I am not buying it.
A 200 foot balloon with a 2000 pound payload was able to breach US airspace over Alaska and went unimpeded as it completed its mission spying over the US. Joe Biden allowed it to finish the mission before ordering the balloon shot down, specifically ordering the payload targeted. My guess is it was done to minimize disclosure of Chinese success.
That balloon could have carried mini-surveillance devices, small dirty bombs, EMP weapons or even hypersonic missiles. The next one also could.
Only until the furor grew to a fever pitch did the Biden administration “reveal” that similar balloons violated US airspace during the Trump administration. High level Trump officials denied it. A rumor spread that SecDef James Mattis knew about it but refused to tell Trump for fear of his overreaction. Mattis then denied that. The chief purveyor of the phony Alfa Bank/Trump connection, Jake the pasty snake Sullivan, once again spewed his typical tranche of lies
“[B]ecause the intelligence community made this a priority at the direction of President Biden, we enhanced our surveillance of our territorial airspace, we enhanced our capacity to be able to detect things that the Trump administration was unable to detect,” Sullivan said at a Monday event with the US Global Leadership Coalition. “And were also able to go back and look at the historical patterns. And that led us to come to understand that during the Trump administration, as you said, there were multiple instances where the surveillance balloons traversed American airspace and American territory.”
Sullivan is a professional liar. he has absolutely no business being anywhere near government.
Magically, only after Trump left office was the Pentagon, using “forensics”, able to discover three incursions during the Trump tenure, but making it public only after Biden failed to act on the current trespass. This is simply not believable. The current balloon was seen by lots of people and pilots. It’s 200 feet in diameter. It is not feasible that during three prior events these stealth balloons were not witnessed by anyone. And that bring me to NORAD.
NORAD blew it.
“Every day as NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America,” Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck of the North American Aerospace Defense Command told reporters. “I will tell you that we did not detect those [previous] threats. And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”
Domain awareness gap. That’s a good one. VanHerck should be relieved of command. Frankly, so should Biden.
NORAD can track “discrete objects as small as 2 inches (5 centimeters) in diameter in low-Earth orbit and about 1 yard (1 meter) in geosynchronous orbit” and Santa Claus. But somehow it could not detect and track a 200 foot balloon with a 2000 pound payload. Nor could the Northern Warning System.
It’s hard to swallow what happened. China just humiliated the United States. Are we that technologically incompetent that we cannot detect and track a 200 ft. balloon?
Not buying it.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.