Late on Tuesday night, the city of El Paso, Tex., learned that the airspace over El Paso International Airport had been closed as of 11:30 P.M. local time. The ban, initially posted as lasting 10 days, was then shortened to a matter of hours. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy later announced on X that the shutdown had occurred as the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration responded to what he called a “cartel drone incursion” along the border and that “the threat has been neutralized.” His post didn’t answer how it was neutralized or why an airport had to go dark.
Reports diverged on what was targeted—the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post suggested it may have been a party balloon, possibly made of Mylar—while Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, stated, “The details of what exactly occurred over El Paso are unclear.”
On Wednesday CNN reported that, according to anonymous sources, Customs and Border Protection had deployed an antidrone laser on loan from the DOD in the vicinity of Fort Bliss, adjacent to the airport. Those sources described a dispute over the use of a laser-based counter-drone system nearby and concerns that it could pose risks to air traffic. The laser, identified as a LOCUST, a “directed-energy weapon” used to counter drones, is a product of the defense company AeroVironment and its counter-drone unit BlueHalo. An AeroVironment press release states that the company had delivered the first two mobile LOCUST systems to the U.S. Army in August 2025.
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“These kinds of systems have been under development for quite a long while, and protection against drones is a key application,” says Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It’s often said that lasers have an ‘infinite magazine.’ Compared to regular weapons, where you have a fixed number of bullets, as long as the laser is plugged in, it could keep on firing away.” But that infinite magazine comes with a problem. “If you fire a laser at a drone and miss it, that laser beam will keep on going for a long way,” Boyd says. “It might hit something else or dazzle a pilot.” Even a hit isn’t clean—some materials are highly reflective, meaning laser energy bounces off the drone and scatters, potentially causing blinding. That’s why, Boyd says, tests near busy air corridors can force officials to close airspace: the beam doesn’t stop at the target.
The appeal of the technology, despite those risks, is simple math. Missiles cost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, are limited in quantity and can be overkill for a quadcopter drone that costs less than a laptop. Lasers promise what Lockheed Martin has called a “deep magazine” and “low cost per kill,” because if you have a source of power and cooling, you can keep firing indefinitely. Raytheon’s pitch is straightforward: on a single charge, its antidrone laser system can deliver “dozens of precise laser shots.” And with a generator attached, it can approach “a nearly infinite number of shots.”
But a laser isn’t a bullet. BlueHalo’s LOCUST system “combines precision optical and laser hardware with advanced software,” according to a BlueHalo press release, “to enable and enhance the directed energy ‘kill chain,’ which includes tracking, identifying, and engaging a wide variety of targets.” Unlike a warhead, a laser needs time on target. Keep the beam steady and locked on long enough, and you heat something critical on the target—plastic housing, wiring, a sensor, a motor housing—until it fails. In a press release describing tests of Lockheed Martin’s ATHENA (Advanced Test High Energy Asset) laser system, the company said that the system defeated its targets by causing “loss of control and structural failure.” Boyd notes that the power in the beam matters but so does the material that is irradiated. “Different materials will react in different ways,” he says. And the targeting is demanding: “you really have to keep the ‘red dot’ of the laser fixed right on the moving target.”
The systems fielded today are a far cry from the Reagan-era vision of the “Star Wars” program: first proposed in 1983 and officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative, the project sought to use space-based lasers to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles. The concept was also explored with the Airborne Laser project, initiated in 1996 and tested in 2007, when a laser with one megawatt of power was mounted on a Boeing 747. In 2010, after a couple of successful tests, it engaged two test missiles off the coast of California, and though it locked on, it failed to destroy them, resulting in the project’s cancelation.
The lasers that replaced those early models are smaller, more efficient and far less powerful—“the systems we’re talking about today for antidrones are probably in the tens of kilowatts, maybe 100 kilowatts at most,” Boyd says. That lower power has changed the target set. Instead of intercepting missiles with lasers in space, you’re shooting down much softer, smaller targets. such as drones, with lasers on Earth. “Getting them into a form factor where you could be defending things like army bases, sports arenas or airports has been the goal in the last five to 10 years,” Boyd says.
The milestones have come quickly. In August 2017 Lockheed’s ATHENA system downed five drones at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. In October 2019 Raytheon announced that it had delivered a system to the U.S. Air Force. In August 2022 Lockheed said it had delivered a laser system to the Navy. And by February 2024, the Army had deployed four laser prototypes to the Middle East. Boyd notes that the U.S. Navy has had high-energy laser systems on some ships for about a decade and that the Army has been developing systems for its Stryker vehicle. Yet “I don’t think any of the U.S. systems have been fired in anger, so to speak,” he says—until, perhaps, the recent incident in El Paso.
If this sounds like the future, the El Paso incident is a reminder that the future has paperwork to contend with and that not everyone is enthusiastic. Citing a Breaking Defense article, the Congressional Research Service reported that feedback on tested laser prototypes was “not overwhelmingly positive,” and officials warned that “results from the lab environment and test ranges are very different from the tactical environment.” The FAA has warned that “a laser can incapacitate pilots,” noting that, in 2024 alone, pilots reported 12,840 laser strikes (mostly from handheld laser pointers that were powerful enough to reach airplanes). Federal law makes it a crime to aim a laser of any sort at an aircraft. And officials familiar with the El Paso closure described exactly that kind of coordination failure: one agency’s counter-drone tool became another agency’s aviation hazard.
At a news conference, El Paso’s mayor Renard Johnson said, “I want to be very, very clear that this should’ve never happened. You cannot restrict airspace over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, the hospitals, the community leadership.” Speaking to ABC News, John Cohen, a former Department of Homeland Security official, summed up the dilemma over the use of such systems. “It has to be coordinated,” he said, because a tool meant to protect the border becomes a hazard to safety if the professionals learn about it the same way travelers do: via an alert on their phones.