[philipallstar]

> Cartels routinely use drones to deliver drugs across the Mexican border and surveil Border Patrol officers. Officials told Congress last summer that more than 27,000 drones were detected within 1,600 feet (500 meters) of the southern border in the last six months of 2024.

No wonder they mistook one of theirs for one of these.

[orwin]

That's such am inefficient, hands-on, loud and dumb way to smuggle drugs across a border this large, this cannot be true. Unless you they are talking about submarines and land RCs, in that case sure, probably.

[carefulfungi]

The statements can also be parsed as "we have thousands of detections of an unknown number of drones that are being used by cartels to surveil the border in order to smuggle".

The number of drones vs. the number of detections is ambiguous. How detections are counted is ambiguous. Whether drones are physically moving drugs or part of an intelligence network is ambiguous.

It would seem entirely unsurprising that cartels are monitoring border enforcement by drone. That's not great, obviously. But different from "thousands of drones are carrying contraband into the US".

[Aurornis]

Why do you say that? Fixed wing RCs can fly fast and have long range. Anyone can buy radios for them that transmit for many kilometers. There are open source autopilot projects. Drugs like Fentanyl are so potent that each dose is less than a milligram.

It’s not far fetched at all.

[piokoch]

Check what is happening in Ukraine. The war moved a field of moderately cheap and moderately powerful drones forward.

We don't understand the consequences yet... Ukraine is actively working on hunter drones that could operate on 10 km altitude to shot down enemy targets. Now, imagine that cartel, terrorists put their hands on such technology, endangering whole civilian air transport.

[smallerize]

Quadrotors are loud, but fixed-wing drones are quieter, more efficient, and have much longer range.

[stronglikedan]

> loud and dumb way

Sounds like the perfect distraction!

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

What about model trains?

[iso1631]

Given they have so far managed to shoot down a balloon and a government drone you'll forgive my scepticism.

[duxup]

I wonder how accurate that number is. Are detected drones just blips on some detection system? Are they even drug running drones, are they even drones at all?

[pjc50]

Alternative hypothesis: the reported number of drones isn't real (anything the Trump government says about "cartels" can be assumed to be made up). The military got increasingly on alert, with senior officers pushing to get a shootdown on one of the not real drones. Therefore the laser operators end up firing on the first drone they confirm seeing.

Compare the MH-17 incident. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident , which also involved no confirmed actual drone.

[sidewndr46]

isn't this more comparable to the incident where a US Navy ship shot down an Iranian aircraft. They somehow convinced themselves it was a lone attack aircraft coming to intercept them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655