Trump and Hegseth are killing people on boats and calling it drug interdiction. The United States military attacked a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Thursday, killing three men. The Pentagon says they were narcoterrorists. It is the latest strike in a campaign that has now killed at least 211 people since early September, when the administration declared an “armed conflict” with Latin American cartels and sent warships and aircraft to hunt them on the water. The military did not provide evidence the vessel was carrying drugs. A strike on June 4 killed two more, pushing the count past two hundred. Another on May 31 killed three. The pace has not let up since the first strike last fall, when a U.S. warship opened fire on a boat off the coast of Venezuela, killed nine men, and then, after two survivors clung to the wreckage, struck them again and killed them. The White House confirmed that follow‑up strike and called it “self‑defense.”
The law of armed conflict is not ambiguous. You identify the threat, you apply the minimum force necessary to neutralize it, and you do not shoot men in the water. That second strike was not self‑defense. By any honest reading of the laws of armed conflict, it was murder. The administration’s willingness to admit it tells you everything you need to know about the legal architecture they think licenses this campaign. Walzer’s distinction principle is foundational. Weapons may be directed at military targets, not at civilians. Persons who are not taking direct part in hostilities are protected. If the administration classifies these men as combatants, Walzer’s framework demands that classification be shown for each individual killed — not assumed from presence on a boat. The 211 people killed were overwhelmingly poor men on small boats — labor, not leadership. The cartel’s accountants walk free. The cartel’s bankers and chemists operate out of reach. The men pulling the boats were real people, and they are dead. What the United States military has demonstrated is its capacity to kill people at sea who cannot fire back. It has not demonstrated it can dent the drug supply.
Now, I am just a simple man, but I can read a map. Nearly all the fentanyl that kills Americans comes across the land border from Mexico, not in go‑fast boats in the Pacific. It is manufactured with precursor chemicals imported from China and India. DC’s drug‑enforcement records have documented this for years. The maritime interdiction strategy is not designed for the fentanyl problem. The boat strikes are not interdicting the supply that fuels the overdose epidemic; they are inflicting death on a scale that will never be matched by the drugs they might have carried. The campaign is an exercise of violence, not of strategy. Sun Tzu wrote that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. This administration has substituted fighting for law enforcement, and then it has substituted body counts for evidence.
Sixty‑five years ago this past January, Dwight Eisenhower warned about the military‑industrial complex. In the original draft of his farewell address, he called it the “military‑industrial‑congressional complex” — he knew then that the legislature would become a co‑owner of the machinery. His warning that only an alert citizenry can compel the proper meshing of our military machinery with peaceful methods has gone unanswered. Our representatives in Congress, who hold the power to declare war, have not compelled anything. They have demanded unedited video but not an end to the killing. They have demanded briefings but not a floor vote. No congressional authorization — not the 2001 AUMF, not a declaration of war, not any statute — permits the United States military to kill more than two hundred people in international waters without due process. The silence from the Capitol is the permission that lets the Navy keep firing.
The Pentagon’s inspector general announced in May it would examine whether the military followed the six‑phase joint targeting cycle — evaluating the process, not the legality of the strikes themselves. It refused to ask whether killing 211 people without congressional authorization constitutes extrajudicial killing, or whether the war‑on‑cartels declaration satisfies the Constitution’s requirements for sending Americans to kill. That is the logic of an institution that has confused process with legitimacy. Tuchman’s folly check is directly on point. In The March of Folly, she defined folly as the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests, where a feasible alternative existed and the policy was recognized as counterproductive in its own time. If the purpose was ending the fentanyl crisis, this does not do it. If the purpose was establishing a lawless military posture, it is well on its way.
I think about the families of the men who died yesterday. I think about the two men who survived the first strike last fall and were killed while clinging to a sinking hull. I think about the sailor who pressed the trigger on that second strike and the officer who gave the order and the civilian leadership that told them it was legal. The law of armed conflict is not a technicality. It is the only thing that stands between a soldier and murder.
Two hundred and eleven dead. No evidence that a single kilogram of fentanyl was intercepted. Not one kingpin indicted. Just boats, burning, in the middle of the ocean, and a president who calls it victory. That is not drug interdiction. That is killing people on boats and pretending the law does not apply.