Is the U.S. campaign against drug-smuggling vessels is unlawful and strategically ineffective?

A Just Security article argues that the U.S. campaign against drug-smuggling vessels is unlawful and strategically ineffective.

Those are separate questions: Is it lawful, and is it effective?

On Posse Comitatus, I think the issue deserves more examination. The Act generally restricts use of the armed forces to execute domestic law. But these operations occur outside U.S. territory against organizations designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, under authorities the administration contends permit military action.

Calling drug trafficking a law-enforcement matter does not itself establish that overseas military action against a designated organization violates Posse Comitatus. What authorities apply, and what does international law permit? Those questions require legal analysis.

The effectiveness argument interests me more.

We tend to measure the event rather than the system.

The authors say cocaine availability, purity and prices have returned to previous levels. If price demonstrates failure, show the data. What were prices before the campaign, what happened afterward, and where are they today?

They also argue that destroying vessels eliminates intelligence. But maritime transporters generally occupy the lowest levels of sophisticated trafficking networks. They are replaceable and usually have limited visibility into the financial, political, logistical and command structures above them.

Nor do targeted vessels appear from an intelligence vacuum. They may already exist within a broader intelligence picture developed through multiple collection streams. Exploitation can still have value, but its marginal intelligence value shouldn’t automatically be assumed to outweigh disruption elsewhere.

For decades, traffickers, facilitators, corrupt officials and associated businesses have adapted to a predictable enforcement environment. Eventually, enforcement becomes another variable the system learns to manage.

Change the rules and you disturb that equilibrium.

Routes change. Communications change. Relationships change. Money moves differently. Facilitators reconsider their exposure. Some make mistakes, others distance themselves, and some may find cooperation more attractive.

Those reactions create intelligence.

Criminal organizations are adaptive systems and will eventually adjust to this strategy too.

But effectiveness cannot be measured only through seizures, prosecutions, evidence or drug prices.

Sometimes the most consequential effect of an enforcement action isn’t what we recover from the target.

It’s how everyone else in the network reacts to it.