Lawmakers say US Military used laser to take down Border Protection drone in TX (opens in new tab)

Lets be realistic, at best it actually means:

"We have thousands of possible detections of an unknown number of possible drones that are possibly being used by cartels to surveil the border in order to smuggle"

That's about 142 detections per day and yeah the big question is are they tracking unique drones (probably not) or radar contacts which appear and disappear? In which case the same drone flying around for 20 minutes and then being recharged would appear multiple times.

That number breaks down to 6 detections per hour across the entire boarder.

> It would seem entirely unsurprising that cartels are monitoring border enforcement by drone

That's actually more plausible. I knew one person in "import-export" of illegal substance (Afghan/Iranian cannabis, he is probably out of work since the US left Afghanistan tbh, his clan was heavily involved with the british/US in both country since at least the Shah coup) and he explained how easy it is to smuggle a few tons of drugs and how hard it is to detect it, it seemed inefficient. Now surveillance drones, i buy that way more

There's no reason to believe a single letter or number that comes from these people, and every reason to believe it's completely made up.

It's not efficient, and easier to detect.You need radio hackers and a lot of very technical job to be as risk-free as a truck, a dead drop in the water or a container, with less quantities. When i think about it, even land RC don't make sense. The Mexican cartels aren't small smugglers that sent 1g of fentanyl, especially when you can smuggle a few ton to any coastal city basically risk-free.

Only works at the Canadian border, Jacob

The story of the El Paso airspace closure seems to have involved multiple chances to properly coordinate but they chose not to. Folks at the pentagon have claimed their use of lasers pose no risk and seem to be skirting or ignoring the law as far as their coordination with the FAA goes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/us/politics/el-paso-airsp...

Seems to less a misunderstanding that could happen to anyone and more administration style and choices.

> I’m not convinced that this kind of communication failure at the tactical level couldn’t have happened under previous administrations

What examples do you have? There was a Chinese spy balloon that was monitored for a whole week before it got shot down - the exact opposite of what’s happened twice (!!) this month in the current administration.

Sure, like most things it's possible and yet it didn't and it's on top of a list of compounding failures of a similar nature: e.g. firing live artillery over an in use highway (while insisting it was safe, and then damaging the vice presidential motorcade) [1].

It's worth noting this screw up happened on the back of the FAA basically hitting the panic button when they realized the military was going to shoot at air targets with high power lasers near an active civilian airport.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c051p3981m4o

Hey now, the system of “checks” and “balances” is still holding up - the checks clear, and the balances go up.

It used to be they had enough shame to try to cover it up. That certainly is in the past!

By then the opposition will have been renditioned to black holes or killed.

Not if the democrats can help it