On Wednesday February 11th, 2026 the airspace over El Paso Texas was shut down by the FAA. What’s more interesting is the stated reason was due to drones flown over the Mexican border by cartel members. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said earlier that the airspace closed as the Defense Department and the FAA halted an incursion by Mexican cartel drones and “the threat has been neutralized.” (1). Labeling a drone flight as an incursion really stirs the imagination and clearly defines how serious the US Government takes rogue drones. It certainly got my gears turning to how the cartel could traffic drugs over the border via drone flights. In fact, more than 27,000 drones were detected within 500 meters (1,600 feet) of the southern border in the last six months of 2024 (1). It’s clear to me that drones have quickly gone from hobby to serious tool. The Pentagon acted accordingly by firing a Directed Energy Weapon, aka, a high power laser. Can’t have planes flying overhead when there are high power lasers being shot into the sky.
Unfortunately this story does not end up like a sci-fi film. What they initially thought was a drone turned out to be something comically different — a shiny tin foil party balloon (2). Clearly whatever radar, imaging or sensor technology was used in the identification of the rogue object needs some work.
Now I could write this blog about government dysfunction but I think the drone aspect is much more interesting. If this really was a cartel drone on nefarious business then we have some serious work to do on the defense side. Just look to Ukraine for endless examples of drone technology in warfare. It got me thinking though, would there be someone on the other side of the border wall piloting all these drones? Can someone pilot more than one drone effectively? My brain is stuck thinking of drones as fancy flying RC cars. If one can find the ability to pilot an entire fleet of drones then the situation changes drastically.
There are certainly companies out there working on last mile delivery via drones which is a proven use case. What if you can find a way to programmatically control the flight of a drone that enables you to scale from one drone to a fleet? I think the use cases to solve are endless if you could achieve this technical hurdle. Increasing the total amount of controlled drones is only one way to improve drone technology. What about enabling computer vision and some form of intelligence? Go fly across this field and find where the fence is broken. How about extending an LLM to communicate with drone flight instruction sets via MCP?
My mind spins on all the different problems you could solve with a technology like this. Product management focused thinking is about solving customer problems and executing against a vision. I plan to continue my research about this very topic and begin to understand where the current state of the art sits. What from a technical perspective is possible? From there I plan to continue to leverage Claude Code to build out a test environment and see how far I can take this. The problems exist. Now I’m going to find out if the solutions do too.
-Jake