Pentagon Report Noted Chinese Balloon Circumnavigating Globe During Trump Admin, US Media Says

While the US has accused Beijing of sending a “spy balloon” over the continental United States last week, Beijing has denied the balloon had any military application, saying it was an escaped civilian scientific balloon. The US shot the balloon down on Sunday, saying it wants to study its technology.

After a senior US Defense Department official said over the weekend that there had been at least three prior flights of Chinese balloons over the US during former US President Donald Trump’s administration, Trump vehemently denied the claim and called it “fake disinformation.”

“China had too much respect for ‘TRUMP’ for this to have happened,” the real estate mogul said on social media, seemingly referring to his name brand.

However, that doesn’t seem to be quite true, as new details have emerged on balloon-related events during Trump’s four-year tenure from 2017 to 2021.

US media reported on Monday that Chinese high-altitude balloons appeared in a US military intelligence report last year, which indicated that a Chinese balloon circumnavigated the world in 2019 - when Trump was president - and went past Hawaii and Florida. It did not say if the balloon crossed US territory or simply floated near it.

The report also noted that Beijing had deployed other high-altitude balloons capable of staying aloft for months at a time at between 65,000 feet and 328,000 feet, the latter of which is the international definition of the border between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

‘We Did Not Detect Those Threats’

Also on Monday, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of US Northern Command, which oversees US military operations in North America, revealed that the Pentagon only found out about the Trump-era flights after the fact.

“We did not detect those threats,” VanHerck told reporters. “The intel community after the fact - I believe as has been briefed already - assessed those threats from additional means of collection and made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America or transited North America.”

What VanHerck described as a “domain awareness gap” was apparently plugged after Biden took office in 2021.

"Because the intelligence community made this a priority at the direction of President Biden, we enhanced our surveillance of our territorial airspace, we enhanced our capacity to be able to detect things that the Trump administration was unable to detect," White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters.

"And we were also able to go back and look at the historical patterns. And that led us to come to understand that during the Trump administration, there were multiple instances where the surveillance balloons traversed American airspace and American territory."

In addition, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the previous flights were “nothing at all” like the most recent one, adding that “from every indication that we have,” the Trump-era flight had been “for brief periods of time.”

Neither the 2022 report or VanHerck’s comments said anything about the Chinese balloons being intelligence-gathering tools. The Biden administration has claimed it suspects the balloon shot down on Sunday of being a spy device, since it passed over a large US air base in Montana. China has denied the balloon had any military application, saying it was a civilian science balloon that its operators had lost control over.

The balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Sunday by an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, after having transited the continental US. The US Navy is engaged in recovery efforts to study the balloon’s technology.

Washington’s Own Balloon Program

Ironically, the US government has repeatedly tested the use of high-altitude balloons for surveillance, both over the United States and for use over China.

A 2019 report based on Federal Aviation Administration filings revealed that the defense contractor Sierra Nevada launched up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons to drift across hundreds of miles of US territory to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats.” The balloons carried high-powered radars to travel multiple vehicles through any kind of weather.

In addition, a report from July 2022 revealed that the Pentagon has spent $3.8 million already and intends to spend another $27.1 million in fiscal year 2023 on a program to develop high-altitude balloons capable of doing everything from detecting hypersonic weapons to spying and even deploying offensive weapons.