China declined Pentagon’s outreach after military shot down spy balloon
Mike Brest
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The Chinese government declined the Pentagon’s request for a “secure call” between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and People’s Republic of China Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe after the U.S. military shot down its surveillance balloon.
The Pentagon submitted a request for the call on Saturday, “immediately after taking action to down the PRC balloon,” however, “the PRC has declined our request. Our commitment to open lines of communication will continue,” spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said in a statement on Tuesday.
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“We believe in the importance of maintaining open lines of communication between the United States and the PRC in order to responsibly manage the relationship,” he added. “Lines between our militaries are particularly important in moments like this.”
China’s surveillance balloon first entered U.S. airspace on Jan. 28 over the Alaskan Aleutian Islands before it then entered Canadian airspace and subsequently reentered U.S. airspace over northern Idaho on Jan. 31 before traveling across the country until it was over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of the Carolinas. An F-22 downed it on Saturday afternoon.
China’s Foreign Ministry first claimed this was a civilian airship “used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes” and has since said it “strongly disapproves of and protests against the U.S. attack on a civilian unmanned airship by force.”
Since shooting it down, U.S. military personnel have begun an effort to recover the debris in order to learn more about China’s balloon program.
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“There was a potential opportunity for us to collect intel where we had gaps on prior balloons,” the commander of United States Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, Gen. Glen VanHerck, told reporters on Monday. “And so I would defer to the intel community, but this 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 the time frame was well worth its value to collect over.”
Similarly, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday that the United States hopes to “exploit what we recover and learn even more than we have learned.”