The United States military says it has defeated more than 300 drones along the southern border this year. The claim comes from U.S. Northern Command, which runs the Joint Task Force-Southern Border, the joint task force that operates on the southern border. But the public record behind the number is thin: only two of those engagements have ever been identified in public, and both of them turned out to be something other than a hostile drone. The gap between the headline figure and the evidence behind it is now the story — and it is drawing questions from Congress, from aviation regulators, and from anyone who has to judge whether a counter-drone claim can be trusted.
What the military says happened
U.S. Northern Command put the figure out on September 4. It said Joint Task Force-Southern Border had defeated more than 300 drones in 2026, with more than 100 of them brought down in August alone. Eleven of those, the command said, were shot down with a laser: the AMP-HEL, a 20-kilowatt directed-energy weapon mounted on an Infantry Squad Vehicle. The system is one of the military’s newest tools for drone mitigation — a beam of light instead of a bullet, aimed at small, low, slow targets that are hard to hit any other way.
The laser has been busy on the border. On November 2, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division trained with the AMP-HEL near Fort Hancock, Texas, rehearsing how to detect, track and engage drones crossing from Mexico. The training was public, with photographs of the turret mounted on the vehicle and soldiers working the controls. It was the kind of demonstration that makes a new capability look real — and it came two months after the command first announced the 300-drone figure.
The two incidents anyone can check
For all the size of the claim, only two border drone engagements have ever been described in public, and neither one fits the picture of a hostile drone being shot down.
The first happened on February 10, near Fort Bliss in Texas. A Customs and Border Protection laser, the LOCUST system, fired on what turned out to be a cluster of Mylar party balloons. The Federal Aviation Administration shut down the airspace over El Paso for eight hours while the incident played out, and 14 flights were cancelled. A party decoration had closed a civilian airport.
The second happened on February 26, over Fort Hancock. The military destroyed a drone — and then found out it belonged to Customs and Border Protection. The agency had been flying it without telling the military it was there. The military shot down a friendly aircraft because nobody had shared the flight plan.
Those are the only two engagements the public has been told about in any detail. Everything else behind the figure of 300 sits in classified or internal reporting that has not been released.
What the numbers behind the claim look like
The most detailed public numbers came on September 29, from Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, the commander of the border task force. He told reporters that between August 22 and September 22, the military had detected 378 drones. Of those, 75 were turned back, 15 were engaged, and one was captured. The rest, he said, were mostly reconnaissance flights — between 95 and 98 percent of the drones detected were scouting for human smuggling operations, not carrying weapons or drugs.
That picture is more complicated than a simple scoreboard. Detection is not the same as defeat, and most of what crosses the border is being watched rather than shot at. The general’s numbers describe a surveillance problem as much as a shooting problem — hundreds of small aircraft, most of them gathering information, in airspace shared with civilian traffic and with other government agencies flying their own drones. It also raises a basic question about the 300 figure: if only 15 drones were engaged in a month when 378 were detected, what does “defeated” mean for the other 285? The command has not explained the term.
The questions that have not been answered
Congress noticed the gap. On March 13, Senator Tammy Duckworth asked three inspectors general — at the Department of War, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation — to investigate the border drone operations. Eight months later, nothing from those inquiries has been made public.
The regulatory picture has moved faster than the accounting. On April 10, the FAA cleared the military to use lasers in American airspace, removing one of the legal obstacles to shooting down drones over the border. And on October 20, the FAA issued three notices banning drone flights within one nautical mile of the border, in force until October 19, 2027 — an acknowledgement that the airspace there is now a military operating area as much as a civilian one.
Why it matters
For anyone buying or building counter-drone systems, the border story is a warning about numbers. A claim of 300 defeats sounds decisive, but a buyer who cannot see what was defeated, with what, and under whose authority is being asked to trust the scoreboard rather than the evidence. Drone detection and drone mitigation are only as good as the record behind them — and in this case, the record the public can check contains a balloon and a friendly drone. The technology is real, and the laser works. The accounting is what still needs to be proved.
Source: DroneXL