By Granite State Report
In the last few months, the United States has quietly opened a new front in the drug war: not just intercepting smugglers at sea, but blowing their boats out of the water.
Since early September, U.S. forces have carried out at least 20-plus air and missile strikes on alleged drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing more than 80 people, according to Pentagon statements and independent tallies. These aren’t Coast Guard boarding actions. These are lethal military engagements in international waters against people who, by any normal definition, are criminal suspects, not combatants.
The Trump administration insists these strikes are lawful acts of self-defense in a “non-international armed conflict” against drug cartels and “narco-terrorists.” Critics — including U.N. officials, human-rights groups, and some U.S. military lawyers — say that’s legal fantasy and that the operations amount to extrajudicial executions.
So: what’s actually happening out there on the water? Are these strikes legal? Are they effective? And at a moral level, are we okay with governments killing people on suspicion of carrying drugs?
Let’s unpack the law, the strategy, and the ethics — and be blunt about the trade-offs.
The Old Model: Chase, Board, Arrest
For decades, maritime drug enforcement has followed a relatively stable law-enforcement model:
- Detect suspicious vessels (radar, maritime patrol aircraft, informants).
- Pursue and signal the vessel to stop.
- Warn and, if needed, disable the boat (e.g., fire warning shots, then shoot out engines).
- Board, arrest, seize drugs, and bring suspects into the criminal justice system.
This is what the U.S. Coast Guard does every day under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (MDLEA), which gives it wide authority to board, search, and seize suspected drug-smuggling vessels on the high seas, especially when they are stateless or with flag-state consent.
The results aren’t trivial. In FY 2025, the Coast Guard reported its largest cocaine haul in history — nearly 510,000 pounds seized in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean. Another recent multi-month operation off Central and South America offloaded roughly 76,000 pounds of narcotics worth an estimated $473 million.
You can see what this looks like in practice in official and documentary footage:
- Coast Guard interdiction video (USCG documentation) – go-fast chases and boardings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific:
“Massive Drug Bust! U.S. Coast Guard in Action in the Caribbean Sea!” - High-risk chase and boarding – a realistic look at interdictions and arrests at sea:
“Caught at Sea! U.S. Coast Guard Intercepts Major Drug Operation”
These operations are dangerous — for both the Coast Guard and the smugglers — but the central idea is clear: this is law enforcement. The goal is to capture evidence, arrest suspects, and prosecute them, not to annihilate them at standoff range.
Visually, the classic model looks like this:
The New Model: Kill the Boat From the Sky
The recent U.S. campaign is different in kind. Instead of pursuing and boarding, U.S. military aircraft and drones are destroying boats outright, often without prior warning or visible attempts at disabling fire.
A few key data points:
- September 2, 2025: Trump publicly announces a U.S. airstrike on an alleged Venezuelan drug-running boat in the Caribbean, releasing video of the moment of impact. Reports indicate 11 people were killed.
- September–October 2025: At least 14 strikes kill 61 people in the Caribbean and Pacific, according to a detailed review by FactCheck.org.
- Late October 2025: UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk says the strikes “find no justification in international law” and likely violate the right to life under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
- Colombia and other regional governments condemn the attacks as violations of international law; Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro flatly calls them “murder.”
- By mid-November 2025, the tally has climbed to over 80 deaths in at least 20–21 strikes, including operations near Venezuela and in the eastern Pacific.
A U.S. Naval Institute analysis describes one such strike — the destruction of a Venezuelan go-fast boat in the Caribbean — as a watershed moment: the first time a U.S. administration has authorized the destruction of a suspected drug vessel at sea without warning or boarding, calling it “contrary to international law.”
In some cases, the Pentagon has released footage of boats erupting in fireballs in the middle of the ocean. But there’s a catch: the U.S. rarely releases public evidence that the vessels were actually carrying drugs, or that those onboard were anything more than low-level couriers.
This is a crucial shift: from arresting suspects to killing suspects — often in situations where they pose no immediate threat to anyone’s life.
That difference — rescue vs. strike — is the heart of the legal and moral fight.
What the Law Actually Says: Drugs vs. War
We need to separate three overlapping but distinct legal frameworks:
- Law of the sea / maritime law (UNCLOS and related treaties)
- International drug control conventions
- Use-of-force and human-rights law (UN Charter, ICCPR, etc.)
1. Law of the Sea: Boarding, Not Bombing
The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is the backbone of maritime law. It defines territorial seas, exclusive economic zones, and what states can do on the high seas.
UNCLOS allows warships to board and inspect foreign vessels in a few narrow categories (piracy, slave trading, unauthorized broadcasting, stateless vessels) or under specific treaties. Article 110 recognizes a “right of visit” on the high seas in these limited cases, particularly when a vessel is stateless or fraudulently using a flag.
Drug trafficking isn’t in that default list. Instead, countries rely on treaties like the 1988 U.N. Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which encourages cooperation to stop drug trafficking by sea — including boarding and searching with flag-state consent, and sometimes agreed-upon rapid authorization mechanisms.
Note the pattern: board, search, seize, arrest. None of these frameworks explicitly authorize a state to destroy a foreign vessel full of suspected smugglers in peacetime, absent an immediate threat.
Analysts who’ve gone through UNCLOS and the drug conventions line by line are blunt: international law supports interdiction and seizure, “not to kill or sink at will.”
2. Drug Treaties: Criminals, Not Combatants
The U.N. drug conventions — including the 1988 Vienna Convention — clearly frame drug trafficking as a criminal problem that demands cooperation, extradition, asset seizure, and mutual legal assistance.
They do recognize that drug trafficking can threaten “stability, security and sovereignty of States,” and they push states to criminalize trafficking and related financial crimes. But nowhere do they say, “You may treat traffickers as enemy combatants in an armed conflict and target them with missiles on the high seas.”
Even the U.S. State Department’s own International Narcotics Control Strategy Report describes maritime interdiction as a law-enforcement endeavor, focused on arrest and prosecution, not targeted killing.
3. Use of Force & Human Rights: The Red Line
Under the U.N. Charter, states are prohibited from using force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, except with U.N. Security Council authorization or in self-defense against an armed attack.
The Trump administration has tried to wedge its strikes into the “self-defense” and “armed conflict” box by:
- Calling cartels “terrorist organizations”
- Asserting a “non-international armed conflict” with these groups
- Arguing that drug trafficking that kills Americans (e.g., fentanyl) constitutes an ongoing armed attack justifying military force abroad
Most international lawyers are unconvinced. Human Rights Watch, for instance, calls recent maritime strikes “extrajudicial killings,” noting there is no recognized armed conflict between the U.S. and drug cartels, and that the individuals targeted are civilians, not combatants.
Separately, international human rights law — including the ICCPR, which the U.S. has ratified — protects the right to life and allows intentional lethal force only when it is strictly necessary to protect life from an imminent threat. The U.N. human rights chief has been explicit: fighting drug trafficking is “a law-enforcement matter governed by careful limits on the use of lethal force.”
A boat hundreds of miles offshore, carrying drugs but not threatening anyone’s immediate life, doesn’t meet that bar.
The U.S. Legal Theory — and Why It’s on Thin Ice
Domestically, the administration points to a mix of:
- The president’s Article II commander-in-chief powers
- A Justice Department legal opinion reportedly offering immunity to personnel involved in the strikes
- The designation of certain cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and a claimed “armed conflict” with them
An Atlantic Council analysis notes that, even under the most generous reading, this is legally “creative” at best: drug smuggling — however deadly its downstream effects — has never been accepted as the kind of ongoing armed attack that triggers a right of self-defense allowing lethal force against every courier and boat.
A U.S. Naval Institute commentary puts it more bluntly: treating a go-fast boat “hundreds of miles from U.S. territory” as an imminent threat equivalent to a terrorist safehouse stretches the law of self-defense beyond recognition and risks shredding norms that protect everyone’s vessels.
Here’s the uncomfortable question:
If Washington claims the right to strike suspected traffickers on foreign-linked boats in international waters, what stops China, Russia, or Turkey from doing the same — say, against a Taiwanese fishing boat or a Ukrainian-flagged freighter they accuse of “smuggling”?
Once you normalize missile strikes on suspected criminals at sea, you don’t get to control who uses that precedent next.
Do the Strikes Work? The Strategic Pros and Cons
Set the law aside for a moment and ask a cold-blooded question:
Do these lethal strikes actually work as counternarcotics policy?
The Claimed Benefits
Supporters argue:
- Deterrence through fear. If couriers know they might be killed at sea, they’ll refuse jobs, raising costs for cartels and shrinking supply.
- Operational disruption. Destroying boats mid-route prevents tons of drugs from reaching shore — especially cocaine headed for Central America, Mexico, and the U.S.
- Signaling toughness. Politically, it projects resolve: the U.S. is “hunting you” if you move drugs that kill Americans. Trump has leaned heavily into this messaging.
You can see why this has emotional appeal. The overdose crisis in the U.S. — especially involving fentanyl — is catastrophic. The idea of hitting cartels hard before drugs reach U.S. shores feels satisfying.
And to be fair, maritime interdictions do matter. Both Coast Guard and Navy operations have repeatedly seized tens of thousands of pounds of cocaine and marijuana per summer season, depriving cartels of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Reality Check
But here’s what the broader evidence and expert analysis say:
- Most “drug boat” crew are expendable labor, not cartel leadership. Killing them doesn’t decapitate organizations; it wipes out low-paid men who can be replaced from poor coastal communities.
- Cartels plan for losses. The U.S. government itself has acknowledged that traffickers treat interdicted shipments as a cost of doing business. They send many boats; some get caught, some don’t. Maritime interdiction alone has never come close to breaking the business model.
- The Coast Guard already seizes record volumes without killing people. This undercuts the argument that lethal strikes are the only way to be “serious” about maritime drugs.
- Evidence of deterrence is weak. There’s no transparent data showing that strikes have reduced total flow of cocaine or fentanyl into the U.S. On the contrary, Coast Guard seizures have hit records even before the maritime strike campaign — suggesting that traffickers keep sending boats regardless.
AP reporting goes straight at this: Trump has publicly derided Coast Guard interdictions as “not working” despite record seizures, while pivoting to lethal strikes that kill dozens of people, mainly couriers, without clear evidence of reduced drug supply.
Strategically, there’s also a big blowback risk:
- Alienating key regional partners like Colombia and Mexico, who see their citizens being killed at sea by U.S. missiles and call it murder.
- Eroding U.S. credibility when it criticizes other countries’ abuses and extraterritorial killings.
- Setting a precedent other states may use to justify their own lethal “anti-smuggling” operations.
If this were clearly reducing overdose deaths, you could at least say, “The policy is ugly, but it works.” The brutal truth is: there’s no good evidence it works, and decent evidence that traditional interdiction plus intelligence-driven prosecutions do more, with far less collateral damage.
The Moral Ledger: Whose Lives Count?
Law is the floor. Morality is the ceiling. You can stay technically within some legal argument and still be morally bankrupt.
So let’s walk through the moral ledger.
Harm from Drugs vs. Harm from Missiles
On one side:
- Cocaine, meth, fentanyl, and other drugs trafficked by sea contribute to addiction, violence, and death in the Americas. That’s real harm. The 1988 drug convention itself talks about “a danger of incalculable gravity” posed by illicit traffic.
On the other side:
- A missile strike on a small boat kills specific human beings — often young men from poor backgrounds — instantly, without trial, without a chance to contest the evidence. Some may be hardened traffickers. Some may be desperate fishermen who took one awful job. We don’t know, because we never give them a chance to speak.
From a just-war or human-rights perspective, you do not get to kill people merely because they are contributing to a broader, indirect harm, unless they pose an imminent threat to life here and now. That’s the same principle that says you can’t drop a bomb on a drug dealer’s house in Chicago because his product may lead to overdoses.
The U.N. human-rights office states the standard plainly: lethal force is permissible only as a last resort against individuals posing an imminent threat to life. Drug smuggling at sea, by itself, doesn’t clear that bar.
Due Process: From “Law Enforcement” to “Death from Above”
In the law-enforcement model, even suspected traffickers get:
- A chance to surrender
- A trial
- Defense counsel
- Appeals
In the strike model, they get:
- A few seconds of latency between a sensor operator’s identification and a missile hitting the hull.
No courtroom. No defense. No public evidence. Often not even confirmed identification.
Human Rights Watch calls that what it is: extrajudicial killing.
Slippery Categories: “Terrorists,” “Narco-Terrorists,” “Cartel Combatants”
The administration’s answer is to relabel traffickers as “terrorists” and insist we are in an armed conflict with them.
But labels are cheap. The moral question is: are you actually in a situation of war? Are these people fighting an organized, sustained armed campaign against your state, or are they engaged in criminal commerce that you hate — and that kills your citizens indirectly — but that remains qualitatively different from war?
Stretch the “armed conflict” concept too far and everything becomes war: gang violence, cybercrime, money laundering. Once you accept “war” on everything, you accept war rules for everything — meaning you accept a world where the state can kill a lot more people, with a lot less oversight.
That’s a world drug cartels might love. It’s not a world free societies should be eager to build.
The “Pro” Side, Honestly Stated
Let’s be fair and state the strongest version of the pro-strike argument.
1. The overdose crisis is a mass-casualty event.
The U.S. loses tens of thousands of people a year to overdoses. Some policymakers argue that if cartel-linked actors knowingly flood your country with lethal substances, they are morally closer to terrorists than to “normal” criminals. Killing couriers at sea, they claim, is proportionate to the scale of harm.
2. Arrest-and-seize hasn’t solved the problem.
Despite decades of interdiction, drugs still flow. Proponents claim that only escalation — including lethal targeting of vessels and possibly land-based labs — might change the calculus.
3. Couriers know the risks.
In their view, if you sign up to crew a boat for a cartel while the U.S. is publicly warning it will destroy such vessels, you’re voluntarily assuming that risk.
4. It’s politically popular in some circles.
There’s raw domestic anger over the drug crisis. Politicians who authorize strikes can credibly say they “did something” dramatic.
There’s a hard, emotionally understandable logic here: the state has a duty to defend its people, and cartels are killing them. Why not hit them as hard as you hit al-Qaeda?
The problem is that this logic melts on contact with facts: the targets are mostly low-level couriers, the campaign hasn’t been shown to dent supply, and the legal-moral costs are enormous.
The “Con” Side: Law, Strategy, Morality All Point the Same Way
On the other side, you have a fairly rare convergence:
- International law experts saying the strikes violate the law of the sea, human-rights law, and the U.N. Charter’s use-of-force rules.
- Human-rights advocates calling them extrajudicial killings.
- Regional allies calling them murder and demanding they stop.
- Strategic analysts warning that these operations set destabilizing precedents other states will copy and that they erode U.S. credibility.
- Drug-policy experts pointing out that traditional interdiction plus financial, intelligence, and public-health strategies do more to reduce harm.
Add all that up and you get a pretty damning bottom line: we’re killing people at sea, on shaky legal grounds, for marginal or unproven gains, while burning through moral capital and international goodwill.
Better Options: Hitting Cartels Where It Actually Hurts
If the goal is to reduce overdose deaths and cartel power, there are more effective — and far more defensible — levers:
- Sustain and expand law-enforcement interdiction with Coast Guard-style operations: board, seize, arrest. These already remove massive shipments with limited casualties.
- Follow the money: target laundering networks, real-estate fronts, and financial facilitators. The 1988 drug convention and international practice put heavy emphasis on asset forfeiture and financial disruption for a reason: that hurts cartels.
- Global intelligence cooperation that leads to high-value arrests, not just couriers. This is slow and politically less flashy, but strategically more meaningful.
- Domestic demand reduction: treatment, harm reduction, and regulated supply for certain substances where evidence supports it. If fewer people want the product, boats don’t launch.
These aren’t as cinematic as a missile vaporizing a speedboat in 4K. But they align with law, with human rights, and with what actually shifts criminal markets over time.
For readers who want to dive deeper into the legal framework at sea, there are accessible explainers:
- Law of the Sea basics (UNCLOS):
“UNCLOS Explained: Understanding the Law of the Sea” - Use of force under international law:
“Use of Force: What’s Self-Defence Under International Law?”
Where This Leaves Us
Let’s strip away the euphemisms.
- These are kill operations on the high seas against people who have not been tried or convicted of any crime.
- They rely on a contested legal theory that stretches “self-defense” and “armed conflict” to cover drug smuggling.
- They risk normalizing a world where any state can lob missiles at boats it dislikes and put “suspected smugglers” in the press release after the fact.
- They haven’t been shown to meaningfully reduce supply of drugs into consumer markets, while traditional interdiction and financial targeting continue to rack up massive seizures.
If you believe that the rule of law, due process, and the idea that states can’t just kill suspects without trial actually matter — not just inside your own borders but in the global commons — then this isn’t a close call.
Stopping drugs at sea is legitimate.
Sinking boats full of suspects with Hellfires and calling it “law enforcement” is not.
The core moral question is brutally simple:
How far are we willing to go, and who are we willing to become, in the name of fighting drugs?
The answer you’re comfortable with at sea will bleed into the answers you accept on land. That’s the real danger hiding behind the dramatic videos and tough talk: not just what we do to smugglers, but what those choices do to us.
References
- ABC News. (2025). 3 killed in latest US strike on alleged drug vessel in Caribbean. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com
- Atlantic Council – Kmiotek, C. (2025). Was Trump’s strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat legal? Retrieved from https://www.atlanticcouncil.org
- Chatham House. (2025). Attacks on ‘drug boats’ are pushing the US away from the consensus on rules in international law. Retrieved from https://www.chathamhouse.org
- FactCheck.org. (2025). Assessing the facts and legal questions about the U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats. Retrieved from https://www.factcheck.org
- Factually. (2025). What are the international laws regarding the use of force on suspected drug boats? Retrieved from https://factually.co
- Human Rights Watch. (2025). US: Maritime strikes amount to extrajudicial killings. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org
- OHCHR (UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). (2025). US attacks in Caribbean and Pacific violate international human rights law. Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org
- Reuters. (2025). US carries out new strike against alleged drug vessel near Venezuela; Pentagon says it struck another suspected drug boat in Pacific, killing three. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com
- U.S. Coast Guard. (2023–2025). Press releases and imagery on record drug seizures and maritime interdictions. Retrieved from https://www.news.uscg.mil
- U.S. Naval Institute. (2025). Drug boats: Where questions of lethality and legality meet; Interdicting narcotics at sea: The Coast Guard’s counterdrug mission is a team effort. Retrieved from https://www.usni.org
- UNODC. (1988/2025). United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. Retrieved from https://www.unodc.org and https://treaties.un.org
- Washington Post & Guardian. (2025). Coverage of U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats and regional reaction. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com and https://www.theguardian.com
The fight over these strikes is really a fight over something bigger: whether we want the oceans governed more by law, or more by whoever has the longest range and the most missiles.
