Pentagon announces it has killed four men in another boat strike in Pacific | US military

The Pentagon announced Thursday that the US military carried out a deadly new strike against a boat suspected of transporting illegal narcotics, killing four men in the Eastern Pacific, as questions mount over the legality of these attacks.

Video of the new strike was posted to social media by the Florida-based U.S. Southern Command with a statement saying that, under the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a designated terrorist organization.”

“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting a known drug trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narcoterrorists on board the vessel were killed,” the statement added.

The footage showed a large explosion suddenly overtaking a small boat as it moved through the water, followed by the image of a burning ship and black smoke streaming overhead.

This latest strike was the first in almost three weeks. It comes as the Pentagon and White House struggle to answer questions about the legal basis for the campaign to kill suspected drug traffickers with military strikes, with US lawmakers vowing to investigate the first such attack, in September, in which two survivors clinging to rubble were killed in a subsequent strike.

Hegseth has come under increasing scrutiny over the September 2 strike, following a Washington Post report that the defense secretary had verbally ordered the military to “kill them all.” A Democratic lawmaker introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth on Thursday, highlighting the boat strike and a report that he broke rules by sharing information about an attack on Signal, but such an effort is unlikely to succeed.

The U.S. admiral who ordered the attack told lawmakers Thursday that there was no order to kill everyone on board. Yet Connecticut Democratic Congressman Jim Himes described footage from the September strike, which reportedly showed two survivors clinging to the rubble, as “one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen since I’ve been in public service.”

“You have two individuals in obvious distress, with no means of transportation, with a destroyed vessel,” Himes said.

Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, disagrees, saying the footage shows “two survivors trying to overturn a drug-laden boat, bound for the United States, so they can stay in the fight” and that nearby “narcoterrorists” may have come to rescue them.

Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and a former Pentagon lawyer, scoffed at Cotton’s interpretation. “I would like to know how Senator Cotton…could have detected that these castaways were trying to ‘stay in the fight’ rather than clinging to their lives to try to survive,” Goodman wrote on Bluesky.

“Even if one believes all the legal falsehoods (that this is an ‘armed conflict,’ that drugs are objects of war), the two castaways were in no way engaged in ‘active combat activities’ (the true legal test),” Goodman added.

Since September, the US military says it has carried out 22 strikes against boats suspected of carrying drugs, killing nearly 86 people.

The administration has argued that the United States is at war with drug traffickers and that such strikes are legal under the rules of war, but most legal experts reject that justification.

“Even if we accept their idea that the individuals on these ships are combatants, it would still be illegal to kill them if they are hors de combat, meaning they are incapable of acting,” Rebecca Ingber, a professor at Cardozo Law School and former State Department legal adviser, told the Guardian this week.

“It is clearly illegal to kill someone who has been wrecked.”