On Thursday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “The Balance,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) stated that he “would have court-martialed” one of his soldiers “if they just started randomly shooting things they didn’t identify as hostile or having hostile intent” like the Biden administration And stated that the Biden administration’s approach to aerial objects is nonsensical and unclear.
Waltz stated, “So, now we have a situation where we track a massive surveillance balloon…all the way from mainland China, and we don’t shoot it down until it’s completed its spying mission, but we are shooting down — with $400,000-a-piece Sidewinder missiles — random objects. I’ve got to tell you, as a Green Beret commander, I would have court-martialed one of my guys if they just started randomly shooting things they didn’t identify as hostile or having hostile intent. And Eric, it can’t be that we’re only going to defend our airspace if there’s a chance it may collide with something. So, that begs the question, if the three additional objects were flying up where the Chinese balloon was, then I guess we would have let [them] go. I mean, anything that’s flying at 60,000 feet just gets a free pass or if it’s big enough that it may harm a civilian on the ground, it gets a free pass too. It’s just — this is just kind of…asinine in terms of criteria for how we’re going to defend our nation.”
He added, “I still just get back to the policy, Eric, don’t even know what it is, yet we’re going to blow it out of the sky. And when we do know what it is, we’re going to let it pass and surveil.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
