“calling a drug smuggler a combatant does not make him a combatant. That reality goes to the heart of the morally and legally bankrupt justification for President Donald Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug campaign in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, which began on September 2 and so far has killed 87 people in 22 attacks.
…
Trump conflates drug smuggling with violent aggression, saying it amounts to “an armed attack against the United States” that requires a lethal military response. According to that counterintuitive theory, suspected cocaine smugglers are “combatants” who can be killed at will, and their vessels pose a “threat” to national security that can be neutralized only by completely destroying them.
In reality, Americans want cocaine, and criminal organizations are happy to supply it. The government does not approve of that trade, which it has long sought to suppress by interdicting cocaine and arresting smugglers.”
“For Russian men, war now advertises itself like any other job.
Offers for front-line contracts appear on the messaging app Telegram alongside group chats and news alerts, promising signing bonuses of up to $50,000 — life-changing money in a country where average monthly wages remain below $1,000. The incentives go beyond cash, with pledges of debt relief and free childcare for soldiers’ families and guaranteed university places for their children. Criminal records, illness and even HIV are no longer automatic disqualifiers. For many men with little to lose, the front has become an employer of last resort.”
Pistols have never determined who won a war. In WWI, they were less than .1% of kills and wounded. Modern, more compact rifles are more useful than pistols. Rifles have more range, accuracy, and can better punch through modern armor. For some troops, it may be better to carry more rifle ammo than a pistol. Modern pistols are like modern smartphones, there isn’t a huge difference between brands and the chance that one company’s pistol saves your life when another company’s would not, is low.
Although stealth delays radar detection, its more important role is making stealth planes hard to target with weapons. The wide bands of radars that can detect the planes are not able to locate them accurately enough to target them with weapons. No stealth is invincible, so mission planning is also key.
Europe is divided. Countries close to the Russian threat take that threat a lot more seriously than countries further away. If the former militaristic European countries ever wake up and return to their martial ways, they could be a danger to Russia and the world.
The F-35 is vastly superior to the Gripen E. By comparison, the Gripen E is the budget choice. If the goal is to limit dependence on the mercurial United States, the Gripen is dependent on American parts.
“military personnel not only “can refuse illegal orders”; they have an obligation to do so. Lederman also cited The Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations, which similarly recognizes an exception to the general rule that “an order requiring the performance of a military duty to act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.” The handbook says that inference “does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.” The first example it offers—”an order directing the murder of a civilian [or] a noncombatant”—is clearly relevant to Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy.
Trump has tried to justify that strategy in various ways: by conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression, by describing the men whose deaths he has ordered as members of “foreign terrorist organizations,” by asserting a “noninternational armed conflict,” and by preposterously claiming that “we save 25,000 lives” with each boat that is destroyed (which would add up to more than half a million deaths supposedly prevented so far). These arguments have been widely rejected by experts on the law of war.”
“Back in early September, he declared that the newly renamed Department of War would favor “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”
When the inaugural strike in this campaign against a boat off the Trinidadian coast left two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the craft, the commander in charge of the operation, in accordance with Hegseth’s spoken directive, ordered a second strike to take them out too.
…
The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.
Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.
The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti back in September.
…
Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.
An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.
…
The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.”