Republican Rep. Mike Waltz criticized Thursday on Newsmax the Biden administration's inconsistent response to four aerial objects shot down this month.
Joining "Eric Bolling The Balance," the Florida lawmaker compared the government's response to three likely "benign" objects downed in the past week against how it handled the alleged Chinese surveillance balloon.
"Now we have a situation where we track a massive surveillance balloon — 200 feet tall, all the way from mainland China — and we don't shoot it down until it's completed its spy mission. But we are shooting down with $400,000 a-piece Sidewinder missiles random objects?" Waltz questioned.
He also questioned a potential justification that "We're only going to defend our airspace if there's a chance it [the object] may collide with something" – a principle that would have ruled out the Chinese balloon.
"I 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," the congressman declared, stressing that it's "asinine in terms of criteria."
Waltz was critical of President Joe Biden's order to strike the Chinese balloon down over the Atlantic Ocean so it could be recovered for investigation purposes, noting that "he got it over the wrong ocean."
"We had plenty of time to get it over the Pacific Ocean," Waltz said about reports that the U.S. first identified the Chinese-owned object in its airspace near Alaska on Jan. 28.
"From the Chinese perspective, the first shots in every war game we have with them are in cyberspace at the homeland and in space itself because our entire economy ... is dependent on those constellations," he added.
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