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

https://apnews.com/article/military-laser-border-drone-texas-airport-55aaab7093f7d6dd174f909f3875001c

by thinkcontext • 5 months ago

59 54 5 months ago

apnews.com

happymellon• 5 months ago

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.

crusty• 5 months ago

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

Eddy_Viscosity22• 5 months ago

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

blitzar2• 5 months ago

They are not sending their finest

nkrisc• 5 months ago

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

blitzar2• 5 months ago

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

heisenbit• 5 months ago

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.

kgwxd4• 5 months ago

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.

mapt• 5 months ago

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.

Eddy_Viscosity22• 5 months ago

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

lazide5• 5 months ago

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.

AreShoesFeet0002• 5 months ago

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

HardwareLust• 5 months ago

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

general1465• 5 months ago

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.

sidewndr462• 5 months ago

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.

philipallstar3• 5 months ago

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.

pjc50• 5 months ago

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.

sidewndr462• 5 months ago

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

orwin3• 5 months ago

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.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 months ago

What about model trains?

smallerize• 5 months ago

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

carefulfungi• 5 months ago

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".

Aurornis• 5 months ago

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.

piokoch• 5 months ago

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.

stronglikedan• 5 months ago

loud and dumb way

Sounds like the perfect distraction!

duxup3• 5 months ago

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?

iso1631• 5 months ago

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

comrade1234• 5 months ago

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.

duxup3• 5 months ago

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

derektank• 5 months ago

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

october8140• 5 months ago

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

kgwxd4• 5 months ago

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.

blondie9x• 5 months ago

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

kgwxd4• 5 months ago

Obviously, tariffs will cover it.

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

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