if the implication is that, you know, there s some sort of blanket now security policy for every base in the continental united states, the answer is no. we do have protocols, particularly when we know that surveillance is going to occur, like in the open skies treaty with russia, for instance. when all of that is scheduled and laid out and when you know there s going to be an open skies strike by russia, you take the appropriate actions. and that s what we did in the case of the chinese spy balloon. we ll always do that. i will never talk about what precautions we re going to make at any given base, any given time, but we always do what we do to protect our nation s secrets. i won t talk about it any more than that. bay way in the back. way in the back. thank you very much. you started the briefing by talking about the president s involvement in this, the report
here is that it has revealed how poor our communications are. this is a problem that was supposed to have been solved in 2001 when the united states had a spy plane that collided with a chinese fighter, actually, the location where we think they re launching these balloons from. and after that incident, which killed the chinese pilot and so forth, they set up these elaborate systems, but the systems only work if someone picks them up at the other end. that s the biggest worry now. if you got into something really big like taiwan, you couldn t have that lack of communication safely. the stakes incredibly, incredibly far too high for that to be the reality. david sanger, general mark hertling, thank you both so much. i want to remind everybody, we re waiting for the white house briefing to get under way. hopefully we ll get some of our questions answered about that.
in concert with u.s. coast guard but they re also involved in trying to locate the degree. there was good communication with our canadian allies. a foreign government taking a special interest in this object from yesterday? reacting in an unusual way? no. thanks, john. two questions. one, you mentioned early on that the the china balloon might have been giving limited additive capabilities. i assume you re meaning onto their satellite surveillance. can you specify what exactly it s getting from a balloon that they re not getting from orbiting satellites that go over us? with the caveat we haven t fully recovered everything, although we have recovered some things from the bottom of the atlantic, and we re analyzing that, but with that caveat that we don t know exactly what this balloon was surveilling or what its capabilities were, so just
suspect they were conducting surveillance of any kind, we couldn t real that out. that s why the president at the recommendation of the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and the north com norad commander gave the order to shoot them down. these missions were completely successfully and safely. efforts are actively under way right now at all sites to find what is left of those objects so we can better understand and communicate with the american people what they are. i think it s important to remind the objects in alaska and canada are in pretty remote terrain. ice and wilderness, all of that making it difficult to find them in winter weather. the object over lake huron now lies in what is probably very deep water. so outside of recovery operations, what are we doing? first, we re continuing to monitor. there are no active tracks today, but the professionals at
need to make. look, just by adapting the way the radar parameters are set, we have improved our ability to detect. and again, i said that could be one reason why we re seeing more. thank you. so, you said that the debris in the waters, are in remote areas and there are also huge objects and they found missiles. so how optimistic are you that you would be able to collect enough debris to get an idea what the objects were? we won t know until we get onsite to see, you know, how much damage was done, not just by the missile strike, but by the fall from a very high altitude, and as you said, one case on sea ice. so, we ll just have to see. yeah, thank you, john. does secretary of state antony blinken plan to meet with his chinaese counterpart at the munich conference? i m afraid that s state department, that s the secretary