For several hours on February 11, the skies over El Paso, Texas, went strangely quiet after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) abruptly imposed sweeping flight restrictions over the border city of nearly one million residents.
The sudden order effectively grounded all aircraft—including police and medical flights—triggering confusion among airlines, local leaders, and even some federal officials.
Within hours, the extraordinary shutdown started unraveling almost as swiftly as it appeared. The FAA reversed course and reopened the airspace around El Paso after initially indicating the restriction could last 10 days—an abrupt about-face that only deepened the mystery of why the skies were closed in the first place.
Early public messaging from U.S. officials did little to clarify the situation. “The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion,” U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy posted on X. “The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region. The restrictions have been lifted and normal flights are resuming.”
Secretary Duffy’s explanation raised immediate questions, not least because the notice had been issued roughly three hours before it was even scheduled to take effect—an odd sequence for a fast-moving “incursion” narrative (and one that would be further complicated by later reports that emerged claiming the purported drone sightings had actually involved a balloon).
As airlines scrambled and the public pressed for answers, reporting began to converge on a different explanation: the shutdown appeared to be less about an immediate airborne threat and more about a breakdown in coordination between the FAA and the Department of Defense (DoD) over a new counter-drone capability operating near the El Paso airport.
By the end of the day, multiple reports suggested the Pentagon had approved U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to employ an experimental anti-drone laser system in the area.
According to unnamed U.S. officials, a lack of interagency coordination surrounding the use of that directed-energy system—especially given its proximity to civilian air traffic—was the catalyst for the FAA’s sudden shutdown, imposed as a precaution while agencies sorted through the safety ramifications for commercial aviation.
First reported by Reuters, the technology at the center of the bizarre episode was AeroVironment’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System, a 20-kilowatt-class counter-drone weapon designed to track and destroysmall unmanned aircraft at the speed of light.
“Directed energy is no longer a future concept—it is a proven force-protection capability,” AeroVironment vice president overseeing directed-energy programs, John Garrity, said in a December press release describing the system’s Army deliveries.
LOCUST Laser Weapon System mounted on a US Army M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle at Fort Sill’s annual Fires Symposium in April 2025. (Image Source: U.S. Army)
What Is the LOCUST Laser Weapons System?
At the center of the controversy is AeroVironment’s LOCUST (Laser Optical Counter-UAS System for Tactical Use), a mobile high-energy laser designed to disable or destroy small drones using concentrated light rather than missiles or bullets.
Fielded through the U.S. Army’s Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) prototyping effort, LOCUST signals a shift from directed-energy demonstrations toward mobile, tactically relevant counter-drone capability. The Army has taken delivery of vehicle-mounted prototype systems integrated on platforms, including the Infantry Squad Vehicle and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.
The system operates in the roughly 20-kilowatt range and is designed to engage small unmanned aerial systems with precision and minimal collateral damage.
In contrast to traditional air defenses, which rely on interceptors or explosive munitions, a laser weapon uses directed energy to heat and structurally fail a target, allowing engagements that are effectively silent and instantaneous.
The company describes it as an end-to-end directed-energy “kill chain,” designed to be moved quickly and integrated onto multiple platforms rather than confined to a fixed base-defense site.
The system’s published details reveal a familiar architecture for modern counter-drone lasers: sensors and tracking, plus a beam director that stabilizes and aims the laser.
BlueHalo—now part of AeroVironment’s corporate structure—describes a “plug-and-play” sensor-agnostic approach that can operate across several sensor types and RF bands, paired with multi-target infrared search-and-track modes that rapidly switch between targets in dense threat environments.
LOCUST includes an electro-optical tracking package with a gimbaled system, telescope, rangefinder, and multiple camera payload options to expand the field of view. These features are meant to solve one of the hardest problems in counter-drone defense: reliably tracking small, fast targets against cluttered skies and complex backgrounds.
What LOCUST represents—at least in concept—is the counter-drone logic many defense planners have been pushing for years: drones are cheap, plentiful, and increasingly disposable, so defeating them with expensive interceptor missiles doesn’t scale.
A laser flips the economics. If you can supply power, keep the optics aligned, and maintain target lock long enough to disable the aircraft, the “magazine” is essentially electrical energy rather than a finite stack of munitions.
That promise—deep shots, low per-engagement cost, and minimal collateral debris compared with kinetic intercepts—is why directed energy keeps resurfacing as a solution for airports, bases, and high-profile events.
However, the recent ordeal in El Paso illustrates the catch: bringing lasers into real-world airspace is not simply a matter of performance against drones. It is also a coordination problem—because safety standards in civil aviation are unforgiving, and because the consequences of misunderstanding a “test” versus an “operational use” can ripple instantly into airline schedules, medical flights, and public confidence.
The episode also illustrates the broader reality that counter-drone missions are no longer confined to distant war zones. As unmanned aircraft become tools of smuggling networks, espionage, and irregular warfare, the line between homeland security and battlefield technology is increasingly blurred.
The military’s decision to allow CBP to activate a directed-energy system near a civilian airport—whether planned as a test, response, or demonstration—illustrates how emerging defenses may collide with regulatory frameworks built for a pre-drone era. Aviation safety authorities must now consider not only aircraft separation and weather hazards but also invisible beams of energy designed to disable airborne threats.
That tension is likely to grow as directed-energy weapons like LOCUST move closer to routine use. The Army’s ongoing AMP-HEL prototyping effort is designed to push these systems into operational formations, demonstrating a broader conviction that lasers will become a standard layer of short-range air defense.
For travelers stranded in West Texas, the shutdown was mostly an aggravating delay. For everyone else, it was a disturbing and confusing spectacle. But the bigger significance is what the episode revealed: a major U.S. city’s airspace can be effectively halted when a new class of counter-drone weapon starts operating in the same physical—and regulatory—space as civilian aviation.
In that sense, El Paso wasn’t just an odd bureaucratic mishap. It was a rare public signal that directed-energy counter-drone systems are transitioning from test ranges into real-world environments where military necessity, domestic security, and civilian infrastructure intersect.
Ultimately, the incident may serve as an early warning that the effectiveness of deploying “cutting-edge” counter-drone systems domestically won’t be just an engineering challenge. It will also hinge on coordination—between agencies, across jurisdictions, and under rules built for a sky that wasn’t designed to share space with lasers.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com