Second strike scrutiny obscures larger question about Trump’s boat attacks

U.S. Navy Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, left, and U.S. Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrive for a closed door classified meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill in Washington on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. Democratic and Republican lawmakers on Thursday came away with starkly different conclusions after top military officers showed them video of an attack on a boat suspected of carrying drugs, including a follow-up strike that killed two survivors of the first missile. (Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times)

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and JULIAN E. BARNES

As Congress parses the details of a follow-on strike that killed initial survivors of President Donald Trump’s first boat attack on Sept. 2, a much larger issue risks getting lost: whether Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have caused the military to commit crimes in a score of attacks.

Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the Sept. 2 operation, on Thursday showed lawmakers a video of the attack. The briefing was part of a congressional effort to understand his decision to order a second strike and determine whether the survivors of the first one remained “in the fight” or were technically shipwrecked, making it a war crime to kill them.

There have been shifting narratives emerging from the Pentagon, and the video showing the minutes before the second strike has been interpreted several ways. But each interpretation entails analogizing the actions of suspected drug runners to actual combat activities. The comparisons are strained at best, legal experts say, because the laws of war were not written for and do not fit a drug smuggling situation.

“Debate over when a shipwrecked crew member loses protection from attack misses the point,” said Geoffrey S. Corn, who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues. “The real problem here is the dubious and legally overbroad assertion that the United States is justified in using wartime authority against a criminal problem.”

As a matter of plain reality, an unarmed speedboat, even if it is carrying cocaine, is not a warship. And none of the 11 people aboard — not merely the two initial survivors, but also the nine people the U.S. military killed in its first strike — were fighting anyone.

The Sept. 2 boat attack was the first in Trump’s policy of directing the military to summarily kill people who are suspected of smuggling drugs at sea as if they are enemy soldiers on a battlefield. The military has gone on to attack 21 more such boats, killing 87 people in all, according to the administration.

The conversation about whether that campaign amounts to murder has largely taken place among experts in laws governing the use of armed force.

The United States has long handled the problem of maritime drug smuggling by using the Coast Guard to intercept boats and to arrest people. That echoes how it works on land: Police officers who believe people are dealing drugs arrest them, and if they are convicted, they serve time in prison. They are not executed.

It would be a crime if officers instead simply gunned down suspected drug dealers in the street. Similarly, a military force is not allowed to target civilians, and being a suspected criminal does not make someone lose civilian status. In peacetime, targeting a civilian is murder. In an armed conflict, targeting a civilian is a war crime.

To justify the killings, Trump has declared that the United States is in a formal armed conflict against drug cartels, and that smuggling boat crews are “combatants” — all because he has “determined” so.

While Congress has not authorized an armed conflict, a memo by the president’s appointees at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts his claim that there is one. Based on that premise, it says the drugs suspected of being aboard the boats are lawful military targets because cartels could use the profits to finance their purported war efforts, according to people who have seen the memo.

It is difficult to find people knowledgeable about the relevant body of law and not working for Trump who think the United States is really in an armed conflict. The essential problem is that trafficking illegal drugs, while a serious crime, is different from an armed attack.

And to the extent the administration has tried to offer substantive justifications for Trump’s purported determination, they appear to collapse under scrutiny.

The White House has highlighted the deaths of tens of thousands of American drug users a year from overdoses. But even if those deaths somehow amounted to an armed attack, the surge in overdoses over the past decade was mostly caused by fentanyl that comes from labs in Mexico, which use Chinese chemicals. The dramatic increase has not been fueled by cocaine that comes on boats from South America.

The Trump administration has also suggested that it can use armed force against suspected drug runners as a matter of the collective self-defense of other countries whose security forces sometimes clash with well-armed cartel goons, such as Colombia and Mexico. But the presidents of both those countries have condemned the boat attacks.

Against that backdrop, a broad range of experts in the laws governing the use of lethal force have called the administration’s armed conflict theory nonsensical. Trump and Hegseth, they argue, have been giving illegal orders to the troops under their command to commit crimes.

With the notable exception of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., most lawmakers who have been arguing that the boat attacks are murders have been Democrats, who do not control Congress.

Until recently, however, most of Trump’s fellow Republicans have shied away from exercising oversight. A Nov. 28 Washington Post article that renewed attention to the Sept. 2 attack — focused on the follow-up strike — has made some Republicans in Congress willing to ask harder questions.

The video, described by people who saw it, shows a strike destroy the boat and kill nine people. When the smoke cleared, two survivors clung to the overturned hull. They tried to flip it, climbed on and waved — possibly at a military aircraft. A follow-up strike left only water.

People debating whether the second strike was a war crime have strained to fit such details into armed-conflict concepts.

To be protected as “shipwrecked,” naval combatants can’t take hostile actions. Could the attempt to flip the hull be interpreted as combat activity, on the theory they might have been trying to reach cocaine, which the administration has portrayed as a weapon? Soldiers on a battlefield can’t be killed if they “surrender.” Could their wave be seen as an offer to do so?

Such parsing of the details of the second strike could end up being a favor to the Trump administration. The idea that something was bad about that particular strike implicitly suggests the first one on that boat — and all the other attacks on other boats — was fine. And the exercise reinforces the premise that the situation should be thought about through the lens of an armed conflict.

The larger question now is whether the belated bipartisan interest in that particular strike will generate momentum for a broader look at the entire killing spree that Trump and Hegseth have led the U.S. military to perform, said Rebecca Ingber, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law and a former State Department expert in the law of war.

“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” she said.

She added: “The administration’s evolving justification for the second strike only lays bare the absurdity of their legal claims for the campaign as a whole — that transporting drugs is somehow the equivalent of wartime hostilities.”