US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan speaking in May 2022 at the White House (AFP)

The US is intent on not only keeping the debris of the Chinese balloon but to "exploit what we recover and learn even more than we have learned", US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Monday.

During his speech at the US Global Leadership Coalition summit, he added that members of the US Navy and Coast Guard were on their way to recover the debris of the balloon following its shoot-down.

Sullivan’s remarks were cited by the coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council, John Kirby, in a briefing on Monday, "Our efforts to surveil this balloon and what we’re going to learn from the recovery will prove to be valuable,” he said.

Kirby added that “The time that we have to study this balloon... will give us a lot more clarity not only on the capabilities that these balloons have but what China is trying to do with them," as he rejected the possibility of discussing whether Chinese President Xi Jinping was aware of the balloon before its existence became public.

".... We have reached out to key officials from the previous administration and offered them briefings on the forensics that we did and expressed our willingness to walk them through what we learned. And I think that’s kind of where I need to leave that one," Kirby concluded.

Biden first president to shoot down balloon

A senior military official confirmed that the DoD, the FBI, and “counter-intelligence authorities ” are on “a collaborative effort” to aid in “categorizing and assessing the platform [at the debris site] itself."

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said afterward, "... at the direction of President Biden, U.S. fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command successfully brought down the high altitude surveillance balloon launched by and belonging to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the water off the coast of South Carolina in US airspace."

Austin stated that the balloon had been used by China in efforts to "surveil strategic sites" in the US.

According to Sullivan, it took a while to shoot down the balloon because White House officials wanted to rule out possible injury on the ground first and stressed that: "The first time any American president ordered a shoot down of any of these balloons was on Saturday, when Joe Biden did it."

The balloon was located over the North American Aerospace Defense Command on January 28 over Alaska, before it was found floating over missile sites in Montana. Days later, after tracking, the US decided to shoot it down over the South Carolina coast.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry stated on Saturday that "China... never violated the territory and airspace of any sovereign country," adding that "some politicians and media in the United States used the (balloon) incident as a pretext to attack and smear China."

In light of the balloon shoot-down and China's response of possible retaliation, Kirby assured that no reason exists to escalate tensions between the US and China over the balloon and that Secretary of State Antony Blinken's trip to China "was postponed, it was not canceled,”