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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   35673 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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If cartels are so easy to beat in Mexico, why can't the US wipe out the drug dealers in America?

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.

The cartels would start acquiring MANPADs, ATGMs, explosives, cash, drones.

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).

Is the US capable of searching every Chinese cargo ship heading to Mexico?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Officials have stressed that the NSA and DEA telephone databases are distinct. The NSA database, disclosed by Snowden, includes data about every telephone call placed inside the United States. An NSA official said that database is not used for domestic criminal law enforcement.

The DEA database, called DICE, consists largely of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. DICE includes about 1 billion records, and they are kept for about a year and then purged, DEA officials said.

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.

Ok, so you don't. Got it. Sounds like there are all sorts of things that NSA does that could conceivably be used in a military operation on foreign soil that cannot be used against domestic drug dealers.

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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.

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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