President Biden ‘Acted Presidentially’ With Chinese Balloon Incident
Former defense secretary endorses US response
President Biden “acted presidentially” in his response to the the Chinese spy balloon which sailed high above the continental United States over the last week, before Biden ordered a military jet to destroy the device off the coast of South Carolina, according to a former secretary of defense.
Biden had authorized the takedown on Wednesday, instructing the Pentagon to act “as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement confirming the operation. The president, in brief remarks to reporters, said: “They successfully took it down. And I want to compliment our aviators who did it.”
With a single missile fired from an F-22 Raptor, the craft was taken down at 2:39 p.m., shortly after the Federal Aviation Administration ordered ground stops for all flights in and out of Wilmington, NC, Myrtle Beach, SC, and Charleston, SC. The agency lifted the order less than an hour later.
The action against the balloon — which first emerged into US airspace over Alaska, before transiting across the continental United States at some 60,000 feet — followed days of political attacks against the president from his opponents on the right, complaining of inaction despite US military warnings that shooting down the balloon over land could have caused American casualties.
Biden did the right thing, according to former defense secretary William Cohen, the one-time Republican senator who ran the Pentagon during President Bill Clinton's second term.
“I think President Biden acted presidential, and I wanted to commend him and secretary of defense Lloyd Austin and the entire team, as well as our aviators, for having shown the kind of restraint and responsibility that we expect our military to engage in,” Cohen said during an on-camera appearance on CNN. “And I would venture to say if he had ordered the shoot down much earlier and any Americans had been injured, the same people calling for him to have shot it down early would be on him saying he acted recklessly. So no, he acted presidentially.”
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