The El Paso Drone Scare Is the Future of National Security Paranoia

Life imitates art. The famous 1983 hit song “99 Red Balloons” by Nena is about a cluster of party balloons being mistaken for enemy aircraft and provoking a nuclear war. Earlier this week, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy declared that the authorities had confronted a “cartel drone incursion” over El Paso, Texas, only for the threat to turn out to be a party balloon.

The consequences were fortunately short of a world war. But the government deployed experimental laser weapons and shut down the airspace over El Paso on Wednesday, disrupting flights for the thousands of passengers scheduled to fly through the city that day.

And it hasn’t even been very long since the last drone scare disrupted society. In December 2024, the FBI asked residents of New Jersey to be on the lookout for suspicious drones, leading to a flood of false reports and even citizens harassing pilots with lasers.

Just like the UFO sightings of the 1950s were a product of Cold War paranoia, the new wave of drone sightings is a product of today’s national security paranoia. American politics is having a hawkish moment, with politicians from both parties sounding the alarm about enemies foreign and domestic. Drones are the perfect object of fixation for paranoiacs; they’re both a symbol of modern warfare and a really common tool used by millions of Americans.

It’s also worth noting that the laser weapon used over El Paso was on loan from the U.S. Army to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Immigration enforcement is increasingly dominating the national security apparatus, bringing together the parts of government aimed at foreign and domestic enemies. CBP, which has been deployed to war zones abroad for years, is increasingly behaving like an occupying army in American cities.

Looming over everything is the Chinese balloon incident of 2023. The Biden administration raised the alarm about a hostile surveillance balloon from China, then let it float over North America for ten days before finally shooting it down over the Atlantic Ocean. That incursion led to justifiable fears about U.S. airspace, but also led to overreactions. Shortly after the Chinese balloon incident, the Air Force used a $400,000 missile to shoot down what was likely a hobby balloon launched by the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade.

Tellingly, the recent drone panics have not focused on China. During the New Jersey drone scare, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (D–N.J.) claimed that the hostile intrusions were coming from an Iranian “mothership” off the Eastern Seaboard. And again, the panic in El Paso was focused on aerial incursions by Mexican gangsters. The Trump administration seems to have given up on trying to win a peer conflict with China and fallen back on the familiar, emotionally satisfying pattern of small wars in Latin America and the Middle East. The phantom enemies in the sky reflect that shift.

A permanent war footing has many costs. American society seems to be discovering a new one: Every few months, a jumpy official seeing something in the sky will disrupt daily life and endanger air traffic over a major city. “99 Red Balloons” warns exactly about that attitude. “This is what we’ve waited for / This is it, boys, this is war,” Nena sings. “Everybody’s a superhero.”