U.S. and China are at a “tipping point,” worn acting protection secretary says

A top Pentagon official who served under former president Trump tells CBS News the Chinese spy balloon may be a Tipping Point in U.S China relations former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller said the incident revealed the U.S capabilities and limitations what do the last two weeks tell us about the military detection capabilities we.

Spent a trillion dollars on defense each year and we should be able to handle something so unsophisticated as a doggone Chinese Bible did we need to use fighter jets to bring down the Chinese spy balloon and these three unidentified objects if you do the math that's probably four or five hundred million dollars worth of.

Hardware in the air shooting 400 000 Sidewinder missiles at them uh the cost curve is in the Chinese favor I would hope that with all the money we spend in defense that we would have had a capability to bring that thing down in a more controlled manner so we could exploit the uh in the the dog on equipment and whatnot on it well the.

White House has said that as they followed the trajectory of the Chinese spy balloon they were able to shore up security around these sensitive military installations do you think that we were able to button that up you would hope but at the end of the day we emanate so many electronic signatures cell phones and other things come off in military.

Installation that I think that's probably a little hyperbolic and it seems to me a bit covering uh your you know what is what's happening right now as acting Secretary of Defense would you have made the recommendation Nation to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon before it reached the continental U.S looking at the map and seeing the track.

Of the balloon across the Aleutian Islands and then there's this huge blue space where it seems likely you could have taken that thing down there I would absolutely recommended that we attack the balloon before it could go fly all the way across the United States President Biden told the American public that the shoot down of the Chinese spy.

Balloon after it traversed the continental U.S sent a clear message to the Chinese government that this is unacceptable what message do you think was sent when you're dealing with totalitarian authoritarian governments I think that message probably is lost a immediate action to take down that balloon when we saw it would have sent a.

Much stronger message you know kind of Reagan's piece through strength I don't think we really did it with in this case as acting Secretary of Defense under President Trump were you briefed about the Chinese balloon surveillance program never wish I would have been if it even existed at the time it seems that's one of the issues right now is transparency.

And accountability that you know I talk about in my book how can it be that you would not be briefed on a surveillance program by by China because there's reporting now that there was Intelligence about the program that's kind of fundamentally the issue I have right now with our Department of Defense and our intelligence community.

That there's so many stove pipes in the intelligence community and since they couldn't determine definitively that it was the Chinese they decided that it would be inappropriate to let senior decision makers no I think that's what we're going to find out finally when an investigation is completed probably in 12 to 18 months how does that happen.

Though you're the top defense department official and you're not being briefed on what may be a surveillance program by an adversary that's one of the that's you just hit the nail on the head that's the issue we need to address and you know I talk about my book about civilian oversight in the military where we have career people.

Great Americans working hard but we also have people that burrow into the professional bureaucracy and think that they know more than the senior decision makers President Biden said the U.S wants to have uh open lines of communication with the Chinese his words were competition not conflict is that possible.

I think that we're at a Tipping Point right now and that's something that has to be resolved you saw secretary Austin's call to his counterpart and China was ignored that's a pretty strong signal to me that we're in a bad place I suspect that a lot of this is the result of our pullout in Afghanistan where the Chinese I think if we open the files you.

Know in 50 years and Chinese Communist Party we're going to find out that they saw a weakness there and now see us as kind of a spent force and are not respectful of the power that we still have

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