CDR SALAMANDER: So, we Now Have the ‘War’ in ‘Drug War.’

If this is not a one-off strike and we no kidding want to go kinetic against drug smugglers at sea, we can’t do it in an effective way with armed drones. We are not always going to have land bases nearby because we can’t cover all that sea with what few overworked and under-maintained ships we have.

Almost all our allies get itchy when we start making things go boom from their territory—so that leaves GTMO and Puerto Rico.

Problem is, we no longer have the proper set of tools to do the job. The Cult of Efficiency under-armed the P-8A, so it is not as effective as it should be. As such, a multi-platform kludge would have to be put together if this becomes an ongoing mission…a highly inefficient kludge that makes the mission less efficient and more costly than it needs to be. Again.

Over to you NAVAIR, again.

Speaking of costs going up, for the bad guys, the cost of doing drug business just went up too. How will the drug producers try to regain access to our markets?

Will they fight back? We’ve impacted the people smuggling business by closing our borders. That pissed off one set of cartels. Now we are blowing up product coming out of South America, pissing off another set of cartels.

Will they take this sitting down? We’ll see.

Exit Quote: “I am quite comfortable putting this in the same category as a truck carrying arms to Al-Qaeda west of the Khyber Pass, or a group of people planting an IED in Al-Anbar.”

Yes.