Keeping anything on the down-low where US national security is concerned is a challenge. Everyone is simply too curious, and who can blame them when it potentially affects their safety?
Last September the US public and the world first became aware of a specific US Tiger Team, a Pentagon task force designed to assist in understanding and countering Chinese spy threats. The name 'tiger team' is not specific to the issue of countering China spy operations, it's used to denote multiple teams used by US intelligence organizations; essentially it's another phrase for 'task force.' This is one way the Biden Administration has been working, quietly, behind the scenes on US national security, and not advertising it. The US Executive Branch and the US military are not typically in the habit of yelling about the existence of these teams from the rooftops of the Pentagon building.
This might be why Biden's formal remarks on Thursday regarding Objects 2, 3, and 4 being shot down last week, were notably absent of the mention of the China counterspy Tiger Team, and his administration's advance knowledge of China's balloon surveillance program, but they did have it.
Intelligence Gathering Wrestles Transparency
It's not a desire for lack of transparency that's driving the silence or the crickets we often hear when there is an ongoing investigation of something not easily identifiable in a public fashion. Rather, it's a desire to allow the US intelligence community to do its job without advertising data which could alert adversaries of both the US and its allies to the intelligence operations and capabilities that keep the US and other first-world countries safe. As of September 2022, however, the cat is out of the bag, so to speak on China's balloon surveillance and the Pentagon's Tiger Team. This doesn't mean that the current administration wants to widely advertise the Pentagon's capabilities to the world though. No doubt the US Pentagon has many other capabilities that the US public and its foreign adversaries are not currently aware of, and thank goodness for that, because without some stealth and secrecy, US national security would not be . . . well, secure. The US population and that of many allied countries depend on US security efforts for their intelligence and safety in indirect ways, including Canada, which participates in an alliance with the US in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
Right now, while the US intelligence community is still collecting and examining the debris from the objects that were shot down last week, both Biden and the US Pentagon can tell us that they believe those objects are not Chinese in origin, based on current intelligence.
We'll report more when debris analysis data is available.
Comments / 5