U.S. Southern Command Says Drug Boat Strikes "Aren't the Answer"
In a Senate hearing Thursday, U.S. Southern Command's top officer told lawmakers that the high-profile airstrikes on drug boats that the Pentagon has championed "aren't the answer" to cocaine smuggling in the Americas. SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan (USMC) told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the military is pivoting to a comprehensive campaign to target and dismantle drug trafficking organizations, rather than individual boats.
Since the start of enhanced operations in September, the U.S. military has conducted 45 airstrikes on suspected trafficking boats and killed 157 suspected smugglers, in addition to nonlethal interdictions completed by the Coast Guard. The lethal strikes are forcing some of the smuggling-boat operators to change their routing, but SOUTHCOM wants to do more.
"Looking forward, senator — the boat strikes aren’t the answer," Gen. Donovan told Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday. "What we’re moving for right now [is] a countercartel campaign process that puts total systemic friction across this network."
The objective is to impede the entirety of the drug supply chain, he said, from production through to delivery. "I believe that actually kinetic strikes will be one of the many tools, and probably not the most effective tool, when we actually look at it as more of a campaign approach," Donovan said.
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Critics of the administration's airstrike tactic have cautioned that at a practical level, it could make it harder for law enforcement to break into cartel networks. Since the airstrike method typically leaves no survivors, low-level drug boat crewmembers cannot be interrogated after the interdiction. This costs investigators an important source of information about the cartel's inner workings, critics say.
At the compliance level, many legal experts at home and abroad have suggested that the airstrike campaign does not align with international law, as it employs military force against men who have historically been treated as noncombatant criminal suspects - civilians, in the law of war. The White House maintains that the operators are "narcoterrorists," and its legal justification - reported by multiple outlets, but not released to the public - is said to rest on the theory that the strikes are targeted solely at the chemical substance aboard the boat, meaning that any harm to the crewmembers on board is incidental.
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