'A key piece of this is the recovery. For us to be able to exploit and understand this balloon...if we had taken it down over the state of Alaska...it would have been a very different recovery operation,' assistant Defense Secretary Melissa Dalton said.
over Alaska because the recovery of the downed balloon would have been much riskier, defense officials told a Senate panel on Thursday.
Conditions off Alaska's Aleutian Islands are"very dangerous" compared to those on the coast of South Carolina because the water depths in the Bering Sea quickly plunge from 150 feet to 18,000 feet, winter water temperatures are in the low 30s and the some parts are covered in ice, Dalton said. But Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska expressed frustration with the Pentagon that the balloon was not shot down sooner. She said her state is the"first line of defense for America" and"the message to China is we've got free range in Alaska."
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