A few days in January and early February brought an incident America should not soon forget. I know I won't. I'm still furious.
Two heroic citizens in Montana sounded the alarm about a "balloon" floating above Big Sky country. Great Falls, Montana is home to Malmstrom Air Force Base, which houses the 341st missile wing with ICBM's (intercontinental ballistic missiles), which could fairly be called weapons of mass destruction. This "balloon" was circling our nuclear assets. Soon the talk of the "balloon" was everywhere. We knew rather quickly that this was much more than a just balloon.
It was a vessel flying 60,000 feet in the air with the capability of spying on anything it wished. It turns out the Biden Administration had been aware of this spy balloon for several days when it first entered U.S. airspace near Alaska. They knew it was a reconnaissance mission by the Communist Chinese Party too. But they said nothing. And they did nothing. They just watched it float over Montana and soon they heard from outraged citizens.
Elected officials in Montana demanded the Biden administration direct our military to take immediate action to bring down the spy balloon. That would accomplish sending the appropriate warning to China and also give us the ability to recover the spy balloons technology to learn what the Chinese were doing. President Joe Biden was told and opted to not shoot the spy balloon down while it was over the thinly-populated areas of Alaska or Montana. Biden argued it could hurt someone on the ground. Montana's Gov. Greg Gianforte was not deterred. "Eastern Montana is probably one of the best places to take it down", the governor said. "We could have contained it. We could have found out what the mission truly was by recovering whatever electronics are on this balloon," he said. As far as Biden's concern about hitting something on the ground? The governor said he wasn't worried about the balloon hitting a cow if it meant stopping Chinese spying.
The Chinese claimed this was an airship that is for "civilian use and entered the US due to force majeure – it was completely an accident." What a joke. Literally.
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CNN reported that Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed Biden that the Chinese balloon was now floating over Montana — and that it appeared to be on a clear path into the continental United States,
Biden was warned, after being aware of the spy balloon for days first in Alaska, but yet he still let this spy balloon drift across more of the U.S. Finally, one week after our military saw this spy balloon enter U.S. airspace, Biden gave the order to shoot it down just off the Carolina coast. The payload is in the ocean in need of recovery. What a national embarrassment
Gianforte summed up this debacle well: "If the Americans had flown a spy balloon over China, do you think it'd still be in the air? Of course not. We should have taken action. Unfortunately, we've emboldened our enemy today."
Scott Hennen hosts the statewide radio program “What’s On Your Mind?” On AM 1100 “The Flag”, AM 1090 KTGO “The Flag” and AM 1460 KLTC. Email him at ScottH@FlagFamily.com
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Forum's editorial board nor Forum ownership.
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