Three cartel drones went up over the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas late Tuesday and early Wednesday. None of them came back down in one piece. The U.S. Army's Multipurpose High Energy Laser turned them into falling debris before they could complete their missions.
The missions, for those wondering, were spying on American troops and smuggling humans across the border.
Major General Curtis Taylor, Commander of Joint Task Force–Southern Border, put it plainly: "Cartel networks are increasingly employing unmanned aircraft systems to facilitate illicit human-smuggling and actively spy on our personnel and law enforcement partners." That's a senior military commander describing Mexican drug cartels conducting aerial intelligence operations against the United States military. On American soil. And we responded with a laser.
The operation was coordinated through NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, the same defense architecture built to track Soviet bombers during the Cold War now being tasked with burning cartel quadcopters out of the sky over Texas. Joint Task Force–Southern Border, established in 2025 under President Trump's border security buildup, has already conducted thousands of detection and monitoring patrols and thousands of observation flights along the southern border.
AeroVironment Inc delivered the first two Multipurpose High Energy Lasers to the U.S. Army last summer. The system — part of the broader LOCUST platform — was designed for battlefield conditions. The fact that it's now deployed domestically tells you everything about what the border actually is.
It's worth remembering that earlier this year, cartel drone activity forced a seven-hour airspace shutdown near El Paso International Airport. Commercial flights grounded because drug traffickers were flying unmanned aircraft in American airspace. In February, the military accidentally shot down a U.S. government drone during border operations — a mistake, but one that illustrates how congested the airspace has become with hostile aircraft that weren't there five years ago.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has offered diplomatic cooperation on border security, but the cartels don't negotiate treaties. They fly drones.
The Army brought a laser to a drone fight in the Rio Grande Valley, and the laser won. Somewhere in a cartel operations room, someone is recalculating the cost of doing business.
