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War with the cartels would go really badly for the US IMO. It's not that the US lacks the firepower or the manpower or the wealth, they lack the political capacity and will to execute these kinds of imperial military operations. The US military is best at defeating conventional forces in conventional wars (preferably massively outmatched ones like the Iraqi army). They are not good at imperial wars and suppression campaigns. They are not good at regime change or stabilization or propping up a puppet government.
If cartels are so easy to beat in Mexico, why can't the US wipe out the drug dealers in America? For a long time I've been saying 'just get rid of the drug dealers to solve the problem'. The US has the technical capacity to track down the drug dealers, they have drones and spies and informants and everything you'd need. Drug addicts can find drug dealers, how hard can it be? There are literally open air drug markets in major US cities! The US doesn't have the political capacity to do it, they don't have the legal capacity and the willpower to actually wage a war on drugs (as opposed to a pretend war on drugs).
How well did the US fare in the last campaign against a nebulous collection of unconventional forces in a drug-rich foreign land? After initial military successes, they fared very, very poorly. The lessons of Afghanistan should be applied to Mexico which is considerably larger. Plus the global balance of power has changed a lot since 2001 and not in the US's favour. Chinese pharmaceutical companies have been fighting a proxy war with Mexican cartels on the streets of Philadelphia (because they do have the kind of willpower and capacity I'm talking about): https://x.com/SantsPliego/status/1748496050543837404
China and Russia would leap at the chance to flex their muscles and make even more problems in the US's sphere of influence, tie them down and bleed them. The cartels would start acquiring MANPADs, ATGMs, explosives, cash, drones. Is the US capable of searching every Chinese cargo ship heading to Mexico?
How should the US act? Slowly build up political capacity step by step, don't leap straight to the end boss. Crack down on drugs at home before an ill-planned, hazy military action overseas. Fight where you are strongest and where the enemy is weakest, build up confidence and experience.
Thank you for the reply, it was interesting to chew on.
Maybe this is a Only Nixon could go to China type of moment.
Kind of hard to beat an opponent you're not allowed to touch their core.
This feels like learned helplessness. China doesn't seem to have a drug crisis, is it not profitable to sell fentanyl to Chinese citizens from across their borders? Why not?
The difference is that Mexico is our neighbor, and their gangs are literally controlling territory inside the core of the United states. And yes, we better have learned a lot of lessons since Afghanistan.
I saw the whole documentary. The fact that this sort of thing is acceptable or met with shrugs, they're just too strong, too manly for us to control makes me want to short America and long China.
This is the strongest point. I'm not sure I can fully address it. But isn't Russia busy enough? Would they risk aggravating the Unites States even more, especially now? I just don't see it. Will China go mask-off? Maybe.
Are they actually willing to transform their enterprises from successful money-making operations to Afghan-style insurgencies where they hide in tunnels for weeks? What will their leaders do once their compounds, palaces, armies, themselves start blowing up?
Agree here, but there are also certain windows of opportunity that may or may not stay open forever. Is China more or less likely to involve itself next year? The year after? How long do you suffer this violation in a contested world?
Yeah, and then the cartels move shop to Colombia and we invade Colombia, then they move to Peru and we invade Peru, another global war on terror, another trillion dollars playing whack a mole for a decade plus, just to get outlasted once again and withdrawal, hooray
If most trafficking has to come by boat or plane I'd be ecstatic. I see your point about scope creep, seems like a trap the US has fallen for before.
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I don't like falling in the same camp as the 'China is the source of all evil' people but there is a good chance that the Chinese state is smiling on people exporting fentanyl precursors to the US. "Try to wreck our high-tech industries with sanctions and keep us in the middle income trap? Plant COVID on us (note that China also has an official history that the US used bioweapons against them in Korea)? We will bury you in narcotics, we'll wreck your high-tech industries with IP theft and industrial policy."
The key thing is that they're not that strong militarily. Drug dealers are pretty manly I guess but that won't help them if you whisk them away to have their organs harvested like China does. Police >>> drug dealers. But the key thing is mobilizing the will to crush them. El Salvedor proves it's not about material capacity but about will, that's what I'm fixated upon.
If the US went in with the will to win, no matter what, they would find wiping out the cartels to be easy and quick. It truly would be shock and awe. Britain and the Soviets casually partitioned Iraq and Iran during WW2 while they were fighting much more serious battles elsewhere, it was trivial for them. Conquering Iraq would be easy in military terms for the US. But it's impossible politically because the necessary will to win doesn't exist. These poor US soldiers were constantly capturing jihadists and sticking them in prison (where they exchanged tips with other jihadists) - then releasing them only to capture them again. There was no will to fight seriously and no proper campaign objectives. They rushed far too quickly to elections and democracy.
The US conquered the Philippines back in the day, it's really not that hard to squelch opposition with force. But you have to do imperialism consciously and confidently, you can't go in thinking 'I'm going to liberate these people with freedom and human rights to form a liberal democracy', you have to be serious about controlling the food, water and fuel, about appointing the puppet government (or maybe just a military governor) and crushing dissent. You have to have the credible threat of massive retaliation looming behind you as you restructure and create a new government.
The US can't bring itself to put on the face-covering villain helmet with the glowing red eyes and do this kind of thing. That's the key lesson of Afghanistan IMO, if you want to win you have to go in and make them play your game rather than try to appeal to the natives. Force them to stop raping children, force them to stop planting opium, forcibly relocate them, force them to respect you as the stronger party, not a pinata full of cash to be siphoned away with tricks and wordgames. That's what the US did to Japan and Germany, they basically razed and raped two powerful countries into submission.
Their beef should be with Britan, we didn't do the opium wars, no fair!
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Dealing with the cartels in Mexico using military force is very different from dealing with them here in the United States because in the United States it is illegal to use surveillance aircraft and NSA SIGINT assets to hoover up reams of data and then act without warrants in response.
Worth noting that this may happen anyway; the US already acts against cartels and they already have been caught with all of the above weapons except perhaps MANPADs (and I've been waiting for that any day now).
Maybe? Looks like they have around 1300 ships (and that it takes about one month to cross from China to Mexico, or two months round trip). Let us assume that the United States is willing to commit a small task force comprising an America-class LHA, a Burke cruiser, two Littoral Combat Ships (finally, a role they are halfway good at!), and two Legend-class cutters, plus a squadron of MPA aircraft and a squadron of Coast Guard or Marine helicopters operating out of San Diego. Let's further assume that the squadron and each of the ships can perform on average a single intercept a day, except the LHA, which we will assume can carry out up to four. That means the US could, with a fairly casual show of force, could intercept every ship in the Chinese fleet twice a year.
Now, I am not saying that fighting the cartels is necessarily a good idea. But I am saying that there's a huge difference between domestic law enforcement operations and the full eye of Sauron that the US can bring to a military operation and that analogizing US domestic drug operations probably isn't correct imho. I tend to think that the US government, if it approached the problem methodically, could "destroy" the cartels as organized groups, but that actually destroying drug production/trafficking in Mexico as a permanent problem is a commitment measured in decades that the US would grow tired of. From that perspective, I agree that it makes more sense to focus on the domestic side of things (we have a border for a reason!) However, a punitive mission against the cartels might make sense in certain context. I also think that Afghanistan only analogizes if we make an open-ended commitment or try to topple the government of Mexico and rule it instead. If "going to war against the cartels" means "a punitive expedition against the Sinaloa" with clear goals, then I think that's very different. You might recall that in 1989 the US invaded Panama over drug trafficking without getting bogged down in a 20-year counterinsurgency, but there we had a very clear goal in mind (capture Manuel Noriega).
This isn't really true in the sense that you're implying. Ordinary police regularly use surveillance aircraft to establish probable cause for an arrest. Ordinary police don't quite have NSA SIGINT assets, but they do still have quite a bit of SIGINT assets they use regularly. If there was political will to arrest/imprison drugees, it would certainly be possible for the police to do so legally.
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Maybe a surgical, well-defined seek and destroy mission would be helpful.
But the US is so mentally/strategically turbulent! Afghanistan was supposed to be a surgical seek and destroy punitive mission. Rumsfeld didn't want to do nation-building. But the whole planning process was so chaotic and prone to mission-creep that it just bloated out of all proportion. The same cadres and officers that organized that fiasco haven't been purged or anything, they're still running the US military.
And I foresee all kinds of toxic political and strategic reactions. The Chinese will bitch and whine about their shipping being illegally searched on the high seas, then they'll do the exact same thing to Taiwan six months later. Mexicans in the US will cause all kinds of problems about the inevitable civilian casualties. The cartels might do their standard 'kidnap and kill the politicians' trick in the US instead. A schizo with a hammer got up close to Pelosi's husband, a schizo with a rifle nearly wiped out Trump... You don't get to run a cartel by being soft or weak, I wouldn't want to tangle with these guys.
I foresee a huge risk that such an operation would be either ineffective or suck the US into a cycle of overreaction and unexpected problems that requires grim determination to overcome. Russia is grimly determined in Ukraine but we've yet to see the US reaching that level of seriousness. I think it would be more prudent for the US to stay at home and cultivate harshness in a safer environment.
Sure, this seems reasonable.
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Sure, but they do it anyway and manufacture chains of evidence, as Snowden revealed. So that's no excuse.
That's not at all what Snowden revealed, but lore was never meant to be real.
You're technically correct; this stuff was published by Reuters at the same time as Snowden but it at least purportedly isn't from that source. But the point stands; they do it anyway.
From your link:
Regardless of controversies about parallel construction (which is already illegal), your own cite doesn't even purport to show what you claim it shows.
"Officials have stressed" that everything the officials were (and are) doing is legal, yes. But they cover it up anyway.
So, you have some other cite that demonstrates that they were using NSA data? Or is this just baseless speculation?
It's the same cite. The claim isn't that they weren't using NSA data, only that they weren't using that particular NSA data. And no, it's not "baseless" speculation. When they've been revealed to having been up to no good in various ways, the prior should be that they've been up to no good in adjacent ways they weren't caught for as well.
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I could be wrong, but I suspect the need to do this still adds a lot of complexity and takes up a lot of time. It's also unclear to me how routine it is.
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There's only so many evidence chain manufacturers, plus it's a adversarial process you don't want to fuck up. Then you also have to try to arrest them. Of course, the cartels don't bother with any of that, they just kill you.
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A war on drugs is much harder to wage when you must at least nominally abide by constitutional protections of the legal rights of the enemy and conduct the war through the standardized channels of the domestic justice system. Hunting the cartels would have none of these restrictions; the NSA and CIA and other alphabet soup agencies could be off the leash de jure rather than merely de facto, and there would be no need for legal entanglements of any kind. This does not make such a campaign a good idea, but if it's a bad idea, it's for reasons other than these in particular.
You are correct in that -- the voting public would be willing to tolerate foreign civilian collateral damage in a way they won't when the victims are US citizens.
However, foreign operations face different challenges. I gather it is harder to get good intelligence on the operations of the Taliban than on the operations of some US based drug lord. Arrests of low tier enemies give can give you insights that you can't get from just bombing people.
The common theme on the domestic 'war on drugs' and a potential war on the cartels is that the number of people who are willing to risk their freedom and lives to make a fortune selling drugs when there is an opening in the market seems near endless.
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