Lawmakers say US Military used laser to take down Border Protection drone in TX | Hacker News Reader

Lawmakers say US Military used laser to take down Border Protection drone in TX

apnews.com

59 pointsthinkcontext58 comments

When Nena was singing about 99 balloons we thought it was hyperbole. Few understood she was a traveler from a future where soldiers where literally shooting down birthday balloons before progressing to drones. Scary to think about the next level of escalation.

Geez, I even recently watched a video about the making of that song, and completely forgot it was exactly about that. Now I'm even more depressed, but at least I have an upbeat riff stuck in my head.

> Cartels routinely use drones to deliver drugs across the Mexican border and surveil Border Patrol officers. Officials told Congress last summer that more than 27,000 drones were detected within 1,600 feet (500 meters) of the southern border in the last six months of 2024.

No wonder they mistook one of theirs for one of these.

Alternative hypothesis: the reported number of drones isn't real (anything the Trump government says about "cartels" can be assumed to be made up). The military got increasingly on alert, with senior officers pushing to get a shootdown on one of the not real drones. Therefore the laser operators end up firing on the first drone they confirm seeing.

Compare the MH-17 incident. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident , which also involved no confirmed actual drone.

isn't this more comparable to the incident where a US Navy ship shot down an Iranian aircraft. They somehow convinced themselves it was a lone attack aircraft coming to intercept them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

That's such am inefficient, hands-on, loud and dumb way to smuggle drugs across a border this large, this cannot be true. Unless you they are talking about submarines and land RCs, in that case sure, probably.

What about model trains?

Only works at the Canadian border, Jacob

Quadrotors are loud, but fixed-wing drones are quieter, more efficient, and have much longer range.

The statements can also be parsed as "we have thousands of detections of an unknown number of drones that are being used by cartels to surveil the border in order to smuggle".

The number of drones vs. the number of detections is ambiguous. How detections are counted is ambiguous. Whether drones are physically moving drugs or part of an intelligence network is ambiguous.

It would seem entirely unsurprising that cartels are monitoring border enforcement by drone. That's not great, obviously. But different from "thousands of drones are carrying contraband into the US".

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.

Does that include the original story that they shot down a friendly drone?

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.

Yes, but they react based on detections, not based on unique drones. The number is the right number to think about.

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"

> 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

Why do you say that? Fixed wing RCs can fly fast and have long range. Anyone can buy radios for them that transmit for many kilometers. There are open source autopilot projects. Drugs like Fentanyl are so potent that each dose is less than a milligram.

It’s not far fetched at all.

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.

Check what is happening in Ukraine. The war moved a field of moderately cheap and moderately powerful drones forward.

We don't understand the consequences yet... Ukraine is actively working on hunter drones that could operate on 10 km altitude to shot down enemy targets. Now, imagine that cartel, terrorists put their hands on such technology, endangering whole civilian air transport.

> loud and dumb way

Sounds like the perfect distraction!

I wonder how accurate that number is. Are detected drones just blips on some detection system? Are they even drug running drones, are they even drones at all?

Given they have so far managed to shoot down a balloon and a government drone you'll forgive my scepticism.

When I read the headline at nytimes I was thinking that it was a test drone and they were testing the process of communicating across branches to coordinate taking down drones (a real problem) but no, it was just incompetence and idiocy. Guess I'm not cynical enough yet to match reality.

The current administration has staffed administrators who seem to choose "shoot first and ask questions later" and generally struggle to communicate / coordinate like adults.

While I think Trump political appointees have set the stage for these kinds of incidents generally by cutting back on training for DHS law enforcement officers (though I’m not sure if CBP has been impacted to the same degree as ICE), I’m not convinced that this kind of communication failure at the tactical level couldn’t have happened under previous administrations

> 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

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.

Just waiting for these lasers to take out important stuff because they can shoot first, ask later.

Mistook a helicopter for a drone because of depth perception problems.

Both of these actions are extraordinarily illegal under US law and FAA regulation for a number of reasons. Among them - Permanently blinding a human pilot can be done at 1000 times the range that it takes to melt aluminum, and laser weapons are powerful enough that secondary scatter off shiny surfaces is a real hazard.

We have a civilian airspace, and we have laser weapons, and we have CBP/ICE MAGA militia dabbling in military work. No two of those are safe to have at the same time in the same place.

The USA is moving away from concepts like 'laws' and 'illegal' and more towards a system based on vibes and bribes.

It’s always been a case of ‘if they can’t catch you/enforce it, it didn’t happen’.

It’s absurdly blatant now, however, and backlash is likely to be pretty crazy in 5ish-10ish years once it’s impacted enough people.

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

The current opposition maybe. No empire/government/strongman lasts forever.

Russia has been a basket case for the better part of the last 1,000 years.

History sucked for a very long time. It is not a natural law that things will just get better.

Sure, but it is a natural law that the specific strongman in charge dies eventually. So far at least.

Every tsar was different, Stalin and Lenin had their own flavors, etc.

Sure it may suck, but the flavor does change? And that is something!

Not if the democrats can help it

Laws and morality have always been bendable. It’s just that doing the bending requires a certain competence that was somehow lost.

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

I hate these free floating quotes and sayings, but maybe the “malice vs. incompetence attribution” idea applies here.

‘sufficiently persistent incompetence is indistinguishable from malice’? or did you mean a different quote?

"Vibes and bribes" is such a wonderfully apt description of our current regime.

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

> We have a civilian airspace, and we have laser weapons, and we have CBP/ICE MAGA militia dabbling in military work. No two of those are safe to have at the same time in the same place.

Day of the Triffids, but only for small border city.

I'm rather confused by this. The military is a branch of the government. Are they really subject to the laws of the US & the regulations of the FAA? The Posse Comitatus Act is often cited here, but so long as the military force believes they are defending against a foreign force there is no actual prohibition on the use of force.

How much do drones like the one shot down cost? Will taxpayers be getting a refund?

Obviously, tariffs will cover it.

It could be a soldier who is not a fan of ICE and border protection saw an opportunity and shot it down.

If there's 1 person making the choice to fire at stuff in the sky, or somehow only they knew it was a US drone and just didn't say anything, there's a huge problem with intelligence, and the chain of command.

So if you're keeping score, that's one party balloon and one of their own drones. The future looks bright!

The party balloon was also ours. It wasn't even an intruder balloon.

They are not sending their finest

It only looks bright if the laser is aimed directly at you. But I suppose even that depends on the wavelength used.

Its only bright for a couple of nano seconds, then it gets really dark ... for ever

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