A “Domain Awareness Gap” Failure? (U.S. Northern Command)

General Keith Kellogg, who was the Executive Secretary and Chief of Staff of the United States National Security Council in the Trump administration, says he was never notified! And he went to every daily briefing.

NO BRIEFING DURING TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY

GATEWAY PUNDIT notes:

….Former Trump advisor John Bolton, former DNI Ric Grenell, Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Former Secretary of State and CIA Direcor Mike Pompeo, President Trump , Defense Secretary Mattis, and former DNI John Ratcliffe, spoke out that that this was a lie.

This never happened during the Trump years. And if it did happen, the top officials in Trump administration were not notified – which is just as bad.

The military is changing their story.  Now they want you to believe that the intelligence community discovered the balloons during the Trump years — BUT NEVER NOTIFIED THEIR INTEL LEADERS!….

DOMAIN AWARENESS GAP

PJ-MEDIA discusses why this may well be the case:

….The American military had a “domain awareness gap,” according to Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command.

“Every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” VanHerck said. “And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out, but I don’t want to go into further detail.”

What’s a “domain awareness gap”? General VanHerck didn’t define the term, but Breaking Defense offered a partial explanation.

When VanHerck speaks of a “domain gap,” he’s referring to the U.S. Northern Command not having “the correct mix of sensor capabilities.”

The four-star general, a staunch proponent of beefing up US sensing capabilities to include over-the-horizon radars, did not disclose the number of past detection failures or where the balloons had flown. John Kirby, the White House National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, said today that the Biden administration discovered three incidents during the Trump administration when “surveillance balloons, by the [Chinese government] transited US airspace” for “brief periods of time.” On Saturday a senior defense official told reporters there had been another incident earlier in Biden’s presidency. None were for the duration of last week’s saga.

That still doesn’t answer the question of how the balloon transits were detected after the fact. Here we get into the classified area of intelligence gathering,

“The intel community, after the fact … assessed those threats through additional means of collection and made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America or transiting North America,” VanHerck said. He noted that USNORTHCOM does not have the authority to collect intelligence inside US borders but was able to track the movement of last week’s balloon because it was granted “specific authorities.”

So part of the problem was jurisdictional. But what those “additional means of collection” are is classified. It still doesn’t answer the question of why no one was informed if the intel was somewhere in some database. That would appear to be a big gap in our intelligence gathering that General VanHerck and Northern Command might want to address with all speed.

Likewise JUST THE NEWS has this:

The Air Force general charged with protecting America’s air space from hostile threats acknowledged Monday that the U.S. military failed to detect some previous incursions by Chinese spy balloons, calling it a troubling “awareness gap” that needed fixing.

“We had gaps on prior balloons,” Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck told reporters.

The comment by the North American Aerospace Defense Command commander both raised concern about NORAD’s vaunted ability to detect airspace threats and also undercut a bungled weekend effort by the Biden administration to try to suggest former President Donald Trump failed to react to three incursions on his watch.

In fact, VanHerck told reporters during a Pentagon briefing, the Trump administration wasn’t told about the incursions because NORAD missed them and that they only recently were detected after the fact by U.S. intelligence agencies.

“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out,” he said, declining to be more specific about how earlier flyovers of Chinese spy balloons were missed……

Which makes KJP’s comments seem coherent (POWERLINE):

….Q How is it possible that this administration discovered at least three previous balloons that flew over the U.S. under the previous administration, but Trump officials didn’t know it was happening?

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Yeah, so, look, I think that — and we have talked about this before, about how the — when it — when the PRC government surveillance balloons trans- — trans- — trans- — transited the continental U.S. briefly at least three times, as you just mentioned, during the President’s — the prior administration and once that we know of the beginning of this administration’s. But never for this duration of time, as we know.

This information was discovered prior to the admin- — administration left, but the intelligence community, as I said, is prepared to give — give briefings to key officials. But this is something —

Q Prior or post?

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: — this is something — sorry, post. So this is something that we — they did not — they were not aware of, as we’ve just laid out. But again, we are ready to brief key officials to let them know what — you know, what the intelligence community was able to figure out…..

#FakeNews – Puerto Rico Edition

Friends who are Marco Rubio fans are posting stuff by Democrat politicians (who are rumored to be running for President) like this to make a point:

So not only are these Republicans I know falling for the media Narrative (more on this below), but they are also being hooked by Democrat politicians building a base for a Presidential run. IN OTHER WORDS, the above Tweet was an opportunistic chance to politically score points against Trump…. JUST LIKE the picture of Mayor Cruz “wading in water” was a photo-op, as Jack Posobiec notes via his TWITTER:

But people are like LEMMINGS and swallow this stuff up due to their dislike of Trump (like the gal on the right).

In another Facebook convo, a friend said no one was helping and that people were dying. When a person pointed out the depth of help Puerto Rico was recieving… she was thanked for her “OPINION.” This is part of what she posted:

…Here is what someone on the ground in PR wrote:

“Just want to clear the air. I’m on the ground in Puerto Rico, I’m walking the streets with my wife every day, we are experiencing the pain and devastation that Maria left behind. I’m hearing a lot noise about US not helping the people of PR, THAT IS NOT TRUE, EVERY single Federal agency possible is here on the ground kicking some major ass, there are thousands of Military, Homeland security, FEMA personnel and the list goes on and on. The airport is not letting comercial planes fly because of ALL the military and first responders flights that are CONSTANTLY day in and day out flying in and out. If you have opinions with political agendas I want to tell you is not helping the cause. It’s time to unite, and stop the stupidity but is a right that….”

(Miss Rose)

I expanded a bit:

Having over 10,000[+ and growing] FEMA people on the ground, known numbers of military and growing (The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Defense Logistics Agency, U.S. Transportation Command, U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Coast Guard, Puerto Rico National Guard, Etc-Etc). 

…AS WELL AS…

Executive Orders by Trump as well as the go ahead with Federal Agencies. 

…AS WELL AS…

Private orgs (Teamsters, United for Puerto Rico, UNICEF, International Medical Corps, Catholic Relief Services, Americares, Direct Relief, Save the Children, Etc-Etc)

THOSE are not opinions. Those are sticky things called facts.

One comment from a friend-of-my-friend noted this:

  • Have to disagree about Puerto Rico… Got a ole buddy I served with in Iraq that is on ground working for FEMA. Says its nothing but political drama… (Patrick C.) 

…CONTINUING…

Trump Is Right… It Is #FakeNews

I swear… people say they dislike the mainstream media (MSM), but are all on board when they see the singular San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, Puerto Rico, plastered all over the place saying, “we are dying.”

First in my mind’s eye is her accolades of a terrorist freed by Obama from the Marxist-Leninist bent….

  • Yulin Cruz is a member of Puerto Rico’s Popular Democratic Party that wants the island to remain a U.S. territory. But she sounded more like a member of the island’s Independence Party in a video that surfaced back in January when President Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Rivera Lopez. (DAILY CALLER)

What is FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional || English: Armed Forces of National Liberation), the organization that this Obama commuted the sentence of FALN terrorist leader Oscar Lopez Rivera? WIKI notes it’s main driving force succinctly:

  1. Directing the armed and political struggle in accordance with the Marxist-Leninist principle of a broad front including a popular sectors willing to [ join ] the armed struggle right away
  2. Agglutination of all forces based upon the principle of coordination between political work and military work under the leadership of a party composed of combatants assigned to different tasks
  3. Application of the principle of internal ideological debate, a study of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the use of criticism and self-criticism
  4. Implementation of the Stalinist ideological position on the concept of “nation” with regard to American reality
  5. Application of the principle of the priority of the struggle for independence of Puerto Rico over any question of internal solidarity, demanding concrete support for our armed struggle as a priority matter in the international struggle against colonialism

Another eye-brow raiser is that the mayor of Guaynabo (the district just West of San Juan), Angel Perez,  has explained the disconnect San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz has with relief efforts and coordination…. NOW…. keep in mind as you read this from a neighboring mayor that Mayor Cruz said this (via THE GUARDIAN): “…if it doesn’t solve the logistics ‘what we we are going to see is something close to a genocide’.”

The mayor of Guaynabo, Puerto Rico cast serious doubt Saturday on the claims made by San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who has repeatedly attacked President Trump and accused him of abandoning Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Guaynabo’s mayor, Angel Perez, said in an interview with The Daily Caller that his experience with the federal government has been different from Cruz’s, in part because — unlike Cruz — he has been participating in meetings with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other federal agencies.

[….]

Mayor Perez told TheDC that the story Cruz is telling the media doesn’t mesh with what he has seen from the federal government.

“My experience is different. I have been participating in different meetings at the headquarters of FEMA and our government and the help is coming in and right now my experience is different from hers. I’m receiving help from the government, we are receiving assistance from FEMA, I got people over here helping us with applications for the people that have damage in their houses. And we have here in Guaynabo, we have thousands of people that lost partially or totally their houses,” said Perez, who is a member of Puerto Rico’s New Progressive Party.

Perez’s comments echoed what FEMA administrator Brock Long said on Saturday. Long defended Trump’s tweets blasting Cruz and indicated that Cruz has failed to connect with the FEMA command center set up on the island to help with the relief effort.

When asked about Cruz’s “genocide” statement, Perez said, “I don’t know why she is saying that. What I can tell you is my experience. She is not participating in any meetings and we had a couple already with the governors and with representation of FEMA and of HUD, of these whole federal agencies that have given us help and she’s not participating in those meetings and some mayors from her political party have been participating, so I don’t know why she is saying that. My experience is very different.”

“Some [mayors] would like the help to be faster but we also know that FEMA is dealing with what happened in Houston and in Florida and now in Puerto Rico,” Perez said…..

(DAILY CALLER || WASHINGTON EXAMINER)

In other words — the only way logistics would fail is if the local government of a district failed to coordinate with their Federal Agencies. Hello? MkFly!

Here is a hugely funny pic of Mayor Cruz standing in front of supplies in her ports sent by America… where Cruz said the following:

  • “So, Mr Trump, I am begging you to take charge and save lives. After all, that is one of the founding principles of the United States…If not, the world will see how we are treated not as second-class citizens but as animals that can be disposed of. Enough is enough.”

  • The mess started after the grandstanding mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, held a Saturday morning press conference claiming the federal government was doing nothing to help Puerto Ricans. Forget that she was standing in front of pallets loaded with supplies sent from the U.S., she’s a Democrat and she was clearly directed by party leaders to make the situation political. (DAILY WIRE)

In the Mayor’s interview with Anderson Cooper, CNN, it was noted that,

  • She’s even managed to acquire a custom-made t-shirt saying ‘we are dying’ on it with an accompanying ‘SOS’ hat. How she managed to score that in the ravaged country that has o power is a question that has not yet been answered. But the Mayor of Guaynabo Angel Perez said that hasn’t been his experience and that there’s a problem with Cruz’s story. (YOUNG CONSERVATIVES)

Mmmmm – okay.

But, people who profess a middle-ground, say they hate corporate media, and all the other colloquial sayings of people who hate Trump… THEY SURE swallow the MSM narrative >>>> HOOK-LINE-AND-SINKERall while Leftist media are trying to make this Trump’s “Katrina.”