President’s silence on balloon incursion speaks volumes

If a Chinese spy craft had tried to violate U.S. airspace days before President Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union address, I suspect the Gipper would have not only ordered it shot down before it entered our territory but also invited the pilot who took it out to be his guest in the House chamber.

But President Joe Biden is no Reagan. Instead of using his speech to report to the American people on the recent incursion of a Chinese spy balloon and lay out a strategy to confront the danger posed by China’s Communist regime, Biden made only an elliptical reference. He spent more time touting his Junk Fee Prevention Act than discussing the threat from Beijing.

The mind boggles. Biden wants to brush the incident under the rug because it was yet another national security failure on his watch. His administration peddles excuse after excuse to play down the significance of the incursion.

First, it questioned the value of the intelligence the spy ship could glean. Well, if spy balloons have no intelligence value, why has Beijing developed a fleet of them? Perhaps it’s because, unlike satellites, balloons can loiter over a target at lower altitude, gathering better-quality pictures and picking up transmissions that cannot be detected from space.

On Thursday, the administration admitted that China is running a massive aerial espionage program that has targeted more than 40 countries on five continents — and that the one over our territory was capable of monitoring communications.

This incursion could have been a dry run to test U.S. defenses — which are clearly lacking. What if the next Chinese blimp carries not spyware but weapons of mass destruction or an electromagnetic pulse capable of shortcircuiting our power grid and shutting down critical infrastructure? China has reportedly been testing such weapons.

Retired Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg wrote in a 2015 paper that a high-altitude balloon would be an ideal platform for delivering such a weapon.

Retired Gen. Jack Keane, former vice chief of staff of the Army, told Fox News: “China is using these balloons, relatively low technology, to probe and to find where U.S. surveillance systems are and where the U.S. is vulnerable. And they know if they’re not detected because there’s no aircraft up, there’s no jamming of their system, and they say, ‘OK, this a path we can follow with our advanced technology’ — not with a balloon to deliver a weapon, but with a supersonic machine that can deliver a weapon.”

This was no benign incident. Worse, there had been previous incidents, including three during the Trump administration — though apparently they weren’t detected at the time “It’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America,” said Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. Northern Command.

“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. That’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”

How on earth did we miss a slow-moving, 200-foot-tall balloon — the size of a 20-story building? This time we did detect the Chinese craft before it entered U.S. airspace yet did not stop it.

Instead of shooting down the ship before it entered our territory, Biden let it hover over our country for a week, before finally shooting it down. One wonders whether he would have done even that if someone in Montana had not spotted it

“This is a bold move, to do this, to enter into our sovereign airspace and with a spy balloon,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Commitee on China. They just calculated that they could get away with it.

What else do they think they can get away with?”

Biden did not address any of those concerns Tuesday night. He didn’t even try. But at least he’s laser-focused on protecting us from resort fees.