Laser Weapon Spotted Near US-Mexico Border
A US Army vehicle sporting a laser turret was photographed training with soldiers assigned to Joint Task Force Southern Border.
The US Army appears to have sent a utility vehicle armed with a high-energy laser weapon to train with American soldiers deployed near the southern border of the United States in support of federal law enforcement.
In a new photo published to the US military’s Defense Visual Information Distribution System (DVIDS) media portal, an M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle is shown prior to being sling-loaded onto a CH-47 Chinook helicopter during the Air Assault Sustainment Course at Fort Bliss, Texas in mid-July.
While the ISV in the photo is partially obscured by dust from the Chinook’s rotor downwash, it is very clearly sporting the telltale BlueHalo LOCUST Laser Weapon System and Echodyne EchoShield multi-mission radar that Laser Wars previously spotted mounted on an ISV during the annual Fires Symposium near Fort Sill, Oklahoma in early April.
It’s unclear if the vehicle training at Fort Bliss is the same one featured at Fort Sill. The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO), which oversees the service’s directed energy portfolio, previously told Laser Wars that the service planned on receiving two laser systems for integration into ISVs in fiscal year 2025, as well as a pair for two Joint Light Tactical Vehicles.
The soldiers participating in the exercise are assigned to Joint Task Force Southern Border (JTF-SB), the US Northern Command group tasked with executing “full scale, agile, and all-domain operations in support of US Customs and Border Protection to protect the territorial integrity of the United States and achieve 100% operational control of the southern border,” according to the DVIDS photo caption. Fort Bliss is currently part of El Paso National Defense Area, established in May to extend the US military’s reach along the border.
So far, there’s no evidence the system has been used in any real-world missions, although a spokesman for NORTHCOM declined to rule out that prospect.
“That laser-equipped ISV is not being used actively at the border,” the spokesman told Laser Wars. “I won't speculate what capabilities or systems will be used in the future.”
That a laser-equipped ISV could make an appearance among soldiers deployed to help federal authorities secure the US-Mexico border is not totally surprising. The Trump administration has increasingly funneled counter-drone capabilities to military personnel deployed there, and with good reason: According to the US Department of Homeland Security, Mexican drug cartels flew drones along the border more than 60,000 times during a six-month period in 2024 alone to size up US law enforcement and ferry drugs into the country.
“We know that cartels have used [drones] for unauthorized surveillance to assess our troop size, our movements, to solicit and enable attacks from other vectors,” as Joint Chiefs of Staff vice director Rear Adm. Paul Spedero Jr. told the House Military and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee in late April, per Defense Scoop. “We know that they have used drones for kinetic attacks.”
This isn’t just about bolstering counter-drone capabilities, but also creating “a laboratory of experimentation along the southern border,” as JTF-SB spokesman Maj. Geoffrey Carmichael recently told Task & Purpose. Indeed, Army personnel are actively experimenting with the service’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) smart goggles, Black Hornet microdrones, and handheld Dronebuster jammers to help border patrol agents track and apprehend migrants crossing into the US from Mexico.
And directed energy weapons may be on the menu for fresh experimentation. In early July, the Pentagon’s Joint Intermediate Force Capabilities Office (JIFCO), which oversees the department’s force-wide non-lethal weapons efforts, published an odd press release positioning anti-personnel directed energy weapons as “a safer, smarter tool for border security.”
“For US Border Patrol agents and military personnel operating in complex environments, [directed energy weapons] offer a critical advantage: increased standoff distance and reduced risk of escalation,” the press release states. “In situations where individuals approach restricted areas or ports of entry aggressively or non-compliantly, DEWs allow agents to respond decisively without resorting to lethal force.”
JIFCO explicitly cited anti-personnel directed energy weapons like its Active Denial Technology system — better known as the Pentagon’s infamous Global War on Terror “heat ray” that the Trump administration previously considered deploying against protestors in Washington DC in June 2020 — as “designed with precision and proportionality in mind,” according to the press release: “Their effects are temporary and reversible, making them suitable for use in civilian-populated areas.”
“It is our mission to increase the awareness of, and as appropriate, advocacy on the vital role of [new non-lethal intermediate force capabilities] across the entire competition continuum and have garnered interest in JIFCO’s Active Denial Technology prototypes to help secure our southern borders,” a JIFCO spokesman told Laser Wars when queried about the release.
While non-lethal tools like the JIFCO heat ray and more destructive counter-drone capabilities like high-energy lasers occupy different ends of the directed energy spectrum, the message from Washington appears the same: the US-Mexico border isn’t just a security zone, but a proving ground where future battlefield tech can be stress-tested against real adversaries.
Still, there are limits to how far this experimentation can go. As The War Zone reported in October 2024, US military officials have repeatedly emphasized that destructive directed energy weapons like lasers or high-power microwaves, with their potential for collateral damage, are not legally authorized for domestic use against drones, cartel or otherwise. This suggests that while systems like LOCUST may be used for training, demonstration, and evaluation in a border environment, they cannot (at least under current law and DoD guidance) be employed operationally on American soil the way they might be overseas.
The southern border increasingly appears to have become a zone where law enforcement, national security, and military R&D collide. And with directed energy weapons potentially in the mix, it’s not just a political flashpoint, but a technological one too.
