(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The United States military—which has lately been committed to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, even at the expense of protecting the American people—failed to hit an alleged spy balloon as it hovered above Lake Huron on Sunday, the Washington Times reported.
The admission was made by America’s most embarrassing general, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“The first shot missed [but] the second shot hit,” Milley said during a press conference Tuesday at NATO headquarters.
He then sought to reassure the media in attendance that the army had successfully tracked and recovered the stray AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, each of which costs about $400,000.
It is unclear if the missle was reusable. But with a toxic spill from Ohio already threatening to contaminate the nearby Ohio River watershed, Michiganders may take solace in knowing that the Biden administration has created only one deadly threat this week to Midwesterners’ well-being.
“In this case, the missile landed harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron,” Milley said at the press conference.
According to the report, the U.S.–Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD, discovered the alleged spy balloon around 5 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 11, tracking it from Montana eastward to Lake Huron.
It was one of four such aerial devices downed by the military since the issue first came to public attention earlier this month. However, only the first one—shot down on Saturday, Feb. 4—has been more or less confirmed as a Chinese spy balloon.
Pentagon officials have declined to offer details into the subsequent encroachments, involving much smaller aircrafts.
In explaining why some of the so-called spy balloons were allowed to remain in U.S. and Canadian airspace for so long after making landfall, Milley told reporters that he was worried about civilians getting hurt.
“We evaluate the risks of the balloons themselves: Are they a kinetic threat or not—yes or no? Are they an intelligence threat? Are they a threat to civilian aviation?” he said. “All those things we go through very carefully.”
Biden administration officials, when asked about the potential origins of the balloons, could not or did not provide any details.
“We don’t see anything that points right now to these being part of the [People’s Republic of China] spying program or, in fact, intelligence collection against the United States of any kind,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.
