Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan on Fox News said America’s Arctic Warriors intercepted the communist China spy balloon before it entered American air space.
“To Alaska Command’s credit, we scrambled F-16s and F-35s and intercepted the balloon before it entered our airspace. We clearly could have shot it down,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan’s remarks came Friday morning, hours after President Joe Biden went on record Thursday saying that the China spy balloon was not a major security breach, and brushed it off as not a big deal.
“‘”It’s not a major breach. Look, the total amount of intelligence gathering that’s going on by every country around the world is overwhelming,” Biden said to a Noticias Telemundo reporter on Thursday.
The State Department, however, also disagrees with the president, and says the airship shot down over the coast of South Carolina, after it had traversed the entire North American continent, was part of a vast surveillance network by the communist China government that spans 40 countries and five continents.
Sullivan said that America needs to send a message to the CCP.
“We need to reestablish deterrence,” Sullivan said. “Right now, the Chinese believe they can do this any time they want. They have been doing it any time they want to us and to other countries. What I pressed administration officials on yesterday was making a public announcement that the next time they do anything like this, particularly over my airspace in Alaska. we’re going to shoot them down. To Alaska Command Military Authority’s credit, we scrambled F-16s, F-35s. We were tracking this balloon before it came into our airspace. We clearly could have shot it down, and next time we need to just tell them, we will shoot it down. That will reestablish deterrence. But right now we don’t have deterrence. They believe they can do this any time, any place, in America and the rest of the world.”
On Monday, the said Pentagon did not shoot down the Chinese balloon as it approached Alaska in late January because it was not a military threat to the United States. The Pentagon also said it was worried about debris hitting people on the ground, although Alaska is a vast and largely unpopulated state.
But on Thursday, the Biden Administration story changed. Assistant Secretary of Defense Melissa Dalton told a Senate committee that the military’s decision not to shoot down a Chinese balloon as soon as it entered Alaskan airspace was because of the difficulty the cold weather in Alaska posed to recovering and examining the surveillance equipment.
The decision to not shoot it down over Alaska was in part due to “the ability to salvage, understand, and exploit the capabilities of the high-altitude balloon,” Dalton told the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee. “And we look forward to sharing that with you in a classified setting and openly as we learn more.”
Dalton said that Alaska waters in the Bering Sea, being cold, deep, and covered with ice would mean “a very different recovery operation” that she said would include additional risk and could have been “extremely dangerous.”
On Thursday, the House voted unanimously to condemn China for its “brazen violation” of U.S. airspace and for deceiving the international community through “false claims about its intelligence collection campaigns.” The vote was 419-0.
