MICHIGAN (WXMI) — A former Pentagon employee says the Biden administration properly handled its takedown of a suspect spy balloon.
“It seems to me that this was a well planned operation,” said Michael McDaniel. “If it took a couple of days to do so, so be it.”
McDaniel is a constitutional law professor at Cooley Law School, but served as Michigan’s first homeland security adviser. He went onto develop policies for the U.S. Department of Defense that helped defend attacks against the country.
“We are always engaged in gathering intelligence, and so our competitors such as Russia and the People's Republic of China,” said McDaniel.
He explains countries constantly spy on each other and often utilize high altitude balloons, like the one China reportedly launched.
In general, McDaniel describes them as pieces of equipment that hover closer to the ground and takes better photos than traditional satellites.
“You can launch them [and] it’s much easier than trying to put a satellite in geosynchronous orbit above the United States,” said McDaniel. “It's much less expensive. There's almost the same degree of maneuverability and the height is such that it makes it difficult for just about any nation, other than a few, to be able to shoot these down.”
Since the Pentagon publicly exposed the balloon on Thursday, there has been criticism that the US took too long to bring it down.
However, McDaniel says he does not think its cross country trek gave China an intelligence opening.
He says when officials spot spy balloons, they physically and digitally cover any sensitive areas.
“There was no threat, no threat to US military secrets at any point in time with their surveillance blown because we have the ability to track these,” said McDaniel.
McDaniel sees China entering US airspace as a bigger deal, but thinks President Biden took the right steps to deter future surveillance with shooting the balloon down and cancelling Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing.
“This is one of those circumstances where there is no harm to the US in terms of surveillance gathering,” said McDaniel. “As I said, the only harm is the fact that there is an intrusion into our national sovereignty, more symbolic than anything else, because of course, other nations, such as the US engage in spy oversights all the time, and it's just a matter of which ones were willing to accept diplomatically and politically and which ones were not.”
With the balloon now in US custody, he says it provides an opportunity to exploit any of China’s advances or gaps.
“It’s an assessment of their intelligence capability, but it's also their ability to capture intelligence,” said McDaniel. “What technology do they have? And what technology do they lack? And then we start doing the 'what ifs?'”
