More than 223 people have been murdered in the open waters off South America by the United States military under orders of Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. When I call it murder, that’s because none of these people have been proven to be drug smugglers or have been given the opportunity to defend themselves from accusations. Even if it turned out that they were drug smugglers, as claimed, and even if it turned out that they were bringing drugs to the United States, a dubious proposition, the penalty for smuggling drugs is not summary execution.
President Trump doesn’t care. Hegseth doesn’t care. The MAGA faithful don’t care. But most disturbingly, the Southern Command of the United States doesn’t care.
Southern Command provided little detail about the strike that took place on Sunday but noted that intelligence reports said the vessel was trafficking narcotics and traveling on a route used by drug smugglers.
“Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere executed a lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific,” Southern Command said in a statement, referring to a new military unit set up to expand the Pentagon’s war against drugs in cooperation with regional allies.
Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of Southern Command, said in the statement on social media announcing the strike, “When I ordered the establishment of Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, it was precisely for this purpose: to accelerate, synchronize, and execute lethal actions against these destabilizing narco-terrorist networks.”
By adding the word “terrorist” to narco, which ignores any cognizable definition of terrorism and is merely a characterization designed to provide a simplistic justification for murdering people who are deemed criminals, General Donovan embraces the lie that it’s acceptable to commit murder. Perhaps it lets him sleep at night. His predecessor, Admiral Alvin Holsey, refused to lie to himself.
This is the new ethos of the American military. Lethality. When you’re ordered to kill, you kill, no questions asked.
Hegseth: We are stating clearly that America’s warriors will be fiercely supported and our military’s lethal edge will not be compromised by desk-bound bureaucracy or lawyers in the cheap seats pic.twitter.com/8MQOwAKIbL
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2026
It’s not as if Hegseth was unclear about his views on lawyers when he was confirmed as Secretary of Defense. One of his first acts was to pull a Dick the Butcher.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to fire the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force represents an opening salvo in his push to remake the military into a force that is more aggressive on the battlefield and potentially less hindered by the laws of armed conflict.
Former JAG lawyer David French, wrote about the consequences of Hegseth’s disdain for the constraints of law and lawyers. This can be seen in Donovan’s willingness to order the murder of people in boats on the open seas. If the Commander in Chief orders their murder, and there is no JAG to opine that this is unlawful, a war crime, and should not be done, they will be killed. Of course, it remains quite possible that even if the JAG lawyers advised Donovan that this was a war crime, he would do it anyway, but that’s a different problem.
Granted, we’ve become increasingly inured to the government engaging in illegal conduct. Granted, we’ve become increasingly inclined to despise people, dehumanize them and care nothing about the harm done to them or the pain they suffer. Granted, calling the people in these boats, whose names we never know, faces we never see and stories we never hear, “narco-terrorists” makes their murder go down easy.
But once the military disconnects its orders from the law, the Constitution and the counsel of “lawyers in the cheap seats,” there is no limit to what it will do if commanded. If and when the constitutional crisis happens, the question turns on whether the military, the guys with the guns, will back the president or the Constitution. Hegseth doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution. There’s no doubt what he will order.