The Trump administration is defending a controversial campaign that targets and kills crews of small boats accused of smuggling drugs from South America to the U.S. But officials have sent mixed signals about who authorized deadly follow-up strikes that killed survivors visible on a burning vessel, raising legal and political questions.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he authorized and watched the initial strike on Sept. 2 but did not view a later round of strikes that sank the boat and killed survivors. “I watched that first strike live,” Hegseth said at a Cabinet meeting. “As you can imagine, the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I moved on to my next meeting.” He added that hours later he learned Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who he said had full authority, had ordered the subsequent strikes. “Adm. Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth’s attempt to separate his role from the later decision drew sharp criticism. Rep. Adam Smith, ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, called it a “CYA moment” and said a defense secretary who gives questionable orders and then blames subordinates is not providing leadership. “It seems to me Secretary Hegseth is the one who’s responsible for what happened here,” Smith said on NPR’s Morning Edition.
The legal rationale for the strikes has also been contested. The Justice Department provided Congress a memo asserting the U.S. is in a non-international armed conflict with drug cartels and that the strikes fall within the laws of war. But critics, including Smith, say the memo is internally inconsistent — portraying narcoterrorist groups as an armed threat while also suggesting the administration need not treat the campaign as a war that would require congressional authorization.
Reporting in The Washington Post said the Sept. 2 incident included two sets of strikes and that survivors of the initial attack were visible when they were struck again and killed. Hegseth initially called that reporting fake but later confirmed the basic facts.
Military experts and former JAG officers have warned that targeting civilians or killing those who are surrendering could amount to war crimes if an armed conflict exists. Human Rights Watch’s Washington director Sarah Yager rejects the premise that the U.S. is at war with narcotraffickers and argues the killings amount to murder. “It’s not a question of a war crime because there’s no war, there’s no armed conflict, so it can’t be a war crime. It is literally murder,” she said, adding that treating nonwar actions as wartime collapses protections for civilians and risks allowing strikes without rules or consequences.
President Trump and Hegseth have reiterated their justification for the campaign. Hegseth said evidence supports labeling the targets “narcoterrorists” but declined to publicly show proof. Trump claimed the strikes had saved hundreds of thousands of lives, a figure far above annual U.S. overdose deaths and at odds with the primary role of fentanyl in most overdose fatalities — a drug that typically does not enter the country by boat.
Sen. Rand Paul posted a letter he obtained showing that 21% of Coast Guard interdictions find no drugs, suggesting some lethal actions could be in error. At the Cabinet meeting, Trump said he relied on Hegseth for information and was not involved in operational details: “I still haven’t gotten a lot of information, because I rely on Pete… I didn’t know about the second strike.” But Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said, “At the end of the day, the secretary and the president are the ones directing these strikes.”
Questions about the legal basis, who issued specific orders, and whether servicemembers could face prosecution are expected to intensify when Adm. Bradley appears before Congress.