The cartels started it. According to Strategy Page, drug organizations on the southern border are running their own drone fleets to monitor American border operations. The reason is simple: knowing where a patrol is, and when it isn't, is worth millions to a load of product moving north.

So the good guys answered. U.S. forces are flying their own unmanned systems to track smuggling, and now there's a drone-versus-drone contest happening in American airspace.

Nobody should be surprised. I spent twelve years in Army military police, and the first rule of any checkpoint is that the other side is watching you. They count your shifts. They test your reaction times. A drone just makes that old game cheaper and safer for the cartel. A quadcopter can do what a scout with binoculars used to do from a ridge, and it can do it from a distance without ever breaking a sweat.

What the cartels didn't count on is that the United States built the high end of this market. American military unmanned aircraft fly higher, stay up longer, and see more than anything a cartel can buy off the shelf. When a cartel drone goes up, it's a small, slow target broadcasting its position. When one of ours goes up, it's feeding a picture straight to the agents on the ground.

That's the trade the cartels are finding themselves in. Their drone spots a patrol. Our drone spots the smuggling operation moving the other way. One of these trades pays better than the other.

This is also why every hand-wringer who said technology can't replace agents on the ground was arguing the wrong question. Drones don't replace agents. They multiply them. An agent with an unmanned aircraft overhead covers ground that used to take a whole squad, and covers it without burning out tires and overtime. Strategy Page's reporting makes clear both sides know it, which is exactly why the cartels are spending real money on their own eyes in the sky.

Watch for this fight to escalate. Counter-drone gear gets cheaper every year, and the day a Border Patrol sector can routinely knock a cartel scout drone out of the sky instead of just logging it, the smugglers lose their best set of eyes. They'll be back to sending human scouts into terrain where we hold every advantage.

The cartel drone fleets are a compliment, if you think about it. They spent years watching our operations because our operations worked. Now we've matched them in the air with the same country that wrote the book on unmanned aviation. I like our side of that fight.