Whether the target is drugs or Maduro, U.S. could be hindering its own military with deadly boat strikes

Voices more closely connected to the U.S. military have emerged this week to raise their own questions about a spate of boat strikes on alleged drug-carrying boats in the Western hemisphere carried out by the Trump administration since Sept. 2.

An anonymous Pentagon employee and a retired U.S. Air Force colonel have expressed concern that the focus on Latin American drug flows will affect American military might elsewhere in the world and lead to unintended consequences. That could include reducing co-operation with allies on the administration’s goal of reducing U.S. fatalities from drug toxicity by throttling supply.

“The administration’s legal framework is nonsense,” a civilian employee of the Department of Defence wrote Tuesday in an op-ed for Gannett’s Military Times website.

The administration is considering the drug cartels enemy combatants, equating them with Islamist terror organizations.

The comparison fails on multiple levels, the anonymous Pentagon employee wrote this week.

First, they said, the cartels generally lack the command structure of a terrorist organization. More importantly, unlike with terrorists, who often hide out in remote, secure locations around the world, the U.S. has long demonstrated it can directly confront drug traffickers — interdiction, in the parlance of officials — either unilaterally through its Coast Guard, or in co-operation with Latin American partners.

J. William DeMarco, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, picked up on this point this week. writing for the security website War on the Rocks. He worried that “perception and storytelling matter as much as interdiction” for the administration.

“The strikes are meant to intimidate Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro while signalling U.S. strength and resolve to China and Russia,” he wrote.

As of Wednesday, U.S. strikes have killed at least 61 people.

There was ample evidence for the claim that the strikes were a possible prelude to Washington’s long-desired regime change for Venezuela, including that the U.S. doubled its reward for Maduro’s capture on a previously issued indictment, and that the first batch of strikes often occurred near Trinidad and Tobago off the coast of Venezuela.

Trump then explicitly said earlier this month that covert CIA operations were approved for Venezuela, including possibly on land.

But in recent days the deadly strikes have arguably grown more amorphous, extending to Pacific waters. Two survivors of boat strikes were previously repatriated to Ecuador and Colombia, and Mexico indicated this week its navy was looking to take custody of a survivor of a strike off the coast of Acapulco.

No presence in Middle East, Mediterranean

As it ramps up its powerful strikes on alleged drug-carrying boats, the U.S. has redirected its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford to South America from Croatia.

That means not a single aircraft carrier will be deployed off both Europe and the Middle East. It comes just as violence has flared up again in Gaza, with renewed Israeli military strikes occurring this week in on the Palestinian territory.

“You can imagine the peace negotiations breaking down in the eastern Mediterranean or something happening with Iran,” Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Associated Press.

Aircraft carriers typically have crews of thousands of personnel and can contain dozens of warplanes. It is not clear if all five of the destroyers in the Ford strike group would move under the auspices of the U.S. Southern Command.

The Navy already has eight warships and a submarine in the region, and a squadron of F-35B Lightning II fighter jets are also now situated in Central and Latin America.

Only three of the 11 U.S. aircraft carriers are typically out to sea, Cancin said.

The USS Nimitz also is deployed but is heading home from the South China Sea to the West Coast before being decommissioned. It recently lost two aircraft — a fighter jet and a helicopter — in separate crashes that are under investigation. A third carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, is not deployed but is conducting exercises off the coast of San Diego.

China paying attention, writer suggests

DeMarco and the anonymous op-ed writer raised a number of concerns this week, with China and drug war policing among the dominant themes.

DeMarco wrote that the Trump administration’s strikes set a precedent that others would likely exploit later.

The anonymous writer offered separately that “China might begin striking Taiwanese commercial vessels or warships that are conducting activities they claim are illegal in the sea.”

Both writers referred to the fact the U.S. approach is overwhelmingly focused on the flow of drugs, even as it’s not clear these vessels were carrying drugs, or specifically carrying drugs to a North American destination.

The U.S. should increase access to addiction services for Americans, wrote the anonymous civilian employee.

“Steady demand ensures steady supply,” wrote DeMarco.

DeMarco is among those who have pointed out that although a handful of South American nations produce the bulk of the world’s cocaine, it is opioids that have contributed to soaring American drug toxicity deaths the past decade.

Furthermore, the U.S. strikes have antagonized Colombia, a cocaine-producing ally with which it has long worked jointly to eradicate coca crops, while focusing on Venezuela, known more as a porous drug transit corridor, rather than a producer on the order of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.

DeMarco also thinks recent U.S. financial support for Argentina is a key data point in understanding the regional context, while taking note of Venezuela’s rich reserves — the U.S., China and Russia have all imported Venezuelan oil at various times.

Condemnation inside, outside U.S.

Democrats in U.S. Congress have expressed concerns about a lack of transparency from the administration. Independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council have said the use of such lethal force violates international laws of the sea and amounts to “extrajudicial executions.”

While the scope and frequency of the the strikes have been remarkable, the Trump administration’s use of lethal force is not unprecedented for the U.S. in the region, at least as far as nations involved in the cocaine supply chain.

George H.W. Bush’s administration’s launched Operation Just Cause to remove Panamanian dictator and drug trafficker Manuel Noriega in 1990. More egregiously, an anti-drug operation in Peru saw CIA personnel shoot down a plane in 2001 that didn’t contain traffickers, but passengers that included an American missionary and her infant daughter. They were both killed.

While the ramifications of the administration’s approach might not be known for months and years, it is an area — unlike trade — where Trump has not been mercurial.

Reports began to emerge in the U.S. media last year when Trump was on the campaign trail that his future administration would consider military force against drug cartels, and on his first day in office he signed an executive order designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.