A senior commander revealed on Monday that the U.S. military had recently seen a quantity of high-altitude Chinese monitoring balloons traveling over the Middle East and Afghanistan.
The information is the most current to surface regarding what American officials are referring to as China's "fleet" of surveillance balloons that have lately flown over the United States and 40 other nations, including one that American forces shot down off the East Coast earlier this month.
Lieutenant. Major general Alexus Grynkewich, head of U.S. Air Soldiers Joint Command, stated at a conference with the Partnership for a New American Defense on Monday that the balloons under U.S. Central Army's domain were not launched close to key American military installations or constitute a risk to American forces.
“High-altitude stratospheric balloons have transited the region. They have not hung out over American bases or been any threat to our forces whatsoever,” Grynkewich said. “The ones that I’m referring to were Chinese.”
Commanders' attention was drawn by one "main incident" last autumn and "one or two others" in prior years, according to Grynkewich. He claimed a framework to analyze as his reason for withholding many specifics of the incidents.
According to Grynkewich, during the first incident, the balloon mostly hovered above waters, and authorities were unable to get closer enough to determine whether it was a monitoring asset or merely a spaceship.
Supervision balloons permit the operator to “give a more persistent stare in some of the places where we don’t see as well as we can,” he said
The remarks were made on the same day that the United States rejected using its spy drones to fly over China, refuting Beijing's assertions that more than ten high-altitude vessels were flown over China without authorization during the previous year.
“It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence collection that it has used to violate the sovereignty of the US and over 40 countries across 5 continents,” National Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the United Nations charter, stated in a tweet on Monday.
Following the downing of a second airborne object by American forces in less than a week, the U.S. on Sunday destroyed another unknown object over its boundaries.
The first element that was gunned down off the coast of South Carolina was a Chinese monitoring balloon, according to U.S. defense authorities, but they haven't yet established what the other components may be. However, according to officials, China runs a "fleet" of spy balloons throughout the globe.
“This is the latest example of China scrambling to do damage control,” Watson said in a tweet. “It has repeatedly and wrongly claimed the surveillance balloon it sent over the US was a weather balloon and has failed to offer any credible explanations for its intrusion into our airspace, the airspace of others.”
Moreover, on Monday, John Kirby, the NSC Spokesman for the Development Of the proposed, categorically refuted Beijing's allegations that the U.S. is flying drones over Chinese territory. “Not true.” The Chinese spy balloon program, however, is something the Biden administration has “been studying since we came into office” and “communicated to dozens of other countries about,” Kirby said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“We know that those balloons have traveled across many different countries, across many different continents, and we have been reaching out to our allies and partners, too many of those countries, to let them know what we have learned about that,” he spoke out.
Kirby added that the three items that were most previously gunned down have been inaccessible to the United States.“in large part because of the weather conditions.” He emphasized “there could be completely benign and explainable reasons for why these objects are flying around up there,” for example, research projects from businesses or major universities.
“We just don’t know,” Kirby said. “But as soon as we can find out, we can get the debris and we can find out, we absolutely can.”
Source: politico news.
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