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The U.S. military has shot down an object flying over Alaska less than a week after shooting down a massive Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast, with questions still remaining as to what the aerial object was and where it came from.
We’ll share what we know so far about the object and the operation to bring it down, plus details on a renewed Russian missile barrage on Ukrainian cities and an upcoming trip for President Biden to mark the one-year anniversary of the Kremlin attack on Ukraine.
This is Defense & National Security, your guide to the latest developments at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and beyond. For The Hill, I’m Ellen Mitchell.US shoots down another ‘high-altitude object’
The U.S. military on Friday took down an object flying over Alaskan airspace days after shooting down a Chinese spy balloon along the South Carolina coast, the White House confirmed.
John Kirby, a national security spokesperson for the White House, said the Defense Department was tracking a “high-altitude object” over Alaska at 40,000 feet that posed “a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight.”
Take the shot: The object was shot down Friday afternoon at President Biden’s direction, Kirby said, and landed in U.S. waters.
“At the direction of the president of the United States fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command successfully took down a high-altitude airborne object off the northern coast of Alaska at 1:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time today within U.S. sovereign airspace over U.S. territorial water,” Pentagon press secretary Brig Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters in a separate briefing on Friday.
Collecting info: The government is still collecting information about the object, Kirby said. It is not yet known whether it was operated by another country or if it was privately or commercially owned. Kirby also would not say if the object was a balloon or another device.
“We’re calling this an object because that’s the best description we have right now,” he told reporters.
“We don’t understand the full purpose. We don’t have any information that would confirm a stated purpose for this object,” he continued, adding that officials expect to be able to recover the debris.
How it was detected: Ryder said North American Aerospace Defense Command detected the object on ground radar on Thursday and sent up aircraft for further investigation, after which the decision to shoot it down was made.
The aircraft, an F-22 flying out of Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, fired an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile to take down the object, which was traveling in a northeasterly direction.
Given that the balloon was operating at an altitude that posed “a reasonable threat to civilian air traffic,” the president gave the order to take it down, Ryder said.
Other details: The U.S. does not yet know where the latest object originated from and was hesitant to refer to it as another balloon as it was “about the size of a small car,” nowhere near the size of the high-altitude surveillance balloon taken down off the coast of South Carolina.
