2023-07-20 23:28:52
Por Patrick Smith – NBC News
China’s spy balloon that flew over North America earlier this year exposed significant gaps in the United States’ capabilities to detect aerial threats, and prompted the country to begin developing new surveillance technologies, a senior US official said in an exclusive interview with NBC News, Noticias Telemundo’s sister network.
General Glen VanHerck, head of the United States Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told the program Nightly News with Lester Holt US surveillance capabilities have been bolstered with new technology since the object was sighted in late January off the coast of Alaska.
“At that time we were not looking for a very slow, 65,000-foot, high-altitude balloon. Our radars were able to see it, but we were filtering and leaving that data out,” he recently declared in a wide-ranging interview from the NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, which monitors the skies of the United States and Canada and responds to potential threats.
[Una filial de una empresa de EE.UU. vendió productos electrónicos a una compañía de defensa china vinculada a los globos espía]
The Biden Administration came under fire for its handling of the Chinese spy balloon, first reported on by NBC News, and some wondered why was it allowed to fly over sensitive military installations in the continental United States, where it could gather valuable information on American defenses.
The revelation that the Chinese were capable of flying such objects into US airspace without detection by the military also raised questions about an intelligence failure, prompting calls for more investment in air defense and radar systems in the country.
FBI special agents process material recovered from the balloon on February 9, 2023. FBI via AP
China initially apologized for the incident, but claimed that it involved a civilian weather balloon that had gone off course.
VanHerck, like other US officials, said they had no doubt the balloon had been used for spying. “We know for sure that it was a spy vehicle,” he said.
VanHerck admitted that the incident, which captivated the country and brought US-China relations to high levels of tension, had been a learning experience.
[Un globo espía chino recogió información de lugares militares sensibles de EE.UU.]
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“We’ve learned a lot and I’ve also learned that I have to be able to see further, further into the Pacific, further into the Arctic and further into the Atlantic,” he said. “And that will be given to us by the radars”over-the-horizon‘” he added, referring to systems that detect objects at very long distances.
VanHerck explained that he first learned of the balloon on January 27 and that his forces intercepted it the next day with F-22 and F-16 fighter jets and determined that it was not a hostile threat.
On February 2, NBC News reported that the object was flying over the country. Two days later, it was shot down off the South Carolina coast on the orders of President Joe Biden. The process to identify and intercept the balloon worked “exactly as it should,” VanHerck explained.
The object managed to obtain information from several sensitive US military points, despite government efforts to prevent it, two senior US officials and a former senior official told NBC News in April.
VanHerck added that while he was aware that China had a high-altitude balloon program before the incident, he was unaware that several of them had flown over the country.
In addition to being the head of NORAD, VanHerck is also head of the country’s national and maritime defense, including defense against ballistic missiles, and supporting civil authorities in response to natural disasters, such as hurricanes and forest fires.
[Blinken aboga por “cerrar el capítulo” del globo espía tras su encuentro con Xi para recomponer la relación entre EE.UU. y China]
In the event of a ballistic missile being launched against the United States, VanHerck must alert in a matter of minutes.
The challenge of the post is not just the vast geography – from the North Pole to Central America – but how the nature of external threats is continually evolving into scenarios that did not exist when NORAD was founded in 1958, during the Cold War.
“Hypersonic missiles, for example, or extremely low radar missiles, cross-sectional cruise missiles, or advanced submarines that are very quiet…those are the daunting tasks I have,” he said.
“Frankly, what worries me the most is the cyber domain and our ability to understand the threats in that domain that affect our projection of power,” VanHerck said.
NBC News also visited the nearby complex of Cheyenne Mountainwhich has been in operation since 1966 and is designed to guarantee the “continuity” of the operations of the military and civil authorities in the event of war.
The complex features a series of three-foot-wide blast doors, capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. The last time the complex was operationally closed was during the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Although the facility was built during the Cold War, VanHerck claimed that the current global climate is the most challenging and dynamic it has seen in 36 years of service.
“These are two competing nuclear-armed countries,” he said, describing China and Russia as current enemies of the United States, noting that many others join them: “There are violent extremists out there and an unstable world” and “international norms that have served well since the end of World War II are being challenged every day.”
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