President Donald Trump has made countering the opioid epidemic a top priority of his second term, promising to build on the progress seen during his first administration. While beefing up border security and punishing drug dealers at home are essential to this mission, military leaders also say they need more resources to stop drug shipments at their source in South and Central America.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February, Admiral Alvin Holsey, Commander of United States Southern Command (SouthCom), reported that “Since 2020, we have seen a steady decline in available resources to support the [counter-narcotics] mission because of competing global requirements.”
Due to these limited resources, Holsey said, SouthCom was only able to act on nine percent of the total number of suspected illicit narcotics shipments bound for the United States. Overall, U.S. intelligence reports estimate that the military and immigration authorities are only able to interdict about 25 percent of illegal drugs coming into the country.
Senator Angus King (I-ME) pressed Holsey on this statistic during questioning before the committee. “75 percent is not being interdicted that we are aware of. Is that percentage still reasonable?” King asked.
“About ten to twenty percent is what we can get a hold of,” Holsey replied, again noting a lack of assets, particularly ships in the Caribbean.
“To me, that is straight-up unconscionable,” King said. “People are dying in my state from fentanyl overdoses and drug overdoses.”
Indeed, overdose deaths have spiraled out of control in recent years, a crisis exacerbated by the porous southern border under the Biden administration. In 2022, the nation witnessed a record 107,941 drug overdose fatalities, a significant increase from previous years. 2023 saw only slight improvement, with 105,007 deaths.
This surge has been driven largely by synthetic opioids, particularly fentanyl, which accounted for 73,838 of those deaths in 2022 and 81,083 deaths in 2023. This deadly drug is often packed into cocaine and methamphetamine coming from South and Central America.
But the failure to intercept more than about a quarter of illegal drug shipments at their source is hardly a new problem. Back in 2014, Marine General John Kelly, then the SouthCom commander, said, “Because of asset shortfalls, we’re unable to get after 74 percent of suspected maritime drug smuggling.”
Kelly told stunned senators that he was forced to “simply sit and watch [drugs] go by” on the cartels’ 30-foot “go fast” boats heading north through the Caribbean and along Central America’s Pacific coast. Despite a mandate to cut drug flows by 40 percent, Kelly said he had just five percent of the resources he needed. At the time, SouthCom had one Navy ship and four Coast Guard vessels, but said it needed 16 Navy vessels.
Despite multiple senators from both parties expressing outrage at these revelations, four years later SouthCom chief Admiral Kurt Tidd said, “Of the known [drug] tracks, we are only able to intercept 25 percent of them, about one-fourth.”
Things got particularly bad for SouthCom during the Biden administration. In 2022, SouthCom commander Army General Laura Richardson told a Senate panel that she receives just one percent of all Pentagon funding for intelligence gathering and surveillance worldwide. This allowed up to 90 percent of drug shipments to slip into U.S. waters.
The root of the problem dates back to 9/11, when the Pentagon shifted the military’s assets and attention to the Middle East.
In the 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, Congress instructed the military to take the lead on detecting and eliminating illegal narcotics shipments headed to the United States. “It was the right decision after the Warsaw Pact’s narcotic operations decreased, allowing us to focus entirely on the south,” a former Pentagon official, who wished to remain anonymous, told me in an interview. In the 1990s, when the U.S. counter-narcotics operations were at their peak, the military dispatched aircraft and numerous ships to the global south.
“We confronted vessels carrying cocaine that were coming from Colombia and other locations,” he said. “But this effort ended after the September 11 attacks, as resources were redirected to other national security missions.” During this time, “Many ships became outdated, and no new ships were built for counter-narcotics operations.”
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ramped up, the military dramatically reduced surveillance flight hours over the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean routes used by smugglers. The early 2000s saw more than a 30 percent reduction in the patrol and combat ships used to search for smugglers. A 2004 report shows that the Pentagon withdrew 12 Black Hawk helicopters, 22 fighter jets, and various other reconnaissance planes used to stop the flow of drugs in Central America. The Army also deactivated several radar balloons, known as aerostats, which monitored the southern border and parts of the Caribbean “due to funding shortages.”
The only noteworthy change in this alarming trend occurred in April 2020 when President Trump ordered an increase in military support for counter-narcotics agencies as part of the administration’s comprehensive approach to combating the illicit drug trade. As part of the reinforcement efforts, Navy destroyers and littoral combat ships, equipped with MH-60 Seahawk helicopters, as well as Coast Guard cutters, Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, and Air Force E-3 Sentry and E-8 Joint STARS surveillance aircraft, were deployed to support SouthCom.
Trump’s return to the White House has brought renewed optimism that the Pentagon will shift its focus more toward SouthCom in service of the president’s “America First” agenda, focusing less on faraway crises and more on immediate threats to the American people. As SouthCom commanders have been arguing for more than a decade, such a development could dramatically aid the United States’ battle against opioid addiction and overdose deaths.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
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