, for us to be able to see potential threats to the homeland.” VanHerck said in an exclusive interview with NBC News. “I think that opened the eyes of a lot of people.”
VanHerck added that the U.S. military, U.S. intelligence agencies and American allies still need to develop faster ways to share information.
“Time is the opportunity to create deterrence options or, if required, defeat options," he said, adding that the U.S. is still “not where we need to be.”
Privately, Biden administration officials complain that the political outcry over the balloon was wildly disproportionate to any threat it posed to U.S. national security.
In their view, because China was so angered and humiliated, the damage done to the relationship between Washington and Beijing was a far graver threat to the U.S. than the balloon itself.
“It caused so many problems,” one senior administration official lamented.
Scrambling to respond<..snip..>
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna130991
