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Without the president s concurring. that would be something like a direct attack. as we ve seen with these four incidents, the high altitude chinese surveillance balloon then these three unidentified objects that the u.s. has shot down, in each case, the u.s. military has deemed them to be one of those threats. it s what the head of north com deemed nonkinetic threats. they don t see it as a threat to people on the ground. but it has the altitude piece. that was why they recommended to take it down. but getting back to your question, are we going to see this going forward, if the past several days are any indicator and there are more balloons or unidentified objects flying in a potential altitude to threaten commercial or civilian aviation, then theoretically, we could see more of these going forward. these are questions we re asking defense officials. ....
Understand them better. now, in light of the chinese balloon program and the recent incursion into our air space the united states and canada through norad have been more closely scrutinizing that air space, including enhancing our radar capabilities, which as the commander of north com and norad said may at least partially explain the increase in the objects that have been detected. slow moving objects at high altitude with a small radar cross section are difficult to detect on radar. even objects the size of the chinese spy balloon, a payload of roughly the size of three school busses were not picked up by previous administration s or other countries. we also know a range of entities, including countries, company, research and academic organizations operate objects at these altitudes for purposes not nefarious at all, including scientific research. that said, we have not been able ....
We will evaluate each and every event on its own merits and we ll make decisions based upon the recommendations of north com, norad commander, the chairman of the joint chiefs. they ll make recommendations to me and i ll evaluate and make recommendations to the president. again, these three events, each presented a risk to safety of flight. we don t know if they were actually collecting intelligence, but because of the route that they took out of an abundance of caution, we want to make sure we have the ability to examine what these things are and potentially what they were doing. the defense secretary is in brussels to meet with nato defense ministers about ukraine tomorrow. let s go to capitol hill now where the white house and senate democrats say they ve done the math and they don t believe house speaker kevin mccarthy has enough votes to raise the national borrowing limit. they think he may have to cave ....
That is the latest coming into cnn at this very moment. we re learning the faa is closing more airspace over montana. natasha bertrand joins us on the phone. what can you tell us? reporter: we are just learning that the faa has restricted some airspace in montana for, quote, national defense airspace. and it is not immediately clear the reason for this, but the faa has made similar flight restrictions in recent days when operations took place to shoot down the spy balloon last week and the object on friday near alaska. now cnn has reached out to the faa, north com, and the department of defense for comment on this, but it is obviously very notable that this closure of the airspace over montana has happened roughly a few hours only after we saw that object shot down over northern canada. that object had originated over alaska and was flying toward northern canada when it was decided by president biden and ....
Transmission equipment on it. for these new incidents, these two, what we don t know and we re not certain there was any transmission going on and we re not certain they were even chinese in origin, it is entirely possible that we ve taken out things that previously we would have let fly by. there was also an incident last night apparently over montana that led to a brief shut down of air space over that state, norad and north com saying there was an anomaly. here is what senator jon tester said on this issue this morning. the investigation is still going on as we speak. the truth is that there was an anomaly and they ve investigated, i think it got t dark so they couldn t check it out. but i m sure it is being checked out right now. so it hasn t been ruled out. there may still be something out ....