Sinking Boats Off Venezuela, Colombia. What Could Go Wrong?

Last week, U.S. Special Operations forces launched deadly strikes against two vessels in the Eastern Pacific off the coast of Colombia. The attacks, against what the Trump administration claimed were narcotics traffickers, represent an expansion of an aggressive new campaign the administration began in early September that had been limited to boats in the Caribbean near Venezuela.  

Efforts led by Senate Democrats to block the administration’s unauthorized military actions have themselves been blocked by Republican lawmakers. A broad range of experts in military use of force, including former George W. Bush justice official John “torture memos” Yoo, have said the strikes are illegal because the military is barred from targeting civilians not engaged in hostilities toward the United States, even if they are criminals. Previous administrations had dealt with drug trafficking vessels by boarding them, arresting their crews, and confiscating their contraband—actions that are permitted under international law.  

What exactly is the Trump administration’s goal with this deadly new policy? What are the risks and the chances of success? To learn more, I spoke with a source who has had a decades-long career in the U.S. defense and the intelligence community, serving both in and out of government. The source requested anonymity to speak freely. The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.  

What do you think of these latest strikes in the Eastern Pacific? 

This is a significant escalation of this whole campaign of theirs. It’s unclear why they’re doing it. When it was limited to the Caribbean, I thought it was a pretext for military action against Venezuela. It wasn’t clear to me why they were doing that either, by the way. Maduro didn’t seem to bother Trump during his first administration. Why’s he bothering him in the second one? Payback for all the migrants? I don’t know. But at least we have a history of starting wars on pretexts that didn’t hold water. So, this would be in that tradition. 

But now, going after shipping in the Eastern Pacific, where Venezuela doesn’t have a coastline, but Colombia does, it’s clearly not just a Venezuela thing.  

On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the redeployment of a Navy aircraft carrier battle group from the Mediterranean to waters off the coast of Latin America to aid in this drug interdiction effort. What does that tell you? 

At a strategic level, it looks like Hegseth is beginning implementation of the new national defense strategy, which has not been publicly released, but its contents and thrust are starting to leak to the defense press. It basically codifies our policy of appeasing Russia and telling the Europeans you’re on your own—which I think everyone has seen for a while. Most people just attributed it to Trump’s unrequited love affair with Putin. But apparently, what is new in this strategy is that we’re now abandoning all our Asian allies as well. Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, Australia—sounds like you guys are now on your own, and we’re going to retrench from the Pacific. The fig leaf, at least that I’ve heard, is, well, we’ll still be focused on countering China, but on their presence in Latin America. But the Chinese presence in Latin America is through trade, commerce, foreign aid, and diplomacy. It really has nothing to do with the military. China does not pose any military threat to the continental United States or to any nation in this hemisphere. So that’s a very thin fig leaf that you’re using to cover up your military retreat from both your allies in the East and your allies in the West. 

Well, the threat Hegseth identifies in Latin America is what he calls “narco-terrorism.” 

Calling these guys narco-terrorists is clearly perverting the definitions of terrorism and narco-trafficking to get around legal restrictions. These traffickers are criminals. They’re not terrorists. They’re not trying to overthrow the United States government. They have no ideology or religious purpose. They’re not enemy combatants. They’re not enemy soldiers. They’re not enemies of anything. They’re common criminals.  

The official reason given by the president and the defense secretary is to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. 

Yes, I understand that. But there are big holes in their story. Trump claimed the boats we sunk off the Venezuelan coast were carrying fentanyl to the United States. But the fentanyl we get doesn’t come by ship or from Venezuela, but by land from Mexico, from precursors made in China. And the drugs that do get trafficked along the Venezuelan coast are mostly headed to Europe.  

We do get a lot of cocaine from Colombia, and some of that comes by boat, right?  

Yes, but if they’re genuinely thinking they’re going to impact the flow of cocaine in the United States by doing this, they are sadly mistaken. 

Why is that? 

Because we have decades of history telling us this, the Defense Department has been in the anti-narcotics business since Congress directed it to be the lead agency in the 1989 Defense Authorization Act. At the time, the Pentagon had many good reasons for not wanting to do that job. But it now has 35 years of experience in drug interdiction and 35 years of data on drug trafficking. The U.S. Southern Command conducts its Caribbean counternarcotics operations out of the Joint Interagency Task Force—South (JIATF-S) in Key West, Florida. Years of data on the routes and conveyances that drug traffickers use—by airplane, by go-fast boat, by fishing boat, by land, and by smuggling in commercial maritime shipping containers. There are thousands and thousands of records of radar tracks and other interdiction events. And what we know from our history is that traffickers are very smart and patient. If you deny them or raise the costs of smuggling drugs in a certain way, they’ll back off that for a while and do other things.  

They have a hierarchy of preferences for how they move drugs. We know that because when they first started transporting cocaine into the United States, there were no defenses whatsoever, and so what they did was fly it from northern Colombia right into Dade County, Florida. It makes sense because with general aviation aircraft, they always have the drugs in their possession. They’re not relinquishing control of them. And these flights take only a few hours, so your risk of interdiction is low. So that’s their preferred mode, and everything after that is just a cascade of less optimal conveyances they will use if denied ones that are preferable.  

If you look at the history of Colombian cocaine trafficking, you can literally watch it ebb and flow for three decades based on what we’re doing. When we pushed them out of general aviation into South Florida, they started flying into the Bahamas and other Caribbean nations. When we pushed them out of the air there, they started flying, working their way up into Mexico, and then using maritime. Maritime takes longer, so they prefer not to do it. As for smuggling in commercial maritime containers, it can take days, and it’s stuck in the port of Miami, the port of Baltimore, or God knows where. So, they really don’t like using that way, but they can.  

They went to Mexico as one of their last resorts because they basically split their drug loads in half with the Mexican drug trafficking organizations. Once it gets into Mexico, you have all your underground tunnels.  

It’s an endless game of cat and mouse. It’s been going on for years. Anyone with any history of how the counterdrug interdiction works will tell you this is how it goes. And obviously, we’re still flooded with cocaine, and now we’re flooded with fentanyl. So, by definition, it hasn’t worked. And we have thrown the kitchen sink at it over the years, with extensive use of Air Force AWACs aircraft, Navy P-3s upgraded with high-tech surveillance sensors, an armada of surface vessels, Over-the-Horizon radars which can monitor the entire Caribbean and portions of South America, all of it. DOD has probably spent between $20-$30 billion on this effort. And for what? Ever hear of a shortage of cocaine in one of America’s cities or towns? Unlikely.  

But can’t the Trump administration say we’ve operated with one hand tied behind our backs for all these years by observing international law, and it hasn’t worked, so now we’re going to try this more aggressive approach? 

Sure, they can say that. But you need to weigh the chances of success against the risks. I think the chances of success are basically zero, for the reasons I’ve said. The traffickers use all the conveyances—by air, sea, land—all the time, and they just flex and move based upon what we’re doing. If you blow a few boats out of the water, they will back off that tactic and do something else for a while. They track our assets very, very carefully.  

For instance, across the Southwest border and in places on the East Coast and in the Caribbean, we have a whole string of ground-based aerostats. These are like big, tethered blimps that float a few thousand feet in the air. They typically have radars or other sensors on them. They are costly as hell, and the traffickers simply monitor when they are up or down—and they are down a lot for maintenance, bad weather, and so on. When they see our aerostats are down or when they see our ships are out of the area, they’ll just go back to what they were doing.  

So, you’re justifying this whole operation by stopping the wrong drug coming from the wrong place, using methods that are outside international law, and that years of history will tell you are destined not to work. So why don’t you look back at some of that history before you blast boats out of the water? 

Won’t bringing in this aircraft carrier group help? 

It’s precisely the wrong instrument to use for these kinds of counterdrug purposes. It’s enormously expensive. You’ve already demonstrated you have plenty of capability to identify and strike these boats. Most likely, they’re using MQ-9 Reaper drones to take them out. That’s a far cheaper way to do things than a carrier battle group intended to fight wars and deter strategic enemies. It’s like grabbing for a sledgehammer when you just need a screwdriver 

Is it possible that these are the first steps of a major new military operation the Trump administration has in mind to go directly after the drug lords, regardless of what the governments of these countries say? 

We’ve had U.S. military participation in counterdrug operations on a cooperative basis with countries in Central and South America literally for decades. You’ve had Marines in Peru doing riverine operations. You’ve had special forces in Colombia and Bolivia on training missions. The Air Force has had ground-based radars in Colombia and Peru. Our Navy has extensive exchanges with its counterparts. So, there’s nothing new about the U.S. military participating and helping host nations counter drug activities. Its utility over time was obviously very limited, or we wouldn’t be where we are today. But it was always with the cooperation of these countries.  

So, if we’re going to embark on something without their cooperation and not at their invitation, then obviously, one could consider that an act of war and an invasion. And it’s hard for me to imagine you’ll be much more effective when you’re going in there over the opposition of the government than you were when you were there at their invitation.  

Short of U.S. troops getting killed in an anti-drug quagmire in Latin America, which is obviously speculative, what are the risks of the policy we’re already seeing? 

A couple of things. Of course, if you keep attacking boats, you will eventually hit the wrong vessel; it is just a question of time. You will get bad intel, or someone will make a mistake in targeting, etc. These are human acts, and humans make mistakes. That is a certainty. 

But that’s actually not the thing I’m most concerned about. What most concerns me is the complete disregard for law and international law and the total erosion and corruption of these terms, the terrorists and the narco-traffickers. Those things are really important because terms and the legal status associated with them establish how business is done throughout the world. And if we can just disregard it any time we want, then so can everybody else.  

That’s why the Pentagon really does not like the idea of shooting down civilian aircraft, because the joint staff would say, Who do you think has the most civilian aircraft in the world? We do. The United States does. So, we are the most at risk when we move to a system where we say we can ignore all international bans, international laws, and international definitions of who is a terrorist and who is an enemy combatant, because it invites everybody else to do that. Hey, I don’t like that person. I just whacked them. Yeah, that was a narco-terrorist. Wow, really?  

Lastly, with the news reporting that the administration has now conducted more than ten of these strikes, I have another worry, and that is this: the Full Motion Video (FMV) clips of these attacks can be exhilarating and addictive (no pun intended). Each strike compels the next. Pretty soon, the hunt is on; we turn on the TV to see if there were any new strikes today. The strikes become an end in themselves. Over time, we lose sight of the fact that these strikes are illegal and are destined to fail to impact illegal drug flow. The only ones being diminished are ourselves.  

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