Who is more wrong?

Incompetence and paranoia operate at scale when there is no leadership

Feb 12, 2026

I was almost right yesterday. “Someone threw the switch on this, and if I had to bet, I’d go with [Stephen] Miller or [Kristi] Noem,” I wrote about the El Paso airspace shutdown. The New York Times identified the cause of the brief panic as the F.A.A.’s response to the border kids playing with a new toy.

The Mobile – Acquisition, Cueing and Effector (M-ACE) System, is a modular, on-the-move C-UAS solution supporting both military and homeland defense. Image: Northrop Grumman

To put this in perspective (as an aside, it would be great to have David Thornton geek out on lasers and commercial aviation), small drones, like the DJI type you see flying everywhere, are not a giant threat to commercial or general aviation. Yes, they can get in the way of things, and, if operated unsafely, hit an aircraft or potentially get ingested into a jet engine. But so can birds.1

Yes, a determined enemy can use drones to execute strikes on military assets, like the Ukrainians did in Operation Spiderweb, devastating Russia’s long-range bomber fleet.

The official White House explanation of yesterday’s airspace shutdown is “Mexican cartel drones breached US airspace. The Department of War took action to disable the drones. The FAA and DOW have determined there is no threat to commercial travel.”

Nobody believes this. And it turns out it’s not strictly true. There was no drone swarm coming over the border to take out El Paso or anywhere else. Like I said, drones could be a potential hazard to flight safety, if they are not operated properly, meaning away from airports and under 400 feet above ground level (AGL). But local flight controllers and pilots have mechanisms to deal with drones spotted where they might be a hazard.

Small drones don’t move very fast, and are not difficult to track once spotted. Local police and aviation authorities can usually deal with the issue, even if the drones came over from Mexico. Now a drone swarm would be a different thing, and the U.S. should be prepared for it. Armed drones hidden in trucks delivered by other means is a threat, and our defense industry has been preparing for that in various ways.

One way is Northrop Grumman’s Counter Unmanned Aerial Systems (C-UAS) project. There are other layered systems with fancy acronyms like M-ACE and SHORAD. But SHORAD is an armored battlefield vehicle designed to operate in a drone-rich environment, like the war in Ukraine, or in Gaza, where Israeli tanks always have counter-drone tech turned on.

In El Paso, it appears from reports and sources inside the government that the Defense Department loaned one of these high-energy laser devices such as C-UAS to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in order to test the system’s effectiveness if there were, say, a swarm of Mexican cartel drones launched over the border. The CBP boys turned on their new toy and it acquired a target, so they engaged and fired. It was a child’s party balloon. I am sure they thoroughly destroyed it.

However, this action alarmed the F.A.A. because although drones are a potential threat to aviation safety, lasers are a clear and existing threat. In 2025, there were 10,993 reported laser incidents, according to the agency’s website, which notes “pointing a laser at an aircraft is a federal crime.” The F.A.A. takes laser incidents very seriously, and has a web portal for pilots, crew members, or the public to report incidents.

CBP firing a laser anywhere near commercial or general aviation in a city the size of El Paso will get the aviation regulator’s attention, and it did. The F.A.A. and CBP, along with the Defense Department, set up a meeting to discuss the parameters and operational details of any anti-drone laser testing. The meeting was to be held on February 20th. F.A.A. officials warned CBP that they were concerned about the safety of laser testing, and according to some reports, mentioned that testing outside agreed parameters would result in an airspace shutdown.

So when CBP turned on the laser and popped that balloon, F.A.A. Administrator Brian Bedford responded by issuing the NOTAM to shut down El Paso airspace until after February 20th, when the meeting was supposed to happen. Then, once the fecal matter hit the spinning blades, the shutdown was lifted.

Of course, this entire circus could have been avoided, and it seems everyone was wrong here. But my question is: who was more wrong?

It was wrong for the CBP to acquire a military weapon, which was designed for battlefield use, to use in an operational sense near an American city and call it “testing.” It was wrong for them to turn it on before working the details with the F.A.A. regarding safety. It was wrong for them to use it to acquire and destroy a child’s party balloon thinking it was a Mexican cartel drone. And it was wrong of the F.A.A. to respond by screaming “fire!” in a crowded room.

Apparently, the level of non-cooperation, non-coordination, and rank paranoia operating within the Trump administration has reached peak Kafka. One branch of the government told another that it was behaving in a potentially unsafe manner, and the other branch did what it wanted. The first branch, having been violated, decided to use the bluntest tool in its possession, causing the greatest amount of public panic, to get the attention of the other agency. It was a marvelous display of passive aggressive behavior at scale.

Congress has already begun calling Bedford to account. If only they’d also call Noem and her crew for their rather cowboy and reckless operation of military technology in a civilian aviation corridor. As my brother Jay quipped: the fun part comes in 2027: wait until Congress flips.

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