Why an Army antidrone laser grounded flights at El Paso International Airport
Late Tuesday night, the city of El Paso, Texas learned that the airspace above El Paso International Airport had been closed at 11:30 p.m. local time. The ban, initially announced for 10 days, was later reduced to a few hours. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later announced on His message does not specify how it was neutralized or why an airport had to remain in the dark.
Reports differed on what was targeted: the The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post suggested it might be a party balloon, perhaps made of Mylar, while Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said: “The details of what exactly happened in El Paso are unclear.” »
On Wednesday, CNN reported that, according to anonymous sources, Customs and Border Protection had deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense near Fort Bliss, next to the airport. These sources reported a dispute over the use of a laser anti-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 defense company AeroVironment and its counter-drone unit BlueHalo. A press release from AeroVironment states that the company delivered the first two LOCUST mobile systems to the US Army in August 2025.
On supporting science journalism
If you enjoy this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscription. By purchasing a subscription, you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
“These types of systems have been in development for quite a long time 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. “Lasers are often said to have an “infinite store”. Compared to conventional weapons, where you have a fixed number of bullets, as long as the laser is plugged in, it can continue to fire. But this infinite magazine poses a problem. “If you shoot a laser at a drone and you miss, that laser beam will continue for a long distance,” Boyd explains. “It could 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 glare. That’s why, Boyd says, testing near busy air corridors can force authorities to close the airspace: the beam doesn’t stop on the target.
The appeal of the technology, despite these risks, lies in simple calculations. The missiles cost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, are limited in quantity, and may be excessive for a quadcopter drone that costs less than a laptop. Lasers promise what Lockheed Martin 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 speech is simple: with a single charge, its anti-drone laser system can deliver “dozens of precise laser shots”. And with a generator connected, he can approach “an almost infinite number of shots.”
But a laser is not 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 to reach its target. Keep the beam steady and locked long enough and heat something critical on the target (a plastic housing, wiring, sensor, motor housing) until it fails. In a press release describing testing of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Test High Energy Asset (ATHENA) laser system, the company said the system exceeded its objectives by causing “loss of control and structural failure.” Boyd notes that the power of the beam is important, as is the material irradiated. “Different materials will react in different ways,” he says. And targeting is demanding: “it is absolutely necessary that the “red dot” of the laser be fixed directly on the moving target.
The systems deployed today are a far cry from the vision of the Reagan-era “Star Wars” program: first proposed in 1983 and officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative, the project aimed to use space lasers to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles. The concept was also explored with the Airborne Laser project, launched in 1996 and tested in 2007, when a one-megawatt laser was mounted on a Boeing 747. In 2010, after a few successful tests, it engaged two test missiles off the coast of California and, although it locked on, it failed to destroy them, leading to the project’s cancellation.
The lasers that replaced these early models are smaller, more efficient and much less powerful: “The systems we’re talking about today for anti-drones are probably on the order of tens of kilowatts, maybe 100 kilowatts at the most,” Boyd says. This lower power has modified the objective set. Instead of intercepting missiles with lasers in space, you shoot down much softer and smaller targets. like drones, with lasers on Earth. “Bringing them into a format to defend things like military bases, sports arenas or airports has been the goal for the last five to 10 years,” Boyd says.
The steps came quickly. In August 2017, Lockheed’s ATHENA system shot down five drones at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. In October 2019, Raytheon announced that it had delivered a system to the US Air Force. In August 2022, Lockheed announced that 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 the Army is developing systems for its Stryker vehicle. Still, “I don’t think any of the American systems were triggered by anger, so to speak,” he says — until, perhaps, the recent El Paso incident.
If this sounds like the future, the El Paso incident reminds us that the future has paperwork to deal with and not everyone is excited about it. Citing a Breaking Defense article, the Congressional Research Service reported that feedback on laser prototypes tested was “not overwhelmingly positive,” and officials cautioned that “results from the laboratory 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 powerful enough to reach aircraft). Federal law makes it a crime to point a laser of any kind at an aircraft. And officials familiar with the El Paso shutdown described exactly this kind of coordination failure: One agency’s counter-drone tool became a danger to another agency’s aviation.
At a news conference, El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson said, “I want to be very clear that this should never have happened. You cannot restrict the airspace over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, the hospitals, the community leaders.” Speaking to ABC News, John Cohen, a former Department of Homeland Security official, summed up the dilemma of using such systems. “It has to be coordinated,” he says, because a tool intended to protect the border becomes a security hazard if professionals are informed of it in the same way as travelers: via an alert on their phone.
