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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
Wait, do you think the cartels aren’t real? Was all the violence in Mexico these past few days committed by ghosts or something?
Because if they are real, and they are trying to get drugs into the United States (their primary income source), then drones seem like a perfectly reasonable method they might use to go about it. And yes, their have been plenty of confirmed cartel drones seized, shot down, etc with lower-tech methods in the past.
Drones are not perfectly reasonable when semi-trucks filled with literal tons of drugs pass the border every day. They are used to smuggle drugs into prisons, but not really any better than the old hollow tennis ball trick and more trackable as well.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
No wonder they mistook one of theirs for one of these.
And what about civilians and youtubers?
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".
It’s not far fetched at all.
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.
Compare the MH-17 incident. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident , which also involved no confirmed actual drone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
Because if they are real, and they are trying to get drugs into the United States (their primary income source), then drones seem like a perfectly reasonable method they might use to go about it. And yes, their have been plenty of confirmed cartel drones seized, shot down, etc with lower-tech methods in the past.
It seems 100% of the drones they have shot down are US government ones.
Which is it
1) US government is deliberately avoiding the cartel ones
2) US government is completely incompetent and the cartel outmatch the might of the US military
3) The cartel isn't actually using drones
4) The US government have shot down dozens of drones but are keeping quiet about it
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.
It’s absurdly blatant now, however, and backlash is likely to be pretty crazy in 5ish-10ish years once it’s impacted enough people.
Day of the Triffids, but only for small border city.
Mistook a helicopter for a drone because of depth perception problems.