The Army Laser Downs Cartel Drones After a Messy Spring

Joint Task Force-Southern Border used the Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser to knock down three hostile drones on the nights of August 25 and 26, the first AMP-HEL kills the command has tied to cartels. The shots came six months after the same family of lasers closed El Paso airspace and destroyed a Customs and Border Protection aircraft.

Three Hostile Drones Came Down Overnight

The Fort Bliss release, dated August 27, said crews engaged the aircraft during late-night hours that ran into August 26. The drones were judged hostile because they were used in direct support of activity that posed a physical threat to U.S. troops and Customs and Border Protection partners.

Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, commander of the task force, tied the aircraft to cartel networks that fly small drones to move people and to watch U.S. patrols. He thanked the Mexican Army in the same statement, and he said the command would not tolerate hostile surveillance.

Cartel networks are increasingly employing unmanned aircraft systems to facilitate illicit human-smuggling and actively spy on our personnel and law enforcement partners. By integrating layered countermeasures alongside advanced directed-energy capabilities like this laser system, we have made it clear that we will not tolerate hostile surveillance.

Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, commander of Joint Task Force-Southern Border, in the Aug. 27 release

U.S. Northern Command called the nights the first use against cartel-linked drones for AMP-HEL on the southern border. The task force did not name a cartel, a drone model, or a grid square.

The official account posted the same claim with a night photograph of the turret.

Counter Drone Technology📡#JTF_SB personnel used the #Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) system to engage and defeat three hostile UAS.

📰Read more: https://t.co/l8Ccuq91Zu@usnortherncmd @DeptofWar @SecWar@SeanParnellASW #ArdentVanguard pic.twitter.com/PIq7COYxDi

— Joint Task Force Southern Border (@JointTFSB) August 28, 2026

El Paso’s Seven-Hour Blackout

The August shots are the clean public win. The same laser family spent February on the other side of that ledger, in the same Texas border airspace, with the FAA in the middle.

THE LASER’S TEXAS RECORD

1. February 10, 2026: The FAA posts a 10-day ban on El Paso airspace at 11:30 p.m. after a Pentagon-loaned laser is fired near Fort Bliss. The ban lifts after more than seven hours.
2. February 26, 2026: The military fires a counter-drone laser at a Customs and Border Protection aircraft near Fort Hancock, about 50 miles from El Paso. A joint statement calls the target a seemingly threatening unmanned system in military airspace.
3. March 2026: The Army tests the laser at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to answer FAA safety questions.
4. April 2026: The Pentagon and the FAA sign an agreement that the system can be used in national airspace under agreed safeguards.
5. August 25, 2026: Task force crews use AMP-HEL against hostile drones through the late-night hours that continue into August 26. The command later says three aircraft were defeated.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy first described the El Paso shutdown as a response to a “cartel drone incursion,” and he said the threat had been neutralized. Later accounts split on the target, and some debris notes pointed to Mylar party balloons rather than a smuggling aircraft. CBP had the Pentagon laser on loan. The FAA had warned that firing it beside a busy airport, without a finished safety review, put airliners at risk.

The Fort Hancock case was simpler and worse. CBP had a drone up and did not tell the troops. The troops saw an unknown aircraft in military airspace and burned it. Lawmakers were told after the fact. The FAA closed more airspace around Fort Hancock, and one notice ran toward late June.

How the Beam Kills a Quadcopter

A high-energy laser is not a missile. It is a focused beam that has to stay on a moving airframe long enough to heat a motor, a wire run, a sensor, or a plastic shell until something fails. Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado Boulder, has described the pitch as an “infinite magazine”: if the system has power, it can keep firing.

The miss is the problem. Boyd said a beam that fails to stay on the drone does not fall to the ground like a bullet. It keeps going, and it can hit something else or dazzle a pilot. Even a hit can scatter light if the airframe is reflective. That is why tests near busy corridors force officials to shut airspace. Federal aviation officials have separately warned that a laser can incapacitate pilots, and pilots reported 12,840 laser strikes in 2024, most of them from handheld pointers that still reached cockpits. Aiming a laser at an aircraft is a federal crime.

If you fire a laser at a drone and miss it, that laser beam will keep on going for a long way. It might hit something else or dazzle a pilot.

Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives, University of Colorado Boulder

Today’s anti-drone lasers sit in the tens of kilowatts, Boyd said, maybe 100 kilowatts at most. That is far below the old megawatt airborne-laser ideas. The target set shrank with the power: small drones, not ballistic missiles. A Congressional Research Service note, citing range tests, found feedback on tested laser prototypes was not strongly positive, and officials warned that lab and range results differ from a tactical fight. Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, who directs Joint Interagency Task Force 401, said last month that the science of killing a drone with a high-energy laser or a high-power microwave is proven, and that the open work is how to use those tools in a real operation.

The Map Still Hides the Strike Point

The August release is dated Fort Bliss. The Army photograph released with it, shot by Sgt. Daniel Huerta, is captioned as AMP-HEL use against a hostile unmanned aircraft on August 25 at Fort Bliss. Separate official accounts put the fight in southern Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, which sits hundreds of miles downriver from El Paso. The command published neither coordinates nor a statement on which side of the river the beams crossed.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The nights: The engagements ran through the late hours of August 25 and 26.
• The weapon: The command named the Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser and called the three aircraft hostile.
• The claim: NORTHCOM said this was AMP-HEL’s first defeat of cartel-linked drones on the southern border.
• The force: About 8,000 service members are deployed under the task force along 1,954 miles of border.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The grid: No public release gives a launch site, a crash site, or a county.
• The airspace: The command has not said whether the drones, or the beams, were over the United States or Mexico.
• The aircraft: No model, payload, or cartel name has been released.
• The turret: AeroVironment confirmed one of its AMP-HEL systems was used and did not name the vehicle or the exact laser.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has said any unilateral U.S. action on Mexican soil would be a grave breach of her country’s sovereignty. That line was already on the record. Taylor still thanked Mexican Army partners in the same release that declined to put a pin on the map. Cheap drone shots are easy to cheer. A beam that crosses a river without a public accounting is a different kind of shot.

Two Truck-Mounted Lasers, One Army Program

AeroVironment told defense reporters the task force used one of the company’s non-kinetic counter-drone systems from the AMP-HEL program. The company would not name the model. AMP-HEL is a prototyping effort, not a single turret, and AV has already handed the Army more than one truck.

AMP-HEL INCREMENTS AV HAS DELIVERED

On December 18, 2025, AeroVironment said it had delivered two JLTV-mounted 20kW-class lasers to the Army as the second AMP-HEL increment, with a larger aperture beam director meant to raise lethality. Mary Clum, president of Space, Cyber and Directed Energy at AeroVironment, said the company was delivering modular laser weapons that perform in real-world threat environments, and that LOCUST was a precise, scalable answer to the drones troops face. AV’s first LOCUST went to the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office in 2022 on the Palletized-High Energy Laser effort, and the company said those systems had more than three years of operational use outside the United States.

BlueHalo, now inside AeroVironment, built the LOCUST line. The August border release did not say whether the turret sat on an ISV, a JLTV, or a pallet. It also did not say whether the system was the December load or an earlier truck.

Why Missiles Lose This Cost Fight

The Army wants lasers on the border because a missile that costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars is a poor match for a quadcopter that costs less than a laptop. Lockheed Martin has sold the same math for shipboard lasers, a deep magazine and low cost per kill if power and cooling hold. Raytheon has said a single charge can yield dozens of laser shots, and a generator can push that number much higher. U.S. officials have said hundreds of drones fly near the border each day. You cannot spend a missile on each of them.

WHAT THE LASER BUYS, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT

• Magazine: A plugged-in laser can fire as long as it has power and cooling, which is the whole point against cheap, repeat drones.
• Dwell: The beam has to stay on a moving airframe, so dust, heat shimmer, and a fast quadcopter still beat a sloppy track.
• Overshoot: A miss does not drop. The beam continues, which is why the FAA treated El Paso as a cockpit hazard.
• Identity: A laser does not read a tail number. In February the system hit a CBP aircraft that troops had not been told was friendly.

Military officials have already treated the southern border as a testing ground for counter-drone gear, including high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves. Three burned airframes in August do not settle whether the identification problem is fixed. They only show that, on two nights, the beam stayed on the aircraft the operators meant to hit.

Eight Thousand Troops on 1,954 Miles

The laser story sits on a larger deployment that began in March 2025, when the task force took the southern-border mission under U.S. Northern Command in support of CBP. About 8,000 service members are now spread across 1,954 miles.

WHAT THE TASK FORCE HAS DONE SINCE MARCH 2025

• Wire: Crews have reinforced hundreds of miles of the border with wire obstacles.
• Patrols: The force has run tens of thousands of detection and monitoring patrols, some with the Mexican military.
• Flights: It has flown thousands of observation sorties over remote ground.
• Brush: Units have cleared vegetation in areas where smuggling routes hide in the scrub.

Taylor said the task force stands with CBP to protect service members and to disrupt criminal groups. The August nights are now the first time that mission list includes a named AMP-HEL shootdown of cartel-linked drones. The command still has not published a grid square for the three shots, or the names of the networks that flew them.