You really cannot make this stuff up. Just weeks after the U.S. Army let Customs and Border Patrol borrow its high-energy laser weapon to blast what turned out to be a party balloon out of the sky near El Paso, Texas, the Army has done it again. This time, it fired the laser at a drone that belonged to CBP itself.
The friendly-fire incident happened Thursday near the Texas border. The Army detected what it believed was a hostile drone, likely a cartel aircraft, and pulled the trigger on its directed-energy weapon. The shot connected, the target was destroyed, and then someone figured out the smoldering wreckage belonged to the very agency tasked with patrolling the border.
According to the New York Times, the laser was fired without FAA approval. Again. This is the second time in a matter of weeks that the military has discharged a high-energy weapon near civilian airspace, hit the wrong target, and left federal aviation regulators scrambling.
The FAA’s response this time around is considerably more aggressive. The agency has imposed a ban on all flights below 18,000 feet around Fort Hancock, Texas, and the restriction is set to last four months. That’s a massive escalation from the ten-day shutdown the FAA slapped on El Paso airspace after the balloon incident, which was itself the longest closure of its kind since the days following September 11, 2001.
Fort Hancock isn’t in the landing path of any major commercial airports, so the disruption to everyday travelers should be minimal. But the duration of the ban sends an unmistakable message. The FAA is fed up.
The Department of Defense, CBP, and FAA issued a joint statement Thursday night, putting on their best everything-is-fine face. They characterized the incident as an effort to “mitigate a seemingly threatening” drone and assured the public the agencies are now “working together in an unprecedented fashion.”
Unprecedented is one word for it. The CBP’s own drone certainly must have looked threatening on an Army radar screen, given that nobody apparently told the Army it was there. The statement is technically accurate in the way that calling a house fire “an indoor warming event” would be technically accurate.
Behind the diplomatic language, the picture is grim. The Pentagon appears eager to deploy directed-energy weapons along the border. CBP apparently isn’t coordinating its drone operations with the military units that have the authority and the hardware to shoot those drones down. And the FAA, caught in the middle, is resorting to the bluntest tool it has — shutting down airspace entirely — because nobody else seems to have their act together.
The humor fades quickly when you consider the stakes. These are high-energy weapons being fired into airspace that commercial and private aircraft also use. The first incident involved shutting down the airspace around a major city’s airport.
This one destroyed a U.S. government asset. The trajectory here is not encouraging.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that two embarrassments in rapid succession tend to focus bureaucratic attention in ways that memos and policy reviews never do. Someone, somewhere in the chain of command, is going to have to answer for this. Operational protocols will presumably be rewritten, and communication channels between agencies will presumably be established or, more likely, actually used.
But “presumably” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Because if the pattern holds, we’ll be back here in a few weeks writing about the third time the Army shot down the wrong thing near El Paso. And next time, there might not be anything to laugh about at all.
