The U.S. military’s war on drugs in Latin America has a (borrowed) name. “Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted Thursday. “Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and SOUTHCOM, this mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood—and we will protect it.”
Hegseth made the announcement on social media; he hasn’t held a press conference since late June.
And the Pentagon’s 20th known boat strike killed four more people on Wednesday, raising the death toll in these U.S. attacks to at least 80 people, CBS News reported.
ICYMI: To date, “U.S. officials have not provided specific evidence that the vessels were smuggling drugs or posed a threat to the United States” on any of the 20 known strikes, CBS reminds readers. And U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk said this week there are “strong indications” of “extrajudicial killings” in the Pentagon’s boat attacks.
“From what we know, these instances violate international human rights law,” he told French media.
Notable: It wasn’t immediately clear how Hegseth’s announcement relates to the pre-existing Operation Southern Spear, an effort to “operationalize” the use of aerial and seaborne drones that the Navy’s 4th Fleet began running in the region in January.
A widening window into the White House’s legal decision-making process is emerging after more reporting Thursday from Charlie Savage of the New York Times, who has been tracking the development of a secret memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The memo declared “extrajudicial killings of people suspected of running drugs were lawful as a matter of Mr. Trump’s wartime powers,” which Savage reports “contradicts a broad range of critics, who have rejected the idea that there is any armed conflict and have accused Mr. Trump of illegally ordering the military to commit murders.”
The conclusion of the memo also “offers potential legal defenses if a prosecutor were to charge administration officials or troops for involvement in the killings. Everyone in the chain of command who follows orders that comply with the laws of war has battlefield immunity, the memo says, because it is an armed conflict,” the Times reports.
Expert reax: “It would be difficult to establish that the cargo on these vessels was a military objective under the law of war because there is no obvious connection between a shipment of drugs and military action by these supposed groups,” said former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane.
Another seemingly confusing wrinkle: “Despite concluding that an armed conflict is underway, the memo also says the operation is not covered by the War Powers Resolution,” Savage writes. Continue reading (gift link), here.
New: Just 29% of Americans support the U.S. military killing drug suspects without the involvement of a court or judge, according to survey results from Reuters/Ipsos published Friday.
More than half openly opposed the killings (51%), including 27% of Republicans polled in a survey of 1,200 adults that concluded this week.
Less than half supported designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (47%), including 75% of Republicans compared to just 22% of Democrats surveyed.
And starting a war to depose Venezuela’s leader? Just 21% of Americans supported it versus 47% opposed—including 49% of voters who said they are not aligned with the GOP or Democrats. Read the rest, here.
Additional reading: “Family of Fisherman Killed in U.S. Military Strike Says It Wants Justice,” the New York Times reported Thursday from Colombia.
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1969, NASA launched Apollo 12, its second moon-landing mission.
Industry
Boeing Defense workers have approved a new contract, ending a strike that idled fighter-jet and weapons production in St. Louis for three months. “The roughly 3,200 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 837 voted 68% in favor of approving the five-year contract. They will start returning to work as early as Sunday,” Reuters reported on Thursday. The New York Times also has a report, here.
Anduril says it will build an autonomous vessel prototype in Korea. It’ll be the first fruit of a partnership with shipbuilding tidal HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, and is intended to lead to subsequent vessels built at the former Foss Shipyard in Seattle, Wash., the company said. The goal is to have infrastructure in place to compete for the Navy’s Modular Attack Surface Craft, or MASC, program, a combination of the service’s previous large and medium unmanned surface vessel programs. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports, here.
Related: See “How American and Chinese Drone Arsenals Stack Up,” via the Wall Street Journal reporting Friday.
Blue Origin’s giant reusable rocket matches SpaceX’s landing on second flight. Ten months after missing its “stretch goal” of sticking the landing in its maiden flight, the heavylift New Glenn booster touched down safely on a landing ship Thursday after launching a probe toward Mars. “I think New Glenn is the most promising competitor for SpaceX right now because it is the only other medium/heavy-lift launcher with reusability. ULA’s Vulcan and Arianespace’s Ariane 6 missed the boat on reusability and have no real chance at being cost-competitive,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense One in January. Space-dot-com has more, here.
Fresh possible U.S. arms sales include the first batch of assistance to Taiwan since Trump took office in January. That pending sale includes “spare and repair parts, consumables and accessories, and repair and return support for F-16, C-130, and Indigenous Defense Fighter aircraft” for about $330 million, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced Thursday.
And in a smaller package intended for Iraq, the U.S. is on the verge of selling Baghdad an array of communications equipment for a “country-wide repeater system” totalling about $100 million. DSCA has details. Congress could object to either of these packages, though that prospect seems unlikely.
It’s now been a week since SecDef Hegseth announced his arms procurement makeover from the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington. “Move faster and invest more—or we just might make you,” was how Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams characterized his effort.
Second opinion: “There’s nothing remotely transformative about this strategy. The admin is simply fulfilling arms industry demands for bigger, longer contracts, reduced weapons testing, and the ability to determine contract prices. Of course, they’re justifying it all by fearmongering on China,” says Julia Gledhill of the Washington-based Stimson Center think tank, writing Thursday on social media. “The result will be unfettered weapons development and production—regardless of need, cost, or reliability. Hard to imagine how military contractors could tighten their grip on USA, Inc… but here we are,” she added.
Additional reading:
Trump 2.0
Developing: Trump’s State Department says four left-wing groups in Europe are anti-fascist “foreign terrorist organizations.” The groups span Germany, Italy and Greece, and State Secretary Marco Rubio said Thursday he plans to announce the terrorist designations sometime next week.
Rubio: “Groups affiliated with this movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism,’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas,” he said in a statement Thursday.
The groups include Germany-based “Antifa Ost,” two organizations from Greece—Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense—and one out of Italy the State Department refers to as the “Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front.”
By the way: Antifa Ost—Antifa east, in German—is “not a formal organization but a label used by German police, intelligence services, and media to describe a cluster of more militant anti-fascist activists in eastern Germany,” extremism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam noted on social media Thursday.
The designations come at least partly in response to physical attacks against neo-Nazis in Germany, including this 2023 Dresden court case involving beatings of far-right extremists using clubs and hammers. The other three groups have carried out select attacks over the past two years that have included explosive devices, but those did not result in injuries, Reuters reports.
Additional reading:
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