The U.S. military admitted on Monday that it failed to detect Chinese spy balloons that entered into U.S. airspace during the Trump administration.
The news comes after the U.S. military used an F-22 Raptor on Saturday to take out a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic Ocean using a single air-to-air AIM-9X Sidewinder missile that was fired at an altitude of approximately 58,000 feet. The decision to shoot down the spy balloon came after President Joe Biden allowed it to fly thousands of miles over the continental U.S. last week.
After the balloon was shot down, reports surfaced that there were similar incursions that happened during the Trump administration but that those incidents were undetected. Fox News reported that a Chinese spy balloon crashed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii late last year.
VanHerck, Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), told reporters: “Every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America.”
“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” said VanHerck. “And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out, but I don’t want to go into further detail.”
Another one just shot down today on the BIDEN WATCH # 3 !!!!!!!!!