Trump and Hegseth are killing people on boats and calling it drug interdiction. The latest strike was early Monday in the eastern Pacific. Two more dead. The count is past 210 now, across more than 60 strikes since this campaign started. General Francis Donovan, who runs Southern Command, put out a statement with the announcement. He said the military is “committed to imposing total systemic friction on narco-terrorists.” That is the language they have settled on. The thing it describes is men on small boats being blown apart by missiles.
I want to tell you what that looks like, because the language has a way of hiding it.
The boats are fiberglass low-profile vessels running dark in open water. The crews are a few men each. They have no weapons worth naming. They cannot signal surrender. They cannot radio back. They cannot outrun what is coming. A missile off a Navy ship costs somewhere in the neighborhood of a million and a half dollars, and it kills everyone on a boat the size of a pickup truck. The man at the controls watches a screen. He does not see the faces. He gets an order. He fires. Then he writes it up. That is the whole of his day, on the days he is tasked to it.
I know what it costs to fire on people you cannot see and cannot identify, on orders you did not write, in a war you were told was necessary. I sat a gunner’s seat in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. I watched rounds walk into places that held men I would never meet, on targeting I would never see the source of, for reasons I was told made sense. Some of those reasons held up. Most of them did not. The men who did the firing carry what the firing did to them for the rest of their lives, whether the orders were right or wrong. The orders in this case are not right. And the men doing the firing are not being told that.
They are being told they are at war with drug traffickers. They are being told the targets have been confirmed by intelligence. The intelligence is classified. The targeting process is classified. The legal basis for the strike is classified. The men at the controls are told the people on the boat are threats. They fire. They go home. They do not get to ask what shipyard built the launcher they used, or what contractor services the radar that found the boat, or what senator put the line item in the budget that paid for both.
So let me name the people who do get to ask.
Donald Trump ordered this campaign. Pete Hegseth runs the Pentagon that runs it. General Donovan speaks for it. The Navy is in the eastern Pacific because it has a fleet it needs to use. The fleet has to be used because somebody paid for it, and the somebody was taxpayers, and the taxpayers paid through senators, and the senators want to see the fleet justified. The boats are the justification. The boats have been the justification since the first strike. Two hundred and ten bodies into it, the justification is producing bodies.
The contractors are getting paid. Huntington Ingalls builds the destroyers. General Dynamics builds the submarines that trail the boats. Lockheed builds the helicopters. RTX builds the missiles. The trades at the shipyards in Pascagoula and Newport News and Bath are working because the fleet is working, because the fleet has targets, because the targets are boats in the water that someone has decided are full of drug traffickers. None of those trades want to ask what the boats are. They want to keep working. That is fair. That is human. But somebody ought to ask.
Because here is what working people are paying for. They are paying for a campaign in which the executive branch kills people without charging them, without trying them, without producing evidence the public can see, in a war Congress has not authorized. They are paying for the gunners who have to live with what they did. They are paying for the families of the dead, who will not get a phone call or a flag or a letter, because the men on the boats are not American and they were not tried. They are paying for the precedent that says any future president can kill any group of people anywhere, on his own say-so, and call it something else.
That is what an unaccountable executive looks like. Not a coup. Not a declaration. Just boat after boat, strike after strike, body after body, in language designed so the bodies do not feel like bodies. Two hundred and ten of them now.
The men in the gunner’s seats did not write this policy. They are living with it. The families of the dead did not write it either. They are not even getting told about it. The contractors are writing it, one contract modification at a time. The senators are writing it, one budget line at a time. Trump and Hegseth are signing for it.
This is what an unaccountable executive does to working people. It uses our tax money to kill people without trial, and it pays the contractors who help, and it grinds the gunners down, and it never has to answer for any of it because the language is built so you do not have to look.
Look.