Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) complained that the U.S. military did not do enough to retrieve suspected Chinese spy balloons from the sky instead of shooting them down.
“We have a lot of capacity to take these balloons out of the air,” he said on Fox News on Monday. “We used to do everything.”
But Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) — who served in the Air Force — stood by the facts, writing on Twitter:
Gingrich cited past surgeries to retrieve the capsule, but experts say that’s not the case in his current situation.
“In the Vietnam era, they used helicopters and cargo planes to sort out reconnaissance drones and bring them back so they could get the film, so it’s not that far off,” national security analyst Rebecca Grant, an aerospace expert at IRIS Independent Research, told Newsweek last week. “It’s been a while since you’ve done something like that.”
The Washington Post quoted an “authoritative Pentagon official” as saying the agency considered trying to capture the balloon, but concluded the technology was not there. Additionally, an unnamed U.S. official told CBS News that taking the balloon into the air would not be possible.
However, the military shot down the balloons when they reached the sky over the ocean, where debris would not pose a threat to people on the ground.
Operations are now underway to recover the balloon’s payload.