Congress needs to ask a lot of tough questions about gaps in U.S. air defenses.
What we are learning about the U.S. response to China’s balloon surveillance is not encouraging.
The Biden administration has struggled to explain why the balloon, which was finally shot down off the Carolina coast on Saturday, was permitted to enter American airspace the previous Saturday, and subsequently glide across the length of much of our country for the better part of a week, lingering over such strategic sites as the 341st Missile Wing in Montana, home to scores of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The administration’s first stratagem was to claim there was nothing unusual about this — that it had happened at least three times during the Trump administration, as well as on an earlier occasion during President Biden’s term. The suggestion was that Trump officials knew about these incursions but kept them from the public, and thus that the Biden administration should be forgiven for concealing what it knew until that was no longer possible — members of the public having begun detecting the balloon on Wednesday, which generated local and then national media coverage.
That was disingenuous and indicative of a much worse problem. It turns out that there is a gap in American air defenses. On prior occasions, they failed to detect balloon incursions, learning about them only afterwards from other intelligence agencies. Moreover, according to Air Force General Glen VanHerck, commander of NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command), our forces have not yet solved this vulnerability. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats and that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out,” General VanHerck said at a Monday media briefing, according to the Wall Street Journal.
As Rich noted this morning, citing our friend Byron York’s Washington Examiner reporting, several senior Trump administration officials denied that they’d been told about the prior Chinese incursions — in contrast to President Biden, who was briefed early last week but allowed the balloon to continue on its journey. Quite apart from Byron’s explanation that the prior incursions were shorter in duration than last week’s, it now appears that they may not have been detected by our defense capabilities in time to give officials notice and options prior to their leaving our airspace.
The most critical question about last week’s episode was largely ignored prior to the balloon’s being shot down: Did the balloon have the capacity to transmit data it was collecting to the regime in Beijing in real time? John Kirby, Biden’s National Security Council spokesman, declined to answer that question today. For what it’s worth, it seems inconceivable to me that the aircraft would be fitted with sophisticated surveillance capabilities yet not with transmission capabilities – i.e., that China would be content to hope the balloon made it back to a regime-controlled landing site in order to harvest the data.
That is obvious enough that the administration’s big talking point today was that it had taken countermeasures to prevent the balloon from gathering useful intelligence as it passed over sensitive sites. That is possible, given that on this occasion, unlike prior occasions, our air defense detected the presence and path of the balloon. But I would not take this explanation to the bank, especially given how unreliable and unconvincing prior administration statements have been. And of course, it would not tell us what intel China was able to glean on previous occasions, when its surveillance missions might have been completed before our forces realized they’d happened.
On that score, there is this from the New York Times:
[W]hile spy satellites can see almost everything, balloons equipped with high-tech sensors hover over a site far longer and can pick up radio, cellular and other transmissions that cannot be detected from space. That is why the Montana sighting of the balloon was critical; in recent years, the National Security Agency and United States Strategic Command, which oversees the American nuclear arsenal, have been remaking communications with nuclear weapons sites. That would be one, but only one, of the natural targets for China’s Ministry of State Security, which oversees many of its national security hacks.
Seems Congressman Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), new chairman of the House Select Committee on China, as well as members of the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees in both congressional chambers, need to ask a lot of tough questions.