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Pentagon acknowledges 'awareness gap'
Pentagon Officials acknowledge a severe 'awareness gap' after only first recognizing the Chinese spy balloon incident on February 2nd, despite the aircraft first being spotted over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska as early as January 28th.
Air Force General and commander of NORAD and NORTHCOM, Glen D. VanHerck, said, "I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that’s a domain 'awareness gap' that we have to figure out.”
This Generals words are more of a confession than a statement, revealing his belief that America still lacks the capability to detect unusual activity happening in its ‘sovereign’ skies. More surprisingly, he also admitted that this is not the first time that China has sent such a balloon into US airspace. There have been four other similar instances during both Trump's and Biden's respective administrations.
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The biggest concern however, is that the Department of Defense has over $3.5 trillion in assets and cannot detect a bright, white, 200-foot tall spy balloon that's been the buzz of social and traditional media for days. This may not come as too big of a shock considering that in the DoD's last failed audit - it's fifth consecutive failure - over $2.1 trillion of those assets were unaccounted for.
Following the balloon being shot down by an F-22 Raptor under orders from the president, the military is now conducting a mission to collect debris from the craft in the Atlantic ocean.
Special investigation teams including the FBI are helping the government to speed up the search process so to determine what information the balloon managed to gather.
VanHerck also believes that the debris could eventually solve the domain awareness gap problem and help US in developing similar technology.
What China gained from this little misadventure is unknown for now, but it is evident that the US now faces not only an economic challenge, but a severe military threat from Beijing.
As a consequence, Beijing-Washington relations have taken another blow as Secretary of State Antony Blinken has postponed his upcoming trip to China.
