The first step was taken roughly 10 months ago, when Donald Trump ordered a deadly military strike against a civilian boat in international waters, and according to the White House, the operation killed 11 people. Two weeks later, there was another, followed by a third strike four days later.
Week after week, month after month, the operations kept going, as the administration continued to target these boats and kill much of their crews. Different news organizations have competing tallies on the precise number of strikes, but there’s a consensus that there have been dozens of operations that have killed hundreds of people.
The underlying questions that emerged last fall haven’t changed. They also haven’t been answered. We don’t know whether there have been other strikes that haven’t been disclosed. We don’t know who has been killed. We don’t know if Team Trump is telling the truth about whether the targets were actually narco-terrorists.
We also don’t know whether any of these extrajudicial killings have been legal, though a great many legal experts have argued that they are not. Indeed, NBC News reported in November that the senior military lawyer for the combatant command overseeing the lethal strikes reached the same conclusion.
There will likely be some who will argue that the ends justify the means and that if these military strikes curtail the drug trade in the United States, then it will be worth it.
Except that’s wrong, too. The Washington Post reported:
The Trump administration’s deadly military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats have not reduced the amount of cocaine entering the United States, but they’re prompting criminal organizations to develop new strategies and tactics and undermining traditional investigative methods, according to a previously unreported assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a closed-door congressional briefing and interviews with current and former U.S. and foreign officials.
In a recent assessment reviewed by The Washington Post, DEA analysts found the strikes had failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire.”
The Post’s report, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, dovetails with a New York Times report from May, which noted that the military strikes have been executed “with deadly precision … but almost nine months into the operation, epidemiologists, addiction scientists and public health experts say cocaine, by far the top drug smuggled out of South America, is as easy to get in much of the United States as it was before the strikes began.”
As for the administration’s perspective, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell defended Operation Southern Spear, telling the Post, “Transnational criminal organizations have continually adapted their tactics for decades. That does not indicate the pressure is ineffective. It demonstrates that we are imposing systemic friction on their operations.”
I have no idea what that means.
For now, the White House apparently doesn’t care about the underlying question of efficacy. A separate recent Times report noted that deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller chairs bimonthly meetings, apparently called “wins” meetings, at which administration officials are expected to report on various successes. The Pentagon’s death toll from boat strikes is reportedly “regularly highlighted” as “one of the biggest” such accomplishments.
Just because the underlying questions no longer dominate headlines doesn’t mean they don’t need answers. The need for congressional oversight in a controversy like this one seems obvious, but since that won’t happen until 2027 at the earliest, it’s worth emphasizing that the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office recently indicated that it will examine the policy. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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