The massive balloons that have made drug smuggling by plane nearly extinct

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas — It was just another Monday in 2001 when a few of the country’s top national security officials gathered inside the Pentagon to discuss taking all the air out of a program that used balloons for surveillance near the U.S.-Mexico border.

The goal of the gathering was to push TARS, or Tethered Aerostat Radar Systems, comparable in appearance to unmanned stationary blimps but containing top-of-the-line airplane detectors, onto another department’s shoulders. That day, the Air Force, which had overseen TARS since 1992, washed its hands of it, not caring if the program came to an end.