the military ramifications of a war with Drug Cartels

[Ssnake]

I think Step 1 would be to force every decision maker to watch all episodes of Narcos/Narcos: Mexico to get a minimum understanding of the complexities, and what has been tried, and all the things that failed.

The most promising strategy is to follow the money trail. Unfortunately that's also when you will quickly meet the biggest resistance because of how well the cartels have corrupted regular business and politicians. If you abandon the rule of law in pursuit of freezing assets, you also invite the abuse by those freezing the assets. Abusive application of asset forfeiture is already a problem in the US. As a minimum, those who freeze assets must never profit from it.

[Roman Alymov]

1 minute ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

I travelled to Mexico on vacation once in 2009.  I was in a very touristy area.  The entire area was surrounded by Mexican Army with guns in hand.  The local guide suggested it was unsafe outside of the cordon.  

The same in Egypt/ I was surprised to see soldiers not just rambling around/sitting on their checkpoint (surrounded by concrete wall about 1.5 m high to provide sort of fortification) but stand with their AKs ready in hands and aimed at the road.

4 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

If no other military solution presents itself then blockade Mexico.  Nothing comes in without inspection.  Anything across an unregulated border is a target.  All that can be done on our side of the border without violating Mexican territorial sovereignty. The downside is that it only gets the little fish and is ruinously expensive.

Useless in the age of drones. Simple DIY drone assembled by student from Made in China alibaba componnets could carry cargo of drugs (thousands of doses of chemical drug) for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles, directly to the hands of middlemen in USA city or some remote farm, or just field near highway....

[Roman Alymov]

For illustration sake: Mexico and Ukraine maps compared

[Tim the Tank Nut]

I've always wanted to see Egypt but it's too iffy for me.  Did you feel like it was safe or were you glad to make it home?

As far as the drones go, that risk has to be dealt with no matter what.  The war in your neighborhood has made it clear that drones are here to stay and plenty deadly.

[Skywalkre]

11 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

If we have the intel and have had it for years that means the Mexican government also has the intel.  If they have not acted by now at what point are they culpable?  Never?  Modern Fentanyl is instantly addictive (if you survive it).  Many addicts are exposed to it through gateway drugs.  I get the idea of play stupid games, win stupid prizes but if we are going that route with our citizenry then we need to go that route with our neighbors.

If no other military solution presents itself then blockade Mexico.  Nothing comes in without inspection.  Anything across an unregulated border is a target.  All that can be done on our side of the border without violating Mexican territorial sovereignty. The downside is that it only gets the little fish and is ruinously expensive.

My takeaway was that we probably weren't sharing all this intel with Mexico for understandable reasons.

Border Patrol has been begging for more equipment to inspect incoming trade forever.  Most of the Fentanyl comes across via traditional shipping means (shipping or truck on the border).  I don't think you'll get any disagreement from folks who say inspect it all... I think we here are just underestimating the logistical challenge of doing that (along with the cost).

On top of that some posters keep focusing on drugs... cartels have diversified in years.  They're massive players in agriculture and other business in Mexico and Mexico is apparently our top trading partner (I had to doublecheck that stat... but I guess it makes sense when you factor in agriculture especially).  Say we could blockade and check everything for drugs... you still have to go into Mexico proper and deal with the cartels because there's no way to scan an avocado to know if it's coming from a farm run normally or by a cartel.  Military action will still be needed... it just can't be done by us directly.

[Tim the Tank Nut]

Things can't stay as they are.  The human cost is staggering and it is only going to get worse.  No type of law enforcement has the resources that the .mil has.

As a practical matter ALL of the drugs are imported.  The amount manufactured in the USA is trivial.  At this level it really is a national security issue.

[Roman Alymov]

11 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

I've always wanted to see Egypt but it's too iffy for me.  Did you feel like it was safe or were you glad to make it home?

First, i have to say my experience may be not representative of entire Egypt, as it was Hurgada, Red Sea resot region (originally small villahe and military airbase on desert shore) separated from heavily populated Nile valley by hundreds of miles of desert. All locals living in the area (mostly hotel staff) are, as i understand, filtered and constantly screened by local version of Gestapo. Note it was before "Arab spring".

Second, it was technically safe in the meaning "well guarded" (not only all cars and busses were checked on entering tourist area, but also each hotel was equiped with anti-ram gate devices (always closed and with dedicated guy opening and closing them), every vehicle was checked on entry and so on.  Still, it was definitely "guys, we are in civil war zone" experience if you take a minute to think about why all this precautions are needed.  At least i felt no desire to ramble around, like i did in Tunisia.

General inpression from the trip was "Sea is nice, nothing to see on shore, and locals are redundant here" (may our Egyptian participants forgive me).

[Tim the Tank Nut]

Thanks,
I would still like to come see you someday (and the tanks!) but geopolitical concerns and finances make it unlikely for the foreseeable future.  You could probably use somebody with experience on US tanks for a day or two... It'd be better than getting killed in Mexico.

 

 

[Skywalkre]

32 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

Things can't stay as they are.  The human cost is staggering and it is only going to get worse.  No type of law enforcement has the resources that the .mil has.

I don't think anyone would disagree with you on this.  The point I'm trying to make at least is that this isn't some quick in-and-out operation where a few weeks of military ops solves everything.  In that interview I referred to I got the impression previous administrations have looked at escalating this but lessons learned over the last two decades have shown how easily this could get real ugly real fast... and then we'd have a clusterfuck right on our border.

I've complained for years here on TN how our government can't think past the next election.  This would be a wonderful time to prove me wrong... have both sides get together (and there is bipartisan support for measures on this, such as increased equipment to scan incoming goods for drugs) and come up with an agreement that would last beyond administrations and single Congresses.  We've done it before with our commitment to Columbia and our efforts there.  Let's step up and do the same in Mexico.

Edited January 21 by Skywalkre

[Roman Alymov]

26 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

Thanks,
I would still like to come see you someday (and the tanks!) but geopolitical concerns and finances make it unlikely for the foreseeable future.   

You are wellcome! Tourist flow is recovering here (mostly Chineese and Gulf people are coming now), but Russia is on another side of the globe from US anyway, except if one cross Bering Strait  - but it will still be many timezones away from Central Russia.

27 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

 You could probably use somebody with experience on US tanks for a day or two... It'd be better than getting killed in Mexico.

Well, as result of new war our collection of US&Co armor is growing again.....

[glenn239]

5 hours ago, sunday said:

Wait until the BBC tells him Putin supports the cartels...

We finally found the war Stuart does not wish to fight.  Oddly, it's the one that would actually benefit the United States if successful.  I wonder if those two things are connected?

[Mighty_Zuk]

11 hours ago, glenn239 said:

Neville Chamberlain called.  He wants Appeasement back when you are done licking Cartel boots with it.

Chief TN appeaser calling another appeaser.

[seahawk]

The obvious choice is to treat the users as the dealers. It would be nice to see 95% of leftist Hollywood going behind bars.

[Der Zeitgeist]

14 hours ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

Please note this is NOT in the FFZ

 

Questions:

What can we do?

How Can we do it?

Will it work?

What happens if we do nothing?

What are the consequences of a domestic military strike on foreign nationals and is such a strike necessary?

Doesn't really matter as long as everyone is having fun.

Like most Trump policies, this one will likely turn out to be highly entertaining to his base while being mostly ineffective in its goals (see "Little Rocket Man"/North Korean nukes during his first term).

[Stuart Galbraith]

2 hours ago, Mighty_Zuk said:

Chief TN appeaser calling another appeaser.

Oh, dont feed him. He lives off the negativity. He was one of those people Oddball was always warning people about.

Several years ago I read a book called, if memory serves, On the causes of war. And it pointed out that most times the way out of a war was the very reverse of how you went into it. You have insecurity, ergo, you fight to achieve insecurity, war ends. Or an enemy invades you, ergo, you invade him, you thrash out an agreement to end the war.

The problem with the Narco's, they arent a Government. They just own one. They arent an armed forces, but they can arm like one. They arent an intelligence service, but they can acquire information like one. They are essentially a ghost government. People want to declare war against it, but they dont declare what achievements they want to see at the end of it. An end to drugs? Its not going to happen, there is too much money. End of corruption in the Mexican Government? Ditto.

If Americans want to achieve those ends in Mexico, buy them off. Pay the cartels not to supply heroin, cocaine, whatever. Pay off the Mexican Government to do stuff to the cartels that dont play ball. It will be a whole lot more effective than the blunt force of military capabilities, shoehorned into trying to achieve ends they were never designed for.

Thats my solution. Glenn doesnt offer a solution, and nobody else seems to here either. We can talk the kinetic effects of 2000lb bombs on the hacienda's of drug barons, but whats the point? Short of an objective, its military wankdom dressed up as a solution, which is presumably why it was preposed. Perhaps Trump wants to declare war on someone he thinks cant fight back effectively, but that isnt the same as saying its a war that will be won. If it cant be won, if it cant achieve ends that make a difference, then why fight it?

[Stuart Galbraith]

1 hour ago, seahawk said:

The obvious choice is to treat the users as the dealers. It would be nice to see 95% of leftist Hollywood going behind bars.

 Back in the 1960's they were arresting people for posession of Marijuana and sending them away for 10 years. Did it stop people smoking Marijuana? No. So what was the point?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sinclair_(poet)

Granted on the comedy value of seeing Hollywood either behind bars or all strung out, but is it achieving anything that will create change? No. This hardball approach was already tried early on, and it didnt work. Heck they did it all through prohibition and never once stopped criminals bringing alcohol in.

Hell, just goddamn legalize it. Then tax it. Use the money to set up drug rehabilitation areas. In Glasgow right now, they are providing areas where users can take drugs, even get it tested to make sure it not a bad batch. If people really are concerned about helping users, do that. Deaths would drop off a cliff overnight if we were all doing stuff like that all over the country.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66929385

 

[ink]

I have a lot of sympathy for the attempt to apply a military solution to the cartels (i.e., not a war on drugs, drug use, or even really drug smuggling). The way I see it, there's no military solution to the the problems in the brackets above and it would be folly to try. But what could be achieved - and this current US administration is just the kind that would try it - is to raise the cost of being a kingpin. Currently, there is no real cost to this career - yes, there's a bit of a risk of jail in Mexico or death in a fight with Mexican security forces, but both of those are pretty unlikely eventualities and at least one of them (jail) appears to not really worry the biggest bosses. So, a sustained campaign of intelligence-led extra-judicial killings might just raise the cost high enough to make it an unpalatable career choice. However, you would have to be ready for the chaos (mostly in Mexico) that this would cause, as well as any reprisals (given that these are not powerless organisations to whom violence is unfamiliar). There would, of course, also be a reputation and moral cost, at home as well as internationally, but if anyone can weather that, it's Trump.

So, yes, I think some sort of military effort might have certain benefits (as long as you don't expect it to solve drug use or trafficking, but just to breakup the larger organisations*).

 

 

* Much like Israel's campaign in Gaza can't hope to stop Palestinians and Arabs hating Israel, but it can hope to bust up Hamas as an organised force capable of Oct 7-style attacks. Though, obviously, in neither case are there any guarantees that it'll work.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Id not agree there is no price to being in the industry, not when Escobar died in a gunfight, and El Chapo is in prison for life. I think sadly, for some people who were brought up in dangerous environment, doing a dangerous job is water off a ducks back. Unless you do something about the rewards for criminal behavour, they simply arent going to be put off just by it getting more dangerous. It already IS dangerous.

 

[sunday]

The case of China, according to wikipedia

Quote

Initially, the efforts towards curtailing opium consumption and production were sporadic and mostly ineffective due to the lack of resources available to the newly-formed government. However, in 1952, the "Directive on Eradication of Drug Epidemic" was issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and the campaign was reinvigorated with a new wave, this time more thoroughly planned, more severe in its measures and accompanied by mass mobilization. Opium consumption was treated as a political issue of class character. Propaganda against narcotics was carried out by local CCP cells. Meetings concerning addiction were part of the new mass line. The testimony of former addicts was important at all levels of this discussion, which took place in both the mass media and small community groups and rehabilitation centers. Mass meetings, slogans, and flags used the words of ex-addicts. Addiction was denounced as antisocial and unhealthy, a result of imperialism and capitalism, and stashes of narcotics and consumption equipment were publicly burned. Consequently, opium trade was banned and opium-producing regions were planted with new crops. Complex measures aimed at addict rehabilitation were carried out, often compulsory: in urban centers, anti-opium clinics were opened, and in rural areas addicts were isolated and forced to bear withdrawal symptoms. Difficult cases of addiction were required to go through labor reform similar to the forced labor of landowners, businessmen, and other groups considered "social criminals". Hundreds of drug distributors were executed, and tens of thousands were imprisoned. The Chinese government is generally credited with eradicating both consumption and production of opium during the 1950s using unrestrained repression and social reform.[58][59] Although by 1953 the issue of opium consumption in urban areas of the PRC was considered to have been solved,[57] rural poppy farming continued up until 1959, especially in areas populated by ethnic minorities, such as in Liangshan and Aba, where opium poppy cultivation and sale accounted for a significant portion of the peasants' income.[56]

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

Lets also credit the PRC in the late 1950's for the 'Great Leap Forward', that resulted in the deaths of between 15 and 55 million people. I submit, much larger than any drug addiction would have killed in the same period, and surely demonstrative that there are few things beyond an authoritarian power from doing when they choose to do them. The USSR also was similar effective at suppressing drug addiction. Or at least, certainly presented the idea they were effective. Interestingly they were significantly less effective in combating alcoholism.

Try doing these kind of things in a Democracy, and you run into numerous problems of civil liberties and proportionality. In fact, its only by throwing those things out the window, that Peru has made any progress against their gangs.

Are Americans ready for a force of Judge Dredds on the streets, and jailing for life or executing drug dealers? Because you can do that. I dont think you are ready for the human rights implications that go with it though.

[ink]

12 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

 

Are Americans ready for a force of Judge Dredds on the streets, and jailing for life or executing drug dealers? Because you can do that. I dont think you are ready for the human rights implications that go with it though.

Probably not (though the militarisation of police forces across the US has been a topic on here already), but I think they'd be very ready for US special forces (and drones, air force, and other elements) to work with their mexican counterparts on snuffing out some high-level cartel personnel.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Of course. But what is the point of putting such men at risk (not to least the expense, in a President determined to cut costs), when its not going to make any difference? If you can say 'This will be 100 percent cutting the supply of drugs for the next 10 years', Id say sure, its worth a try. But 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent? What difference does it make, when the market will adjust, either through supplying cut drugs, or just putting the price up?

I do find it bizarre that a country that so embraces capitalism and the free market, is going all in to suppress market instincts. logic dicates that if you embrace that market, it gets less violent, the price will come down, and better supply goes up. You can even tax it. This is precisely what happened with alcohol. Oh, there are still holdouts in West Virginia, but hardly enough to be considered a real problem.

One can condemn the drug trade as an evil, but you know what, so was slavery. it took 200 years to suppress it, took considerable investment not least from Britain to stop it happening. It created a civil war and huge number of collateral casualties, and even then, slavery didnt really so much go away, as change into things like human traffiking. We ended up enslaving white women as sex slaves, instead of black people as cotton pickers. It certainly doesnt make the basic effort any less moral or just, you just have to ask, would everyone that saw what resulted from it have embarked on it if they knew what it would mean? Probably not.

Same here I think. I think the only way you are going to stop the South Americans exporting drugs is either give them free trade or export their excess people to make them less poor, or take them over and run them as colonies wholesale. And Americans are not ready for all these things. In fact, I dont think they really know what they want here, other than  throwing military force vaguely at a problem will  somehow solve it. Thats how we have cluelessly used military force for the last 60 years, and it really has to stop.

[futon]

The opium problem in China was going to addessed by Nationalists Chinese (both CKS side and Wang side) as well. Once the wars all finally ended for China, whichever one from the three factions that would emerge from the end of it all, addressing the opium problem was naturally next.

[sunday]

17 minutes ago, futon said:

The opium problem in China was going to addessed by Nationalists Chinese (both CKS side and Wang side) as well. Once the wars all finally ended for China, whichever one from the three factions that would emerge from the end of it all, addressing the opium problem was naturally next.

Intentions are well and good, and Chinese govts were again opium use since the end of the 18th Century. No one managed that until the 1950s.

[Stuart Galbraith]

20 minutes ago, futon said:

The opium problem in China was going to addessed by Nationalists Chinese (both CKS side and Wang side) as well. Once the wars all finally ended for China, whichever one from the three factions that would emerge from the end of it all, addressing the opium problem was naturally next.

I remember reading in Christopher Robbins book on Air America, that remnants of the Kuomintang in Burma were central to founding the Golden Triangle.