American military forces destroyed three boats suspected of running drugs through Latin American waters late Monday, killing all 11 men aboard in the single deadliest strike since the Trump administration launched its campaign against narco-terrorism. No US forces were injured.
US Southern Command confirmed the operation, which targeted vessels moving through the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean. The strikes mark a significant escalation in tempo and lethality for Operation Southern Spear, the administration's ongoing military campaign to disrupt cartel trafficking routes in the Western Hemisphere.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth didn't mince words. Posting on X the following day, he offered a message aimed squarely at anyone considering a narcotics run through American-patrolled waters:
"Turns out President's Day — under President Trump — is not a good day to run drugs."
The scope of Operation Southern Spear
Monday's strikes were the fourth set of aerial attacks carried out in February alone, the Daily Mail reported. On February 5, a strike killed two people described as alleged narco-terrorists. Four days later, another operation killed two more, with one survivor whom US forces moved "immediately" to rescue. A February 13 strike killed three.
The cumulative toll tells the larger story. Since the campaign launched in early September, at least 145 people have reportedly been killed in strikes on suspected trafficking vessels. The previous single-day high came on December 30, though the exact casualty figure from that operation has not been disclosed.
Southern Command stated that intelligence confirmed the Monday targets were "transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and were engaged in narco-trafficking operations." The boats, according to the command, were "operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations."
Video released by the military showed people aboard the vessels in the moments before they were destroyed, with footage appearing to capture individuals chatting on one of the boats before it was struck.
The legal framework
The White House has been direct about the legal posture undergirding these operations. According to The New York Times, President Trump "determined" that the United States is in an armed conflict with the cartels and that the suspected drug-running boats were "combatants." That designation matters enormously. It shifts the rules of engagement from law enforcement parameters to the laws of armed conflict, where the threshold for lethal force is fundamentally different.
The administration has defended the legality of the killings, though some military lawyers and legal experts have raised questions. No specific legal challenges have materialized publicly, and the operations continue at an accelerating pace.
This is the core policy choice that separates the Trump approach from every predecessor: treating cartel trafficking not as a crime to be prosecuted but as a threat to be eliminated. For decades, the default posture was interdiction, arrest, and prosecution through a criminal justice system that cartels learned to exploit, evade, and outlast. The new framework treats them as what they functionally are: hostile organizations waging a chemical war that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year.
A hemisphere on notice
The broader context makes the strikes even more striking. On January 3, the US seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in an overnight raid. That operation signaled something that Monday's strikes reinforce: the administration views the Western Hemisphere as an active theater, not a diplomatic abstraction.
Hegseth has laid out the doctrine on multiple occasions, describing the mission as one that defends the homeland, removes narco-terrorists from the hemisphere, and secures the country from drugs killing Americans. "The Western Hemisphere is America's neighborhood - and we will protect it," he stated.
For years, American foreign policy focused on the Middle East and the Pacific while cartels consolidated power, territory, and logistics networks across Central and South America. They built submarine fleets, corrupted governments, and moved enough fentanyl across the southern border to kill every American several times over, while Washington's response largely centered on funding studies into root causes.
Operation Southern Spear is the opposite of a root-cause seminar. It is kinetic, visible, and escalating. Whether you frame it as overdue or aggressive depends largely on whether you think the 100,000-plus annual American drug deaths constituted a crisis worth fighting or merely a statistic worth studying.
What comes next
Four operations in February. Eleven dead in a single day. A cumulative toll climbing past 145. The pace is not slowing. If anything, Monday's triple-boat strike suggests the intelligence pipeline feeding these operations is maturing, enabling larger and more decisive engagements.
Critics will continue to question the evidentiary standard. They will ask how we know the men on those boats were traffickers and not fishermen. Those are fair operational questions that deserve serious answers from the chain of command. But they are not arguments for inaction. The cartels did not pause their operations while Washington debated terminology.
Eleven men boarded three boats in Latin American waters on Presidents' Day. They didn't make it to their destination. That's the message Operation Southern Spear is sending, one strike at a time.
