national security interests and threats as best we can. thanks, admiral. real quick, is there a timeline for recovery of this object? you d have to talk to the pentagon, i don t know. guys, again, this just happened in the last hour and a half and they re still assessing where this thing landed and the degree to which they can get to it. on the poland visit, i know in the statement that you put out, it says that the president is going to meet with leaders of the eastern flank countries. are any other european leaders, nato leaders expected to join the president on this trip? we re still putting the agenda together. the predominant reason is to talk to those nations who are literally on the eastern flank of the nato alliance. but i can t rule in or rule out there may be additional attendees that the president may have. thanks very much. back to lula, is there going to be any commitment to the amazon fund by the united states during this visit? let s have the visi
we can t rule that out completely. the key thing that i focused on was that apparently this object did not have the kind of connective capability that the balloon did. so that becomes a very different issue. and to what major lyons was saying, there is a big difference from an intelligence collection perspective. it actually is okay in some cases to collect the information, see how it actually talks to other entities. in this particular case you have a bit of a different situation where it didn t talk to anything, but you don t know what kind of a threat it poses except for the fact that you know it is a threat to commercial aviation. natasha, to you and the intersection of the military and politics here. i think oren s question is fair, considering that the argument to let the chinese balloon go across the country and then shoot it down, you can collect something from it, one has to
again, right now we ll know more once we assess it and just leave it at that. thank you. liz. thanks for taking my question. what made this threatening enough to shoot down? what is different about this object than the last object that was over alaska, because it was chosen not to shoot the last one down over alaska. yeah, so the important thing to understand here is any time we detect anything, we re going to, first of all, observe it and then make a decision and take appropriate action. so you have to look at each individual case on its own merits. in this particular case given the fact that it was operating at an altitude that posed a reasonable threat to civilian air traffic, the determination was made and the president gave the order to take it down. was there a specific threat, a specific civilian air traffic incident that could have happened? again, as you well know,
question. so a couple of questions. first of all, has anything like this happened before with an object this size, this shape, in this particular height, the 40,000-foot range, has it happened before? and second of all, why did you can you say more about why you knew that last balloon or object was from china whereas this one you don t know? so in terms of this particular object, again, as i highlighted, we don t know where it s from. it posed a reasonable threat to civilian air traffic and so the determination was made to take it down. in terms of the other balloon, as i mentioned in our previous briefing, we have learned a lot about the chinese surveillance high-altitude balloon program. we ve gathered a lot of information over the last couple of years and so we were able to, based on that information, detect at a very early stage as it approached u.s. airspace.
potential hostile intent or actions. however, given the fact that this aircraft was or, excuse me, this object was operating at an altitude that posed a reasonable threat to civilian air traffic, after consultation with the secretary and the president and of course the president on our advice gave the order to take it down and we took it down. to clarify, is his authorization required in a situation like this? again, it s kind of a moot point at this point because the president gave the order. but he has the authorization to take action against anything that presents a potential threat to the american public or people on the ground. in this particular case it was determined that this posed a reasonable threat to air traffic. again, i ll just leave it at that. thanks. tara. just a couple of clarifiers.