Why is the White House claiming Chinese Spy Balloons violated US airspace during Trump's presidency?
NORAD admits that it had to 'enhance' its radars to be able to detect and track slow-moving high-altitude objects. How did it retroactively 'enhance' its radars?
President Biden’s decision to allow a Chinese Spy Balloon to travel the complete length of the continental United States was widely criticized by both Democrats and Republicans. Since allowing the Chinese to violate US airspace for more than a week the White House has desperately attempted to claim that Chinese Spy Balloons routinely penetrated American airspace years ago—specifically during President Trump’s first term in office. How realistic are these claims?
Just yesterday Assistant Secretary of Defence Melissa Dalton gave an on-the-record briefing1 where she explained that NORAD had “enhanced their radar” to allow for the detection of similar objects in the future. She explained that the increase in the number of objects they’ve detected over the past week was a result of these changes to NORAD’s radar system. Previously NORAD filtered out low-speed, high-altitude objects like weather balloons—the discovery of the Chinese Spy Balloon has resulted in their decision to stop filtering these results out. As a result, four objects have been shot down in the last eight days.
“I believe this is the first time within United States of America airspace that NORAD or United States Northern Command has taken kinetic action against an airborne object.”
~ General Glen David VanHerck
If NORAD had to ‘enhance’ their radar systems2 to detect Chinese Spy Balloons how could the White House be able to confirm that similar spy balloons violated US airspace years ago during Trump’s presidency BEFORE the radar systems were ‘enhanced’?3 Does NORAD save raw radar data from years past? Does that data include radar signals that it previously filtered out? Who gave the order to review radar data from several years ago? How many Air Force personnel were required to re-review the raw radar data from 2017-2020? Did Air Force personnel review raw radar data from before 2017? If not, why not. If so were any Chinese Spy Balloons detected?
The fact of the matter is that the most likely answer is that NORAD has no idea if Chinese Spy Balloons violated US airspace during Trump’s presidency. The truth is that someone likely suggested that these sorts of incursions could have been going on for years—but it was just merely an assumption. The White House now makes it clear that NORAD didn’t detect any Chinese Spy Balloons during Trump’s presidency and as a result never alerted the president at any time. The White House is merely attempting to distract from the president’s failure to act for a week allowing the Chinese Spy Balloon to cross the entire continental United States.
In an effort to bolster their claims that Chinese Spy Balloons made incursions during Trump’s administration, the White House is planning to brief4 Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton—Bolton published a tell-all book5 critical of Trump and the two are not friends.