An AeroVironment LOCUST counter-drone laser is now part of the air defenses around President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Getty photographer Andrew Harnik caught it on October 31, mounted on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and parked between two palm trees behind a pair of Avenger missile launchers on a floating platform in Lake Worth Lagoon. NORAD and U.S. Northern Command have confirmed that they deployed ground-based air defense and counter-drone systems around Mar-a-Lago at the request of the U.S. Secret Service.
The vehicle and the beam director on its roof match the 20-kilowatt Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser, the system family behind the test that made the FAA shut down El Paso’s airspace in February and that destroyed a Customs and Border Protection drone near Fort Hancock two weeks later. Those shots happened over a military range and a border strip. This one sits in a residential town, three miles (4.8 kilometers) from a commercial runway.
The FAA’s flight restriction over Mar-a-Lago already warns drone operators that the Department of War may destroy unmanned aircraft deemed a credible safety or security threat. Neither NORAD nor the Secret Service has tied the laser to a specific threat.
NORAD Confirms the Deployment but Will Not Name the Weapon
“Due to operational security, we are unable to provide additional details,” NORAD and U.S. Northern Command said, and referred further questions to the Secret Service. The Secret Service said it is operating in a heightened threat environment and continuously adapts its protective operations, without naming a weapon or a threat.
The Secret Service’s late-October statement to CBS12 did name one item: NORTHCOM’s counter-small Unmanned Aircraft System Fly-Away Kits. NORTHCOM fielded those kits to rush to bases with drone incursions, and The War Zone reports the ones at Mar-a-Lago carry Ku-band radar, electronic support measures, jammers and 360-degree infrared search-and-track sensors. The LOCUST can be cued by offboard sensors like those.
The War Zone’s Joseph Trevithick reported the laser on November 2, after Jared Keller’s Laser Wars newsletter picked it out of Harnik’s frame and identified it as a 20 kW AMP-HEL. The Avengers came first: NurPhoto’s Christopher Beckett photographed them on the shoreline on October 16 and on the ramp at Donald J. Trump International Airport the day before. In August, Avengers covered Trump’s Bedminster club during the LIV Golf final, and NORAD said then that the 263rd Army Air and Missile Defense Command runs them for the Secret Service. The command would not say whether that is the case in Palm Beach.
The JLTV Points to the 20 kW LOCUST, Not the New X3
AeroVironment delivered two JLTV-mounted LOCUST lasers to the Army in December 2025 under AMP-HEL, a 20 kW-class system with a larger beam director than the Infantry Squad Vehicle version. The 30 kW LOCUST X3 won its first production contract in September, and NewsBytes labeled the Mar-a-Lago unit an X3.
Neither NORAD nor AeroVironment has confirmed the variant. The JLTV in Harnik’s photo is the December hardware: AeroVironment’s own release describes it as “the same 20kW-class LOCUST LWS” as the ISV version, and the Army captions its border photos of the vehicle the same way. The $464.8 million X3 contract pays for deliveries over the coming years.
That 20 kW family has a US record. On February 10, CBP officials fired a Pentagon-owned LOCUST at what turned out to be Mylar balloons near Fort Bliss, and the FAA closed El Paso’s airspace over the test. On February 26 soldiers used the same system to destroy a CBP surveillance drone the Pentagon had not been told about. The FAA and the Pentagon then signed a safety agreement on April 10 that cleared the lasers for US airspace, and in October the Pentagon picked AeroVironment’s laser for a year-long pilot at US bases, citing an FAA safety finding that covered that one laser family.
The Mar-a-Lago TFR Already Threatens to Destroy Drones
NOTAM FDC 6/0100 was issued October 18, 2026. It closes a one-nautical-mile circle around Mar-a-Lago from the surface to 2,000 feet AGL until October 20, 2027. Drone operators are warned the Department of War, DHS or DOJ may take action resulting in the “seizure, damaging, or destruction” of their aircraft.
The NOTAM extends a restriction in place around the clock since October 20, 2025, whether or not Trump is in residence. The Secret Service asked for it in a September 16, 2025 letter from Director Sean Curran to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, citing “adverse threat intelligence” and the “persistent risks posed by unauthorized aircraft and unmanned aircraft systems.” On September 2 the FAA proposed making it permanent as a Special Flight Rules Area under Part 93, the same instrument that covers Washington, D.C. The comment period closed October 2.
Palm Beach County, West Palm Beach and the Town of Palm Beach took the restriction to the D.C. Circuit over the noise from rerouted airliners, and the county commission voted 4-3 in September to pause its case rather than drop it. In an August 11 filing in federal court, the FAA counted more than 160 planes and drones that had breached the airspace since the restriction began, a figure The War Zone attributes to the filing as first reported by the Palm Beach Daily News. NORAD F-16s intercepted a general aviation aircraft over Palm Beach as recently as October 24. The FAA’s own proposal notes that the airport’s primary runway averaged 86 airline operations a day in 2025, and that arrivals and departures have to pass through the restricted circle.
DroneXL’s Take
The Secret Service has a real problem at Mar-a-Lago. More than 160 aircraft and drones have crossed a line every Part 107 operator is supposed to know about, and a laser is the cheapest way to enforce it without raining shrapnel on Palm Beach the way a Stinger would.
But the FAA’s clearance for these lasers came out of a White Sands test, on a range, after El Paso showed what happens when a laser fires near a civilian airport without the FAA in the loop. At White Sands the laser’s automatic cutoff stopped the beam when an airliner strayed into its track, and that result is what the clearance rests on. The airliners into DJT fly through the same one-mile circle the laser is guarding, and the FAA’s own rulemaking notice says 86 of them a day use that runway. I’d want the FAA to say in public whether its April agreement covers a laser parked under an approach path, the way it said so for the border, because the people in those seats are not Secret Service protectees.
For anyone flying a drone in Palm Beach, the practical read is simpler. The restricted circle has been there since October 2025, a 20 kW laser with a radar feeding it now sits inside it, and the agencies running it will not say what it is there to shoot at.
Sources: The War Zone, Laser Wars, NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Secret Service via CBS12, AeroVironment, FAA NOTAM FDC 6/0100, Federal Register (Docket FAA-2026-10827), WPTV, Defense Visual Information Distribution Service
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
