I mean, wouldn’t an even slightest clever adversary do just that? Launch a bunch of decoys(party balloons, drones, whatever) amidst one they actually want to actually use as an attack vector?
Would the pentagon just play an expensive pew pew and potentially miss the real one?
It's honestly wild to see this happening again so soon after the El Paso incident. You'd think with a budget that massive, 'not lasering our own hardware' (or party balloons) would be a higher priority. The coordination gap between the Pentagon and the FAA/CBP seems deeper than just a 'communication lapse' if these high-energy systems are being fired off without a heads-up. That El Paso detail about the Locust system and the airport shutdown still feels like something out of a satire.