China’s Rise and Fall: Two Cases of Unsafe Aircraft Embeddings in the USA During the Second Aerial Collision
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If the tables were turned, China would react badly to a scenario in which the assets of the US are operating near mainland China. Let’s review a few examples.
The US military considered a Chinese naval J-11 fighter to be an unsafe maneuver and it forced the US plane to take evasive maneuvers.
The two videos watched by CNN showed the Chinese plane was in the wrong place and there was no excuse for it to be close to the American plane.
The aircraft is not military. Why does the PLAN think it necessary to intercept missiles that are carrying missiles in order to see the aircraft? Doing this is potentially dangerous and could lead to a major and tragic incident,” Layton said.
The purpose of the intercept was to visually identify the plane and the fighter could have stayed a long distance away from it. Getting closer brings no gains,” he said.
“The (Chinese) response is so far divorced from reality that it is fictional. An aircraft does not turn into a fighter when it’s not actively turning into a fighter.
He said that the US military risked blowing the incident out of proportion by saying that the US jet had to take evasive maneuvers.
“These are no different than a driver adjusting her position to avoid a temporary lane incursion by an adjacent driver,” Hopkins said. The US response is simply theater and unnecessarily creates an exaggerated sense of danger.
Blake Herzinger said that flying aircraft close to each other at 500 miles per hour is unsafe.
The 2001 US-Pedializable Attack on the Paracels: How the People’s Liberation Army Becomes Worryful
“It’s worth remembering that the PLA has effectively wrecked any kind of hotlines or discussion forums for addressing potential incidents with the United States. If an intercept does go wrong, there are fewer options than ever for senior officers to limit potential escalation,” he said.
But in a regular press briefing on Friday, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the incident was just the latest in a string of US provocations that threaten stability in the region.
The Chinese Southern Theater Command said the US reconnaissance jet was flying “in the vicinity of China’s southern coastline and the Xisha Islands” – known in the West as the Paracels – where Beijing has built up military installations.
The US does not recognize these territorial claims and routinely conducts operations there, including freedom of navigation operations through the South China Sea.
The most memorable and instructive example dates back to the presidency of George W. Bush. On April 1, 2001, two Chinese fighter jets harassed a US Navy EP-3 surveillance plane over international waters near China. One collided with the EP-3 and crashed. A pilot in a damaged plane managed to get back control of his aircraft and make an emergency landing in China. The 24 US crew members were held for 11 days before US officials had the final say on their release.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last year that the actions of the People’s Liberation Army were becoming worrisome and should worry us all.
In her previous role, Beth Sanner oversaw the elements that coordinate and lead collection, analysis, and program oversight throughout the Intelligence Community. She was also the president’s intelligence briefer. She is a professor-of-practice at the Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland and a CNN national security analyst. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
Washington thinks the balloon shot down over the Atlantic may have been part of a Chinese program, but may not have been aware of it.
Stepping back a bit, however, the uncomfortable fact is that the Biden Administration’s effort to set “guardrails” on its relationship with China is not working that well. The US democratic and open-market system has been exploited by China, and they are becoming more aggressive than ever. The actions the administration has taken to hold China accountable for this behavior have threatened core Chinese interests.
If the Chinese had downed the US craft, they would be responsible for any damage or loss of life. Protests would have erupted in front of the US Embassy, with China’s Ambassador to the US immediately withdrawing.
The balloon left Canada and arrived in the Lower 48 on January 31. And concerns that the balloon had been sent by Beijing explicitly to spy on the mainland US were confirmed when NORAD observed the balloon “loitering” over sensitive military facilities, multiple sources familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
But Biden’s comments underscored how opposition to China, which has been crystalizing here for several years, has now become a rallying and unifying point in US politics. China has long mounted a broad intelligence campaign against the US, using satellites, cyber and traditional methods of collection. US intelligence operations are focused on China. But the sight of a balloon tracking across the US, visible from the ground and on blanket television coverage, encapsulated a potential threat to US sovereignty from China as never before amid talk that a new Cold War may be dawning.
Peter Bergen is a professor at Arizona State University, a vice president of New America and CNN’s national security analyst. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
And it reminded me that when my father, Tom Bergen, was a lieutenant in the US Air Force in the mid-1950s, he worked on a program to help send balloons into Soviet airspace.
In 1954 he was assigned to Headquarters Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. In the 1960’s he worked on the “Grand Union” project, which featured balloons carrying cameras over the Soviet Union. Those spy balloons were launched from Turkey.
My dad didn’t talk about this part of his career much, likely because the work was secret, but the program has long since been declassified since it happened around seven decades ago.
F-35: The UFO spy satellite program, its hacking, and its global surveillance, as revealed by the Pentagon’s All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office
Despite the latest revelations about the capabilities of the spy balloon, the Pentagon has insisted since the vessel was first acknowledged publicly that it does not give China capabilities above and beyond what they already have from spy satellites or other means.
The United States and its rivals have spy satellites, which are able to take photos. They can do full-motion video! They can take Thermal imagery that shows people moving at night. They have a resolution of centimeters when the skies are clear.
Satellite imagery is getting so cheap you can even buy your own close-up images of the Russian battle group in Eastern Europe. Maxar Technologies was acquired by a private equity firm for $6 billion, and they have built up a profitable business on this model.
The Office of Director of National Intelligence published a little-noticed report last month.
The work of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office raises some interesting questions, could some of the balloons they identified be from China? And could some of the 171 “unexplained sightings” of UFOs that they also assessed be Chinese balloons?
But China has arguably done much worse. US officials have accused it of benefiting from the work of hackers who stole design data about the F-35 fighter aircraft as China builds its own new generation of fighters – and of sucking up much of the personal information of more than 20 million Americans who were current or former members of the US government when they reportedly got inside the computers of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2015. The OPM hacking was not responsible for China’s denial of the F-35 theft report.
The Biden Administration is reaching out to the countries that have been affected by the program and answering any questions, according to a State Department official.
One official familiar with the intelligence says that half a dozen of those flights have been within US airspace.
And not all of the balloons sighted around the globe have been exactly the same model as the one shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, that official and another source familiar with the intelligence said. Rather, there are multiple “variations,” these people said.
The link to the broader surveillance program, which was uncovered before the latest balloon was spotted last week, was first reported by the Washington Post.
An FBI team is working on understanding more about the equipment reclaimed from the balloon shot down over the sea – including what kind of data it could collect and whether it could transmit that in real time.
If the balloon that traveled over the US is part of what Washington describes as a coordinated and military-affiliated surveillance program, one possibility, according to analysts, is that Xi may have been aware of the program, but not its day-to-day operations.
The biggest unanswered question is China’s intent. China still believes that the vessel was a weather balloon that malfunctioned, and that its path over the United States was an accident. Officials have acknowledged that this type of balloon has only limited steering capabilities and largely rode the jet stream.
The Chinese explanation for the balloon’s path is not credible, and sources briefed on the intelligence have described it as intentional.
This elite team consists of agents, analysts, engineers and scientists, who are responsible for both creating technical surveillance measures and analyzing those of the US’ adversaries.
OTD personnel, for example, construct surveillance devices used by FBI and intelligence community personnel targeting national security threats — but they also are responsible for managing court-authorized data collection and work to defeat efforts by foreign intelligence agencies to penetrate the US.
But, according to one member of the House Intelligence Committee, “there’s number of reasons why we wouldn’t do that. We want to collect off it, you want to see where it’s going and what it’s doing.
A defense official said the US has procedures – akin to a kind of digital blackout – to protect sensitive locations from overhead surveillance, typically used for satellite overflight.
A World Leader Slammed by Xi Jinping and the Discovery of a New Cold Airflare: The Bidenth State of the Union Address
As diplomatic tensions between China and the US increase, Biden called out Beijing in front of millions of viewers in the US and around the world.
Moments later, in an ad-libbed addition to his speech, Biden specifically named Xi, as he slammed autocracies and argued for the superiority of democracies.
“Name me a world leader who’d change places with Xi Jinping. Name me one! Biden knows his Chinese counterpart well, as he’s met him many times over the years. The president was almost shouting at the end of a sentence that could be seen as disdainful of China’s stunning economic emergence at a time when Xi’s aura has been damaged by mismanagement of Covid-19.
The United States is locked in a confrontation with Russia and China at the same time that the president delivered his speech. There is a new generation of great power politics that Biden sees as a fight between democracy and tyranny. Biden said that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a test for America, and an example of how the country was attempting to work for freedom, dignity, and peace.
Biden has repeatedly said as president that he would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack – in an apparent rewriting of the long-held policy of strategic ambiguity on the issue – only for officials to insist the US stance hasn’t changed.
It wasn’t difficult to miss the synergy between his policy toward both China and Russia after he talked about the perils of autocracies in his speech on China.
President Joe Biden said in a new interview that the recently recovered Chinese spy balloon that traversed the continental US did not damage bilateral relations between the two countries.
“The idea shooting down a balloon that’s gathering information over America and that makes relations worse?” Biden told Judy Woodruff in a wide-ranging interview after his second State of the Union address.
Biden administration officials said the meeting was delayed until a later date, and that it wasn’t canceled. The date hasn’t yet been set.
The investigation of a suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down over the Atlantic Ocean by a U.S. airstrike on May 23rd
The official said that it was obvious from China’s public comments that they had not a plausible explanation for why they violated US sovereignty and found themselves on their heels.
The Biden administration has stated that they were able to mitigate the balloon’s intelligence collection capacity by moving quickly, despite the fact that they would end up benefiting from the ability to collect information about the balloon and Chinese intelligence capabilities.
The House will vote Thursday on a resolution condemning the Chinese Communist Party for their use of a high-altitude balloon over U.S. territory.
Biden wasn’t briefed until three days later, when a balloon crossed out of Canada and into the United States. Officials said that Biden asked the military to present options immediately to shoot down the balloon.
And he detailed a telling observation he shared with Xi last year as US officials warned China not to provide military support to Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
The US Navy released photos Tuesday of its recovery effort of a suspected Chinese spy balloon, which US fighter jets shot down over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of the US Northern Command and NORAD, said on Monday that the balloon was 200 feet tall and weighed more than a thousand pounds.
“[F]rom a safety standpoint, picture yourself with large debris weighing hundreds if not thousands of pounds falling out of the sky. That is what we are discussing, according to VanHerck on Monday. “So glass off of solar panels, potentially hazardous material, such as material that is required for a batteries to operate in such an environment as this and even the potential for explosives to detonate and destroy the balloon that could have been present.”
“[T]his gave us the opportunity to assess what they were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities existed, and I think you’ll see in the future that that time frame was well worth its value to collect over,” VanHerck said.
The object was downed near the Canadian border by a F-22 fighter jet, similar to the one used to shoot down the balloon. A US official said the military waited to shoot the object down during daylight hours to make it easier for the pilots to spot it. The Alaska Air National Guard provided aerial assets to support the mission.
“The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to force majeure – it was completely an accident,” another statement from the Foreign Ministry said.
The situation resulted in a postponed visit for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing, which had been expected to happen within days of the balloon’s sighting.
She declined to comment on the equipment on board the balloon and the entities that own the balloon. Chinese statements implied that the balloon wasn’t operated by a government entity, but by one or more companies. It has not named them.
Mao Kong said on Monday that China is a responsible country. “We have always strictly abided by international law. We have handled the situation properly and informed all parties, which did not cause threats to any countries.
In addition to developing high-tech vessels such as solar-powered drones and hypersonic vehicles, China is also reviving a decades-old technology to utilize this area of the atmosphere – lighter-than-air vehicles. They include high altitude balloons similar to the one over the continental United States that was shot down on Saturday.
And a range of “near-space flight vehicles” will play a vital role in future joint combat operations that integrate outer space and the Earth’s atmosphere, the article said.
In the video, Cheng Wanmin, an expert at the National University of Defense Technology, said progress has been made in the development of these vehicles by the US, Russia, and Israel.
The space for information confrontation is no longer limited to land, sea, and the low altitude with the development of modern technology. In its official newspaper, thePLA Daily, the paper wrote that Near space has become a new battlefield for warfare and an important part of the national security system.
Unlike rotating satellites or traveling aircraft, stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons can hover for a long period of time and are not easily detected by radar according to the executive editor of Shipborne Weapons.
In a 2021 video segment run by state news agency Xinhua, a military expert explains how near-space lighter-than-air vehicles can surveil and take higher resolution photos and videos at a much lower cost compared to satellites.
An example of advances China has made in this domain is the reported flight of a 100-meter-long (328 feet) unmanned dirigible-like airship known as “Cloud Chaser.” In a 2019 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, Wu Zhe, a professor at Beihang University, said the vehicle had transited across Asia, Africa and North America in an around-the-world flight at 20,000 meters (65, 616 feet) above the Earth.
The US has been increasing its capacity to use lighter-than-air vehicles. In 2021, the US Department of Defense contracted an American aerospace firm to work on using their stratospheric balloons as a means “to develop a more complete operating picture and apply effects to the battlefield,” according to a statement from the firm, Raven Aerostar, at the time.
The documentary did not provide further detail about the time and location of the incident, but a paper published last April by researchers in a PLA institute noted air-drift balloons were spotted over China in 1997 and 2017.
Two Aerial Missing Oscillations from the US and their Connection to the China-Suzuki Report on a High-Speed Balloon-borne Explosion
“Understanding the atmospheric conditions up there is critical to programming the guidance software” for ballistic and hypersonic missiles, according to Hawaii-based analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.
Both the self-governing island of Taiwan and Japan have acknowledged past, similar sightings, though it is not clear if they are related to the US incident.
Mulvaney said that if the balloon is classified as a state-owned device, the data collected from it would be sent back to China.
The object brought down over Alaska was much smaller than the Chinese surveillance balloon downed over territorial waters on Saturday. The Chinese balloon that was downed last Saturday was described by the US as about the size of three buses, whereas the object taken down on Friday was described as a small car. The US has not attributed the second flying object to any country or entity.
The report was distributed through secret channels within the US government. But it wasn’t flagged as an urgent warning and top defense and intelligence officials who saw it weren’t immediately alarmed by it, according to sources. Sources familiar with the report said that the White House was not made aware of the DIA report, and President Joe Biden was not briefed on it.
Instead of treating it as an immediate threat, the US moved to investigate the object, seeing it as an opportunity to observe and collect intelligence.
NoRAD decision to send a rocket to the Atlantic coast without the president: Pentagon officials briefed on the case of the Alaskan balloon
Administration officials from the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday on the balloon, which has prompted criticism from Republicans over allowing it to float across the US before it was shot down off the Atlantic coast.
On January 28, when the balloon entered US airspace near Alaska, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, sent up fighter jets to make a positive identification, according to defense officials, reflecting a subtle shift in urgency.
The issue of control over the balloon’s path is still being debated. The senior US official said that because the balloon was powered by propellers and rudder, it was able to turn like a sailboat and that they were able to predict its path across the US in advance.
Military officials said that it was not surprising that the president was not briefed until January 31, given the expectations for a balloon.
As more information about the administration’s decision-making process on the balloon has continued to trickle out, Congress has taken a keen interest.
A Senate Republican aide told CNN that there are still many unanswered questions about Alaska. “Alaska is still part of the United States – why is that okay to transit Alaska without telling anyone, but [the continental US] is different?”
One pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself, these officials said – an image that has already gained legendary status in both NORAD and the Pentagon.
The Chinese balloon was found to be capable of monitoring the US communications and was determined to be by the Biden administration.
The order to dispatch the balloon was communicated without the knowledge of the Chinese President, sources familiar with the briefings said.
A Pentagon Secret Service Response to Senator Jon Tester: “Spy balloons are not coming from the bottom of the ocean,” Rep. Jon Greene
Only evidence that was on the surface of the ocean has been delivered to FBI analysts so far, one official said, which includes the “canopy itself, the wiring, and then a very small amount of electronics.” The official said analysts have not yet seen the “payload,” which is where you would expect to see the “lion’s share” of electronics.
“We did not assess that it presented a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in actionable technical means from the Chinese,” said Gen. Glenn VanHerck, the commander of US Northern Command and NORAD, on Monday.
The House briefing Thursday morning was tense, the sources said, with several Republicans railing against the administration, including GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who said that the Pentagon made the president – whom she noted she doesn’t like – look weak by their actions.
The Pentagon told us they could make changes in real time to protect us, but I think the concern was the safety of our families, that’s accurate.
The military and intelligence agencies acted with care and did a good job. Their capabilities are amazing at the same time. Is everything done correctly? I can’t imagine that would be the case of almost anything we do. But I came away more confident,” Romney said Thursday.
The military assessment of the Chinese intelligence was under attack by senators at the Appropriations committee hearing on Thursday, with Democrat Jon Tester of Montana saying that he did not know how they could say that it was not a military threat.
The baby was not taken out long before and I need you to tell me why, because this isn’t the last time. We’ve [seen] brief incursions, now we’ve seen a long incursion, what happens next?,” said Tester, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/09/politics/spy-balloon-technology/index.html
Pentagon Status of the Detection of a Chinese Spy Balloon at the Trans-Atlantic Airborne Collider
Pentagon officials told the hearing that they were not concerned about the balloon gathering intelligence over Alaska because it was not close to sensitive sites.
The parts of the balloon that sunk in the ocean have been delivered so far, officials said, while the recovery of additional pieces of the balloon has been complicated by bad weather.
The officials are still unsure of where the parts for the balloon were manufactured and whether any of them were made in America. Because analysts have yet to look at the bulk of the equipment on the balloon, the officials said that there has not been a determination as to everything the device was capable of doing and its specific intent.
Of the small portion they have examined, analysts have not identified any sort of explosive or “offensive material” that would pose a danger to the American public.
One of the sources familiar with the briefings said that the English writing on parts of the balloon were not high-tech components. The source declined to provide detail on what specific parts of the balloon contained English writing.
The official said that the balloon violated the airspace of Central and South American countries and that they had no explanation. “The PRC’s program will only continue to be exposed, making it harder for the PRC to use this program.”
As U.S. Navy crews continue to fish parts of the alleged Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic, a senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, gave reporters an update on Thursday on some of what has been learned so far.
The FBI officials said it was too early to determine what the intent was, and how the device was operating.
The Shoot Down of a High-Altitude Object by US Jets Over Alaska on Friday: Result from a “Front-Line” Investigation
“That narrative is probably part of the information and public opinion warfare the U.S. has waged on China,” Mao added. “As to who is the world’s number one country of spying, eavesdropping and surveillance, that is plainly visible to the international community.”
The government is making improvements as well. China launched a research project to use materials that can be used to make balloons that are higher in the air.
President Joe Biden told CNN that the shoot down a “high-altitude object” hovering over Alaska on Friday “was a success,” shortly after American national security officials disclosed that the commander-in-chief gave the US military approval to take the action.
It marked the second time US jets had taken down an object in less than a week, following the shooting down of a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina last Saturday.
The object was shot down because it posed a serious threat to air traffic as it was flying at 40,000 feet and officials didn’t know the origin of the object, which did not appear to be manned.
There were two efforts to get closer to the object and evaluate it as it flew. The first engagement by fighter aircraft took place late Thursday night and the second Friday morning. Kirby told reporters that the engagements yielded limited information.
The fighters were able to get up and around it before the order was given for them to shoot it down.
John Kirby told reporters on Friday that he arrived inside the territorial waters, but also in territorial airspace and over the territorial waters. “Fighter aircraft assigned to US Northern Command took down the object within last hour.”
The Alaska Command of the US Northern Command collaborated with other entities including the Alaska Air National Guard, Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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“We’re calling this an object because that’s the best description we have right now. We don’t know who owns it – whether it’s state-owned or corporate-owned or privately-owned, we just don’t know,” Kirby said.
The object first came to the attention of the US government “last evening.” The Pentagon had enough information for Biden to be briefed as soon as possible.
The object did not seem to be maneuvering in it’s own way, and therefore it was at the mercy of prevailing winds, making it less predictable.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a temporary flight restriction Friday in the area around Deadhorse, Alaska, as the military took action against the object.
The assessment is said to have been presented to American lawmakers in briefings and if true would point to a lack of coordination between the Chinese and US systems.
It could mean that Xi and his top advisers underestimated the potential gravity of the fallout of the mission and the possibility it could imperil Blinken’s visit, which would have been the first from the most senior US diplomat since 2018 and had been welcomed by Beijing as a path to easing strained ties.
The device was linked to companies in the statement Beijing published last weekend, though the prominence of state-owned enterprises and a robust military-industrial complex blurs the line between the two.
According to Singapore analyst Drew Thompson, this situation could have been worse if it weren’t for the fact that a third term for China’s President, Xi Jinping, paved the way for him to cement his hold on power.
That means that officials who have the capacity to more closely monitor such missions may not be given the power to make political decisions about their impact. Communication might be affected by power struggles between higher ranking officials and lower ranking officials.
The tension in the Chinese system is due to the fact that lower levels of governance are trying to get control of their own.
Past crises in China have pointed to these tensions, including the outbreaks of both SARS in 2002-2003 and more recently Covid-19, where reporting delays were widely seen as having slowed the response and compounded the problem. Local officials were blamed, because they were used to a system in which information flows from the top down.
Balloon launches could also fall into a gap in which operations were not managed or overseen in the same way as space or other aircraft missions, according to Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.
The balloon launches may have been given little or no push back from other countries, including the United States, and they may still be happening now because of the weather.
He said that the leaders of these programs may have gotten less priority attention from the political risk side because they have become more willing to test new routes.
Unidentified Chinese balloon shot down over Alaska: The lesson from China’s invasion of control and the fate of the public, said Xi Jinping
China’s Foreign Ministry appeared caught off-guard by the situation as it publicly unfolded over the past week – releasing its first explanation of the incident more than 12 hours after the Pentagon announced it was tracking a suspected surveillance balloon.
“Because of his personality, he wants 100% (control),” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor, also at the NUS Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. “I don’t think Xi Jinping allows for that kind of autonomy.”
Instead, Xi may have been comfortable with an incident that diverted the attention of a public frustrated amid a faltering economy after years under the recently dismantled zero-Covid policy – but underestimated the US domestic response that resulted in the postponed talks, Wu said.
Meanwhile, Washington may be offering its message that Xi wasn’t aware of the situation as it seeks to “continue the dialogue” started during a meeting between Xi and US President Joe Biden at the G20 summit in Bali, according to Wu.
An unidentified object was shot down 10 miles off the frozen coast of Alaska on Friday afternoon, US officials announced, but details about the object are scarce.
It’s unclear what the object looks like, or where it came from. On Friday, Ryder said it was traveling north east across Alaska. He said that it was about the size of a small car and not similar to the Chinese balloon that fell off the coast of South Carolina.
A US official says that the object did not seem to have any surveillance equipment, which makes it smaller and less sophisticated than the Chinese balloon shot.
There hasn’t been any indication that the object is related to the Chinese balloon downed last weekend, which debris of which was recovered on the Atlantic Ocean floor.
Ryder said on Friday that recovery teams have “mapped the debris field” and are “in the process of searching for and identifying debris on the ocean floor.”
It was a little bit of apples and oranges when asked if the lessons learned from China’s balloon helped detect the object shot down over Alaska.