military had the operation to take down the spy balloon. but president biden made clear that he asked the military leaders to shoot down the balloon as soon as possible. they waited until it was out over seas, over waters to minimize the impact it would have on people on the ground, and president biden talked about that thinking with reporters a short while ago. on wednesday, i was briefed on the balloon. i ordered the pentagon to shoot it down on wednesday as soon as possible. they decided without doing damage to anyone on the ground. they decided when it got over water within a 12-mile limit. they successfully took it down and i want to compliment the aviators who did it. what is your message to chai that? you were saying the
what they were doing and they took some prudent responses. i happen to have a friend who was the flight of rperations director, when the aircraft came down, it swas spread across 17 different rates. you know, you can t always plan on where debris is going to land, especially when it s coming down from 60,000 feet. i think, you know, this was a very good, thought out plan. the president, as you just said, made the decision on wednesday. but as i said in the last hour with you, they knew what they were looking at few days, if not weeks before this, as the balloon started covering over the bering see and over the allusion island chain? what do you think the chinese got out of the balloon? we heard that there were efforts
relationship between washington and beijing? well, think of it. the secretary was supposed to have been flying i think out today. he would have been landing in china before they really knew first whether they had gotten the balloon down and second, what it was collecting. i think he will be in a better position to go confront the chinese once we have a fact base of what the balloon was all about. what it was collecting. whether the chinese story that it was merely civilian meteorological is accurate or whether secretary austin, as i suspect that he is, that it had some sort of intelligence collection. you are going to be set to be confrontational if you have a set of facts first. we will learn about the balloon and what fact exactly
it is conceivable that somehow the chinese president wasn t aware of at least the timing of this. it doesn t minimize the severity and the brazen attempts to surveil our country, putting in perspective there are low earth chinese satellites surveilling all these areas almost on an hourly basis, and so all that is extraordinarily series. it has to be mitigated against. it s why the healthy intelligence community is so important. but so much doesn t make sense for it to happen at this particular team. how important do you think it is to get it out of the water and analyze it? we are told when they do recover, the balloon and whatever remains will be taken up to quantico and examined.
but doing it over you know, directly the middle of the the continental united states, we re trying to understand this. because what most most will attempt to be covert in nation, and t nature and i think that something that every american is aware of. we are concerned about this. we are concerned about the surveillance efforts. all i m adding is the fact that the chinese made a historically difficult and silly mistake at an extremely bad time. so we have to mitigate against all the efforts the chinese government is making to surveil our government, and it s obviously human intelligence. this is just one that every american has been made aware of. and what about the criticisms from republican lawmakers who are saying the balloon should have been shot down sooner than