You always have to balance [the act of shooting down] with the intel-gain opportunity,” he said. “And so there was a potential opportunity for us to collect intel where we had gaps on prior balloons. And so I would defer to the intel community, but this gave us the opportunity to assess what [the Chinese] were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities exist on it and I think you’ll see in the future that that timeframe was well worth its value to collect.”
— Read on www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/02/chinas-balloon-may-have-taught-pentagon-more-beijing-learned-it-general-says/382642/