The Narco-Boat Killings Expose America’s Deadly Double Standard

I do believe that in war…you’re either all in or all out. Anything in between is how wars rot from the inside. I/We watched it happen in Afghanistan. Rules of engagement (ROE) drift turned into mission drift, then into moral drift, until guys on the ground were fighting with one hand tied behind their back for weak-kneed politicians who couldn’t decide if they wanted victory or another constituent press release. And it’s no surprise that warfighters started executing their own plans off-the-book, much like at the end of the Vietnam War. War is war. If you’re going to call it that, then own what that means: commit fully, finish fast, and stop pretending you can do half-measures without paying full price. But should “all in” mean “anything goes?” Maybe, maybe not but it should be transparent to Americans, because the second you start freestyling, you’re not winning a war, you’re just feeding the next one. So yeah, the second strike is ugly. But it’s only possible because we already decided the first one was morally effortless. “Fog of war” doesn’t apply when you manufacture the weather. And I’m sorry, claiming fog of war is also not a disinfectant for bad decisions. Americans (myself included) seem desperate for a day when we can actually defend the moral high ground and move away from our schizophrenic foreign policy. When was the last time anyone could clearly explain what we were doing in Afghanistan for twenty years, Libya, Iraq, anyone? Nobody seems to understand with clarity at any level of government or military branch. Bueller? A big problem is that our old war playbook is outdated for the modern era of grey asymmetric wars. Our political cycle is also too short, enabling the likes of Putin and Xi to wait us out. We saw this with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine once Biden took office as just one example. It’s time to update our political system and the rule book on modern warfare. But let’s focus on the latter. War is a meat grinder, and without rules that make sense and that everyone understands (including the public), you don’t get a civilization afterward, just a bigger graveyard, and fat cats in DC trying to claim righteousness. We’re not the good guys because we say we are. We’re the good guys when we act like it, even when it’s inconvenient. Americans seem to want two incompatible things at once: A bloodless victory over fentanyl. Clean hands while getting it. But then reality leaks through. You find out survivors were killed. You find out the kill list now floats on waves instead of hiding in caves. And suddenly, everyone in DC is clutching their pearls of innocence and looking for a chair before the music switches off. This is the same country that spent two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan with collateral damage (e.g., dead women and children) baked into the daily menu, then acts shocked that lethal force at sea is lethal. You can’t run the world like a bouncer and then faint when somebody gets thrown through a window. If we want to be serious, we should start with ourselves. You want to choke off the drug trade? Cool. Here are the boring, brutal truths nobody sells on cable news… Drugs move because demand pays. We are the demand. Cartels don’t rise in a vacuum. They grow in the cracks, where governments are weak, where economies are broken, where people have no better option than to work for monsters. And if we’re honest, we’ve helped widen plenty of those cracks over the years, then acted shocked when something ugly crawled out. Missile-first solutions feel righteous in the moment, like pounding the table makes the math change, but these networks don’t run on bravery; they run on profit. Cut one route, they open two more. Burn one boat, they build three. The market adapts faster than our talking points ever will. So if we’re going to treat cartels like terrorists, fine, make the case in daylight. Take it to Congress. Take it to the public. Lay down clean rules and live inside them. Don’t duct-tape a terror label onto a criminal economy, hit “launch,” then act offended when the world asks what the hell we’re doing. Because the second we start calling our violence “war” when it’s convenient and “justice” when it’s messy, we’re not leading, we’re rationalizing. America doesn’t get to survive on reputation alone. We have long lost that pass with no-helmet BMX bikes, in the ’80s, when movies like E.T. were in theaters. We only stay the good guys by doing the hard, boring, disciplined thing when it matters most, using force like professionals, not like a cartel with a flag. We don’t need to be perfect, but we damn sure need to be better. Better than the people we’re hunting. Better than the shortcuts. Better than the version of us that thinks the law is optional when the target is unpopular. If we want the world, and our own kids, to believe we’re the good guys again, then it starts the same place it always does…with us acting like it, even when nobody’s watching. — ** Editor’s Note: Thinking about subscribing to SOFREP? You can support Veteran Journalism & do it now for only $1 for your first year. Pull the trigger on this amazing offer HERE. – GDM