The military did not detect previous flights of Chinese spy balloons over the U.S. that took place during the Trump administration, a top general said Monday, due to a “gap” in the Defense Department’s ability to track certain airborne objects.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of North American Aerospace Defense Command, cited the issue as the reason that at least three spy balloon flights were not briefed to senior Trump officials at the time.
“So those balloons, so every day as a NORAD commander it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America,” he told reporters at the Pentagon. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out. But I don’t want to go into further detail.”
He added that the intelligence community later determined the flights had occurred using “additional means of collection.”
The Defense Department first brought up the Trump-era flights on Saturday, not long after an F-22 fighter shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. Republicans had for several days blamed the Biden administration for its handling of the incident, but a senior DoD official on Saturday noted that flights had also occurred during the previous administration.
