Pentagon shifts to Pacific strikes seeking stronger link between targets and US drug trafficking

By Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — The Pentagon has deliberately shifted its strategy in recent weeks to striking suspected narcotraffickers in the eastern Pacific Ocean, rather than the Caribbean Sea, because administration officials believe they have stronger evidence linking cocaine transport to the US from those western routes, according to people familiar with the matter.

The intelligence suggests that cocaine is far more likely to be trafficked from Colombia or Mexico, rather than Venezuela, the sources said, raising more questions about the true purpose of the US military buildup in the Caribbean Sea.

The last four US military strikes targeting suspected drug smugglers were carried out in the eastern Pacific, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and sources said that future attacks are likely to be concentrated in that area because of the stronger link to US markets.

By contrast, there have been questions about whether every boat struck by the US in the Caribbean was actually heading toward, or sending drugs to, the US. After the first boat strike in September, for example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the vessel had likely been headed toward Trinidad and Tobago.

Venezuela is also not known to be a major source of cocaine for the US market, but the Trump administration has been aggressively trying to link Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to the drug trade while accumulating a huge military presence near Caracas.

“At the direction of the President, the Department of War is taking the fight to the cartels and defending our Homeland from Designated Terrorist Organization’s illicit activities before their violence and poison reaches our shores – this includes all of our nation’s borders,” a Pentagon official told CNN. “The Department’s newly established counter-narcotics Joint Task Force is expanding efforts on both the East and West Coasts to counter illicit drug trafficking by narco-terrorists using maritime routes.”

The Trump administration has not provided Congress with evidence to back up its claims that the 15 vessels the military has struck since September in both the Caribbean and the Pacific, killing at least 61 people, were ferrying drugs and carrying known drug traffickers.

During a classified briefing on Capitol Hill this week, Pentagon officials also told lawmakers they do not know how to gauge success in the ongoing military campaign, according to a source familiar with the closed-door session.

“They don’t know whether there’s any data or metrics that would show (the strikes are) impeding the flow of drugs, whether there has been an increase in the price due to higher demand or lower supply, like there’s just no information,” the source said. “None of the briefers could say what they’re going to do when the traffickers change their tactics. None of them could say how they’re addressing air and land routes.”

Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs said following the briefing on Thursday that administration officials confirmed that they do not necessarily know the individual identities of each person on board a vessel before they attack it.

“They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes,” Jacobs said, adding that the administration did not want to detain or try survivors in court, “because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden.” The US military briefly held and then repatriated two survivors of one of its strikes earlier this month.

Military officials also told lawmakers on Thursday that the strikes were targeting cocaine, not fentanyl.

President Donald Trump told a collection of senior military brass assembled during an unusual event in Virginia last month that the strikes were primarily targeting fentanyl transporting ships.

“These boats, they’re stacked up with bags of white powder, that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs too,” he said. “Every boat kills 25,000.”

Fentanyl killed more than double the number of Americans than cocaine did in 2023, according to US government data. By Trump’s math, the campaign against alleged drug boats thus far should prevent roughly 375,000 deaths, or slightly more than the total population of Cleveland.

Jacobs said the briefers insisted that cocaine is a “facilitating drug of fentanyl but it was not a satisfactory answer for most of us.”

“None of them could say what they’re doing for fentanyl,” said the source familiar with the briefing. “Fentanyl is the real problem here, and they’re actually not addressing fentanyl in any of these operations.”

Democrats and Republicans also want a better explanation of the legal justification for the strikes, but military lawyers have been conspicuously absent from recent congressional briefings. The legal counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was supposed to brief lawmakers on Thursday but pulled out after it became clear that lawyers from the defense secretary’s office were given a “pass” at attending, sources told CNN. Without the lawyers there, Democrats said the briefers could not fully answer their questions about the legality of the strikes.

“They didn’t even show up with the lawyers,” Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts said after the briefing. “They canceled at the last minute.”

Hegseth told reporters on Friday while traveling in Asia that he had engaged with Congress on a bipartisan basis about the strikes. But also on Friday, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker and Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, publicly released two letters they’d written to Hegseth over the last month seeking clarity on the operations, both of which have gone unanswered, the lawmakers said.

The letters requested the execute orders for the US military strikes on the boats, and the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion that CNN has reported the administration is leaning on to legally justify the strikes. Some Republican senators were shown the OLC memo by administration officials during a briefing on Wednesday, infuriating Democrats who were not invited to the briefing and have still not seen document.

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner called the move “a partisan stunt” that “is a slap in the face to Congress’ war powers responsibilities and to the men and women who serve this country.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

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