>The sudden and surprising airspace closure over El Paso, Texas, on Wednesday — first announced as extending for 10 days but lasting only a few hours — stemmed from the Pentagon’s plans to test a laser to shoot down drones used by Mexican drug cartels, according to three people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.
>That caused friction with the Federal Aviation Administration, which wanted to ensure commercial air safety, and the two agencies sought to coordinate, according to two of the people.
>Despite a meeting scheduled for later this month to discuss the issue, the Pentagon wanted to go ahead and test the laser, prompting the FAA to shutter the airspace over the city on the U.S.-Mexico border.
>Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales, whose congressional district covers an area that stretches about 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) along Texas’ border with Mexico, said cartel drone sightings are common. “For any of us who live and work along the border, daily drone incursions by criminal organizations is everyday life for us. It’s a Wednesday for us,” Gonzales said.
As expected, it's not just "there were drones". There's drones all the time. It's actually "there were AA weapons".
As a reminder, the Pentagon murdered several dozen American civilians in DC about a year ago, because they made a routine practice of running helicopter flights directly through the approach path of one of the US's busiest airports, at night, with complete disregard for collision alerts they triggered multiple times a day, while relying on the delusion that the civilian traffic can be avoided by spotting its lights against a backdrop of all the other lights of a city of millions. So it's not new that they're reckless and dangerous when it comes to civil aviation.
But testing a new anti-aircraft weapon next to a large international airport is a different kind of retarded. And it's definitely an extraordinary tier of government dysfunction when one agency is saying "fuck coordinating for safety, we'll do whatever tests we want" and another is saying "fine, if there's no cooperation to do it delicately, we'll use brute force to do it unilaterally".