Ivory Tower Thinking and Narcotics Boats
The debate over U.S. military interdiction of drug‑running vessels has reached a fever pitch. The spark was a report about a second strike on a suspected trafficking boat on September 2, 2025. Let’s be clear: engaging shipwrecked or wounded combatants violates the laws of war, and answers are rightly demanded about that incident. But this article is not about that strike. It is about the broken focus of the commentary that followed.
The bottom line is, if history will judge U.S. military intervention harshly, it will also judge harshly those who trivialize the international drug trade as a mere “law enforcement problem.” That claim is not just wrong, it is dangerous. The narcotics industry is vast, sophisticated, and embedded in the governments of multiple nation states. To call it “criminal” in the narrow domestic sense is to deliberately blind oneself to reality.
if history will look back critically at the U.S. military intervention to stem the supply of dangerous narcotics, it is bound to also look back critically at those who consider the international drug trade a mere “law enforcement problem.” Its size, scope, sophistication, and deep roots inside the governments of several countries make such assertions wrong, and dangerous.
It’s time to start accepting that there is a need for military intervention to stem the industrial-scale supply of drugs pouring into the United States. It’s time to change the focus on the actual problem and start proposing solutions. The practice of paying lip service to an enterprise actively killing tens of thousands of Americans just to score points against disagreeable methods is at a minimum callous and at worst inhumane. It isn’t a “pro-strike” position to be against the international drug trade or to support a military response to an international problem.
The critics’ fixation on the administration’s decision‑making has become a distraction from the real problem. The global narcotics trade is a transnational threat of unprecedented magnitude. The entire trade is designed around international law for the express purpose of avoiding a comprehensive response, and no police force on earth can match it. Even those who coined the term “transnational” should recognize how absurd it is to suggest that domestic law enforcement can scale to meet a problem of this size.
Yet, many insist on characterizing the problem as “criminal” in order to deliberately narrow the suite of possible solutions. This is ivory tower thinking: “I come from a place I believe could scale up law enforcement to match the problem, therefore scaling up law enforcement is the only correct solution.” This view shifts the burden from the assailant to the assailed, demanding that states absorb limitless harm in any form so long as the threat retains a “criminal” label and not a military one. That position is both unworkable and irresponsible. Somali piracy proved that when criminal activity exceeds the capacity of law enforcement, the law bends. Between 2008 and 2013, nearly forty nations treated piracy as a quasi‑armed conflict, suspending the ordinary rules of UNCLOS to destroy pirate networks on land and sea. That precedent cannot be wished away.
This article will show how ivory tower thinking produces unworkable proposals, demonstrate the sheer scope of the narcotics trade, and remind readers of what happens when criminal enterprises cross the threshold into military problems. The critics may prefer to score points with clever dismissals, but the facts demand a more serious focus.
Why The Real Problem Matters
The human toll of narcotics is staggering. As one California legislator noted, more Americans died from overdoses in 2022 and 2023 than U.S. soldiers killed in every war since World War II combined.
The scale of the trade is equally astonishing. The Coast Guard seized 255 tons of cocaine bound for the United States, but that total is from an estimated global production volume of 3,708 tons, or about 6-7%. This is not the work of backyard dealers but of nation‑states. Colombia alone dedicates 888 square miles — about 9% of its arable land — to coca cultivation, producing 65% of the world’s cocaine. Peru and Bolivia account for most of the rest. To compare, wheat occupies about 9% of U.S. arable land. Believing Colombia is uninvolved in the drug business is naïve.
Economically, the industry rivals household names. Inflation‑adjusted estimates based on 2008-2010 numbers would value just the Latin American drug trade at $27–$43 billion before accounting for user growth in the same period. That’s roughly the size of Starbucks, whose global revenues were $36 billion in 2024—and we are comparing those global revenues just to Latin America. With global narcotics users rising from 210 million in 2009 to nearly 300 million today, the Latin American trade likely now approaches the scale of PepsiCo with global sales of $70 billion.
With this kind of money, the narcotics industry has already destabilized Central and South America politically, socially, and economically. To argue that intervention is destabilizing is to pretend the region is stable now. It is not. It is a hub for industrial‑scale drug production and distribution, and that reality is the problem. Law enforcement cannot, and could never be, matched to the task of stopping drug production and distribution at modern scale.
Supply is the Problem
Many people fault demand for drugs as the true problem, and the industry as the natural outgrowth rather than the source. It’s an interesting argument to hear from the generation who lived through the legal battles against big tobacco. To repeat the lesson, the narcotics industry is not driven by demand alone, it thrives because supply has been scaled to industrial levels. It is simple supply‑side economics: when producers make more, more cheaply, the market expands, prices fall, consumption rises, and the overall economy for the product grows. Abundant supply fuels demand because lower prices and easier access pull more buyers in. Take the example of the car in the time of the horse-drawn carriage, what demand was there for cars before Henry Ford mass manufactured the Model T?
The best analogy to conceptualize the problem is fast fashion. Clothing brands flood stores with cheap garments, and consumers buy more than they otherwise would. The drug trade operates on the same principle, but with margins that are almost unimaginable. The DEA has estimated that producers can lose 90 percent of their product and still remain profitable. That means cartels can afford to give drugs away to open new markets, confident that the sheer scale of production guarantees profit.
This is why focusing on law enforcement alone is misguided. It is like recommending the forcible removal of Pepsi products (which includes brands like Frito‑Lay, Quaker, and Gatorade) from every person’s home rather than targeting the company’s global supply chain. The only effective strategy against a multinational enterprise is to target its sources of supply and distribution. In the case of narcotics, those sources lie in foreign countries, which makes the problem inherently international and beyond the reach of domestic law enforcement.
A Deliberate Omission of Relevant International Law
Any argument about narcotics boat strikes that ignores the Somali piracy interventions of 2008–2017 should be treated skeptically. The operations were not a perfect analogue, but they remain the closest and best precedent. International law is built by state practice, and this was the moment when nearly forty nations deliberately destroyed criminal groups on land and sea. To dismiss it is like refusing to compare an apple to another apple because the names are different.
The Somali precedent matters because each of those nations operated under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which prohibits killing pirates and treats piracy as a law enforcement problem. Yet all chose to suspend those principles under UN Security Council Resolution 1851. Each had to reconcile domestic law with international prohibitions and justify lethal targeting of criminals. From the U.S. perspective, the question was straightforward: what problem justified interdiction?
In 2011, Somali piracy cost the world about $18 billion annually, including coalition operations. Pirates killed sixty‑two hostages between 2007 and 2012, only four of them Americans, all from a single incident that did not even involve a commercial shipping vessel. Taken together, these figures suggest that the Somali piracy intervention was relatively modest in its direct impact on the United States. By comparison, the economic cost of the opioid crisis was estimated at $504 billion in 2015. Yet, intervention was appropriate in Somalia to protect global commercial shipping interests.
Despite its modest direct impact on the United States, the campaign proceeded. The intervention destroyed the diasporic network of criminal enterprises along the Somali coast. It is estimate hundreds of pirates and support personnel were killed. It is from this example we can say, with authority, that the evolution of international law created a quasi-armed conflict that justified the attendant use of deadly force against criminal groups — whose objectives were not challenging government authority but rather the armed robbery of global shipping — and maintained that evolved posture for nearly 10 years.
Still, many argue there is nothing to be learned from this example because operations proceeded under the authority of a Security Council Resolution. It’s an interesting consideration, especially if this was still 2007, a council member wasn’t actively participating in an illegal war, and the dueling hegemons of the Security Council could agree on achieving global change, but that isn’t where we are. Such a binary view, at a minimum, overlooks the lessons to be learned from the humane conduct of the operation. UNSCR 1851 did not erase the fact that nearly forty nations had to reconcile their domestic law with UNCLOS’s prohibitions, justify lethal targeting of criminals, and sustain a decade‑long military campaign against a problem previously characterized as mere “law enforcement.” The lesson is not whether the Council spoke, but how states justified and conducted the operations once they did.
What Somalia teaches us in the current debate is to define the point when criminal activity exceeds the capacity of law enforcement, and military action becomes acceptable. Somalia had no Coast Guard, no framework to be overwhelmed. Pirates exploited a governance vacuum beside a global trade route, and the international community responded with force. That response transformed a criminal enterprise into a quasi‑armed conflict. The threshold was simple and economic — criminals disrupted global trade, and no local government could solve the problem. This is a standard we can carry forward.
There is a Better (and More Appropriate) Focus
Much has been written about the administration’s targeting of narcotics boats, and with good reason. The tools being used were forged in the war on terrorism, and the current context is not a perfect fit. But that is precisely why the Somali piracy precedent matters. The criticisms of today’s strikes echo the criticisms of that intervention: piracy was “just crime,” not war; UNCLOS prohibited killing pirates; military force was “destabilizing.” Yet nearly forty nations bent the law to meet reality, and the precedent endured for a decade. To pretend that history offers no guidance is willful blindness.
The best justification for military intervention lies in the nature of the problem itself. The global drug trade is not a backyard criminal enterprise; it is a $70 billion industry that funnels profits into governments and destabilizes entire regions. Nobel Laureate María Corina Machado has lived the consequences of a country built on criminal profits. This is an international problem, with transnational cartels deliberately designed to avoid military confrontation. Advocacy for a “law enforcement solution” is not principled restraint — it is exactly what the cartels want. Like Russia’s “little green men,” their methods are deliberate lawfare: exploiting legal categories to shield themselves from the only tool that could match their scale.
That is the point commentators must reckon with. This is a law enforcement problem because the cartels have chosen to make it one, and ivory tower thinking allows them to succeed. The Somali piracy precedent shows that when criminal activity overwhelms law enforcement frameworks, the law bends. It bent then, and it will bend again. The better focus is not dismissive snark at analogies or hand‑wringing over methods, but forthright recognition of the precedent and the scale of the threat. History will not be kind to those who refuse to see it.
MAJ Trent Kubasiak is the Chief of National Security Law with Eighth Army in the Republic of Korea. Previously, he was chief of military justice, 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum. He deployed three times to Afghanistan and once to Kuwait. He has a JD from Marquette University School of Law, Wisconsin; an LLM from the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, Virginia; and an MBA from Capella University.
(The views expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the official position of the Department of Defense.)
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
