Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will continue to pursue a conversation with his Chinese counterpart as the fallout from the Chinese spy balloon that the U.S. military shot down continues.
The secretary's comments come roughly a week after Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder announced that days earlier, "the PRC has declined our request" for dialogue with PRC Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe.
WHITE HOUSE SAYS NO INDICATION THREE OBJECTS SHOT DOWN WERE CHINESE SURVEILLANCE
"When something happens, they somehow tend to shut down their military channels of communication," Austin told NBC News in an interview that aired on Wednesday. "I think that's dangerous, but it won't stop me from continuing to encourage them to open up the lines of communication. I think that's the right thing to do."
A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on whether defense officials had additional requests since the previously disclosed one, which occurred "immediately after taking action to down the PRC balloon," was ultimately rebuffed.
China's surveillance balloon first entered U.S. airspace on Jan. 28 over the Alaskan Aleutian Islands before it then entered Canadian airspace and subsequently reentered U.S. airspace over northern Idaho on Jan. 31. It then traveled across the country until it was over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of the Carolinas, which is when an F-22 downed it on Feb. 4.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters on Thursday that the U.S. "should not have overreacted," and Chinese officials have accused the U.S. of flying similar balloons into Chinese airspace, a claim that U.S. officials have denied.
"Not true. Not doing it. Just absolutely not true," U.S. National Security Council coordinator John Kirby said earlier this week. "We are not flying balloons over China."
The U.S. has shot down three additional objects since, but none have been tied to China yet. They shot down additional objects off the coast of Alaska near the Arctic Circle on Friday, in the Canadian Rockies in the Yukon region on Saturday, and over Lake Huron on Sunday.
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“While we can’t definitively say, again without analyzing the debris, what these objects were, thus far — and I caveat that by saying thus far — we haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the [China’s] spy balloon program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts,” Kirby said.
Austin told reporters on Wednesday that he was unaware of any new "objects that have been reported operating in this space in the last 48 hours or so."