Armor Capabilities News Today

welcome to "inside politics." im john king in washington. thank you for sharing a remarkable news day with us. we begin with a brazen spy drama. straight to the pentagon, the briefing on a chinese balloon over montana. >> conducting press briefings in our temporary press briefing room while other primary location undergoes technical renovations and upgrades. we greatly appreciate your patience and flexibility as we work to install some long, overdue upgrades to the pentagon press brief...

thing. the pentagon briefing has begun, lets go there. >> the pentagon for a variety of reasons our normal call-in options will not be available, for those that have had to call in, we apologize. we will get it up as quickly as possible for reporting purposes and answer questions from the dod press desk. moving forward well look at ways to improve briefing operations and expect regular press briefings will resume in the press briefing room in middle to late may. we appreciate your pati...

Can you talk specifically about this particular group of capabilities? how are they tailored to whats happening in ukraine now? for instance, theres equipment that connects the various air defense systems. can you speak to why this specific package now? >> sure. its important to look at this from an evolution standpoint in terms of adapting to the conditions on the ground, and so weve been focused on several key areas in the last few months to support ukraine, specifically air defense capabiliti...

Began tracking this balloon and been tracking it several days now, im told they began to mitigate ability of that craft to be able to gather information, surveill the sites in montana where the nuclear silos are and so they feel pretty confident that this spycraft is not necessarily able to continue gathering information and so they wont say how they know that or how they are managing to control that. i think what was interesting, i asked who is controlling this balloon at this point and there w...

Capability, long-range fire capability that will enable them to conduct operations in defense of their country and take back their sovereign territory and russian occupied areas. when it comes to ukrainians plans on operations, clearly that is their decision, i will not talk about or speculate about future operations, weve been working with them to provide them with capabilities that will enable them to be effective on the battlefield. >> follow-up to that, can you talk specifically about this p...

Weve been focused on several key areas in the last few months to support ukraine, air defense capabilitieses, armor capabilities, long-range fires capabilities and then combined with training in order to enable them to have the ability to conduct combined arms. looking at things like further enhancing integrated air defense, which i think everyone continues to watch with horror as russia conducts aerial bombardment on civilian targets throughout actor, working in those areas. also through the co...

Of security assistance valued at $25 million and 1.75 billion in ukraine security assistance initiative funds. presidential drawdown is 31st drawdown of equipment for ukraine. in total, the u.s. committed $32 billion in security assi assistantance to ukraine and 29.3 billion since russia unprovoked and illegal invasion one year ago this month. today announcement includes air defense capabilities to help ukraine defend their people and armored vehicles and more equipment ukraine is using to effec...

Okay. >> just going back to the ukraine package, can you talk about integrating the air defense systems, all systems sent by different nato partners and how do you integrate those with systems the ukraine already has? >> yeah, without going into operationally sensitive matters, broadly speaking, so couple of things. it is important to recognize ukrainians have done a fairly remarkable job of protecting employing air defense capabilities they have, we recognize they take these new pieces and part...

And secondly, is the, to the point about capabilities, how is it powered? how is it moving? how does it maneuverable? >> thanks, phil. on your latter question, ill not get into intelligence, it is balloon with payload underneath it. leave it at that. whats that? it has a large payload underneath surveillance component under the actual balloon piece of it. so leave it at that. and then in terms of the maneuverability, again, all i can say is this point, it is moving eastward across the united sta...

No-fly zone, it would have had a similar effect. >> its clear were acting on the side of the rebels, and that we can, by keeping up the sustained pressure and movement, that gadhafi can be removed. if we tell gadhafi, dont worry, youre not going to be removed by force, i think that thats very encouraging to gadhafi. and so i believe that the rebels, as i predicted are succeeding because we negated the air power and the armor capabilities of gadhafi, and were rapidly on the road to success. the p...