Latest news with #ClearandPresentDanger
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Digital Storage Can Assist Or Foil AI
Data Center In this article we will look at some resent announcerments on digital storage and its use in AI training and inference. But first, an example of digital storage technology used to save humanity. Data Storage Saves the Day Digital archiving startup SPhotonix's 5D memory crystal was an important element in the plot of the latest Mission Impossible movie. The 360TB memory crystal was used to stop a rogue AI from destroying the world. In practice, SPhotonix stores data using a FemtoEtch nano-etching technology on a 5-inch glass substrate. Note that I am an advisor for SPhotonix. SPhotonix 5D Memory Cystal Digital storage technologies have been used in many movies and TV shows over the years, such as the StorageTek Tape library used in the 1994 Film 'Clear and Present Danger.' Hybrid AI Data Centers In practice data centers are generally using SSDs as primary storage in data centers, including for AI training applications. SSDs provide fast storage for refreshing data on the high bandwidth memory located close to the GPUs that directly support data processing. However, the cost for storing data on SSDs in data centers is about 6X higher than storing it on HDDs. This leads data centers to use HDDs for storing colder but useful data in a hierarchical storage environment. Data is moved back and forth from various storage technologies to optimize the balance of cost versus performance. Ultimately archived information in data centers that is not frequently used is kept on magnetic tape cartridges or optical storage. Vdura, formerly veteran storage company, Panasas, recently announced a white paper on digital storage for AI workloads and announced changes in their hybrid SSD and HDD storage offering to support HPC and AI workloads. The company is now offering QLC NAND flash SSDs combined with high-capacity HDDs with their global namespace parallel file system combined with object storage, offering multi-level erasure coding and fast key value storage. The image below shows the layout of this hybrid SSD and HDD storage system. Vdura Global Namespace Storage The Vdura Data Platform V11.2 includes a preview of V-ScaleFlow that enables data movement across QLC flash and high-capacity hard drives. This allows resource utilization, maximizes system throughput and provides efficient AI-scale workloads. In particular the company is using Phison Pascari 128TB QLC NVMe SSD with 30+TB HDDs to reduce flash capacity requirements by over 50% and lowing power consumption. Overall total cost of ownership is said to be reduced by up to 60%. The Vdura white paper goes into details on data storage and memory utilization in an AI application. The figure below shows an AI data pipeline which should have the storage system enable minimum GPU downtime. AI Data Pipeline The table below goes into detail on read, write, performance and data size requirements for various elements in an AI workload. These various elements can require from GBs to PBs of digital storage with various performance requirements. This favors a combination of storage technologies to support different elements in this workload. Element Characteristics in an AI Workflow The below image shows a sample storage node that can provide all-flash or hybrid SSD and HDD storage to support AI and HPC workloads with a global namespace and a common control and data plane. Vdura Storage Node Digital storage technology saved the world from a rogue AI in the latest Mission Impossible Movie. Combining SSDs and HDDs can enable modern AI workloads that optimize cost and performance.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's plan to wage war with cartels will backfire, experts say
In February, the State Department branded Mexico's Sinaloa and Jalisco drug cartels, as well as several other Latin American gangs, as "terrorist organizations" akin to ISIS or al-Qaeda. This comes after years of Republican lawmakers banging the drums of war against the narcos south of the border, even describing illicit fentanyl, an opioid used daily in hospitals for surgery, as a "chemical weapon." The declaration was shortly followed by the opening shots of a trade war with Mexico, Canada and China with the Trump administration imposing tariffs on goods imported from those countries unless they take drastic action to stop narcotrafficking. Back at the White House, President Trump told a meeting of governors he was ready to send drug dealers to the gallows. 'If you notice that every country that has the death penalty has no drug problem. They execute drug dealers,' the commander-in-chief claimed. 'And when you think about it, it's very humane, because every drug dealer, on average they say, kills at least 500 people — not to mention the damage they do so many others.' This is, of course, bullshit. But the dubious factual accuracy of this aside, all signs point to Trump – like his predecessors Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Clinton – reinvigorating the war on drugs at home and abroad. But why should he succeed where they've failed? Let's begin with the terrorist designation. There are fears that by lumping the narcos together with America's more overt enemies like ISIS could set the stage for military action, a possibility Trump brought up in his 2024 election campaign. Indeed, Trump has both privately and publicly contemplated deploying special forces to liquidate cartel chiefs, seemingly lifting his foreign policy from the plot of the 1994 action flick 'Clear and Present Danger.' 'A lot of people are under the belief that this designation allows the United States to go into Mexico or do drone strikes or bombardments. Not hardly,' Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the DEA, told Salon. 'There's been actions like that taken against Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, but it's not done because of that designation. It's done through the executive power of the president.' Such actions, if taken unilaterally without Mexico's consent, would also be illegal under international law. If Mexico doesn't agree to boots on the ground, it's a breach of sovereignty — and you can kiss goodbye any counternarcotics and immigration cooperation after that. That said, it's possible Trump could order operations into Mexico anyway. But this has been tried before. The killing frenzy that has engulfed Mexico erupted in the mid-2000s, partly from turf wars between criminal organizations and partly from the actions of President Felipe Calderón, who in December 2006 declared war on the cartels, starting with his home state of Michoacán. Troops and tanks poured into the state and Calderón himself flew down, dressed in full army regalia. Under the Mérida Initiative, Mexico received three billion dollars worth of American aid to fight the drug gangs, including training and Black Hawk the generals at the start of World War I, Calderón probably thought this would be over quickly. Two decades of slaughter later, he was proven wrong. Eliminating crime bosses created power vacuums that their capos scrambled to fill, as is happening now in the northwestern state of Sinaloa which is in a state of civil war after last year's capture of narco-godfather Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada. While Mexican crime lords do wield their own militias which occasionally engage the armed forces in open combat – sometimes even wearing their own uniforms and insignia – for the most part they're more like insurgents than regular armies, deeply embedded in local communities, where it's not always obvious who's who. Abuses are rife: in 2019, 21-year-old Jennifer Romero was kidnapped, along with seven others, by the Mexican security forces in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, dressed as a sicario (cartel enforcer), and shot dead. She was two months pregnant. Any armed intervention is practically guaranteed to result in heavy civilian casualties. Over two decades of this narco-war, drug deaths in America continued climbing, only suddenly falling last year. This is because all that gunplay failed to dismantle the basic structure of narcotrafficking. The term 'cartel' plays well in an American courtroom but doesn't accurately reflect reality. Mexican drug cartels are more than merely gangs of bandidos: they're networks of traffickers, politicians, police chiefs and other strongmen, with factions between them. Parading gangbangers before the cameras is only good for PR. Moreover, intensifying violence will only worsen the border crisis. The number of Mexican refugees fleeing gang warfare has already surged dramatically in recent years, and now the 'terrorism' designation may add legitimacy to their asylum claims. The label may have other unwanted consequences for American interests; chief among these is there is no evidence it will slow or stop drug trafficking. 'I think it's all for show, because the terrorist designation is not going to have any impact,' Vigil explained. 'The terrorist designation allows for three things. One, it allows the United States to seize bank accounts that are in financial institutions here in this country that belong to these designated groups. Two, it allows the government to sanction U.S. citizens that provide material support to these designated organizations. Three, it tries to prevent them from coming into the United States.' Vigil warned that sanctioning U.S. citizens would have a 'ripple effect.' 'There's a lot of businesses that operate in Mexico, and if they have ties or they're buying products from a company that belongs to or is tied to one of these designated groups, they can be sanctioned,' he continued. 'So, Donald Trump has opened the door for that to occur with businesses operating in Mexico.' Given how thoroughly the Mexican economy is compromised by organized crime, from paying protection to outright fronts, staying clean can be a challenge. 'Secondly, that would allow also for sanctions to be applied to the gun manufacturers and distributors here in the United States, because at least 80% of the weapons that are going into Mexico come from the United States,' noted Vigil. Since 2021, Mexico has been suing the American firearms industry for enabling the cartel carnage. Then there are the tariffs: 25% on Mexican and Canadian goods, and 10% on Chinese goods. The pressure has produced some immediate, if short-term results: Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, seemingly eager to stay on the good side of White House's new occupant (unlike her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador), expedited the extradition of 29 cartel figures including Rafael Caro Quintero, who's been wanted by the DEA since 1985 for ordering the slow, painful death of agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena — an event which shook Mexican-American relations. Meanwhile, the amount of fentanyl intercepted at the border shrank by 41% between January and February, although it had been shrinking for several months already. But it's a little early to break out the champagne glasses. Sanho Tree, a fellow at the D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies said it was speculative, "but it's quite possibly drug war theater.' 'What we know that is getting through is much more than what they're confiscating, right?' Tree told Salon. 'It's like the astrophysicists who search for dark matter in the universe — we know it's out there, and we know it's massive." Tree said that if he were the Sinaloa Cartel, this is exactly the strategy he would pursue. 'I would continue to send some drugs through ports of entry, some even with migrants in backpacks across the desert, even though I know they'll get caught,' Tree explained. 'The Republicans are happy; they get to point to seizures and migrants. Customs and Border Protection is happy because they get all their new toys and they can show how many kilos they've intercepted. But if I'm a drug trafficker, that's the tax I'm going to pay whilst I use my primary means of smuggling.' This, Tree points out, could be anything from tunnels running under the border, to boats, drones, submarines and even catapults. It could also be that drugs start moving from an entirely new direction. While Canada is not currently a significant source of narcotics (despite Trump's tariffs, only 0.2% of fentanyl intercepted last year came from the Great White North), last year a fentanyl 'super lab' was discovered near Vancouver, along with a large stash of weapons and explosives. It's possible one day we will see fentanyl labs in the States – if they're not already here. Meanwhile, pressuring your neighbors with unrealistic demands is unlikely to endear them to you. 'Claudia Scheinbaum, when she took over as president of Mexico, immediately came out and said she wanted to work with the United States,' Vigil said. 'And she continues to say that, despite the ridiculous attacks by Donald Trump, because Trump wants to put all the blame on illegal drug trafficking and consumption on Mexico and tries to absolve himself of any liability on his part. You know, no country is going to fully cooperate when they're being hit over the head with a sledgehammer, and that's basically what Trump is doing.' Back home, the president has repeatedly stated he wants the death penalty for convicted drug peddlers. 'There are quite a few [countries]— many in Asia — where they have the death penalty,' he told the governors' meeting. 'There's no drug problem whatsoever.' Only the first part of that statement is correct. It's true that Iran, China and Vietnam regularly execute traffickers, and yet they all still have well-documented drug issues, just like any country. Singapore will march you to the gallows over just half-a-kilo of weed, but authorities themselves admit drug consumption is steeply rising, especially among people under 30. And while the Philippines had not officially imposed capital punishment, recent hearings revealed that the anti-drug campaign under President Rodrigo Duterte, in which death squads may have mercilessly slain as many as 30,000 Filipinos, only reduced consumption by 4.5%. (Duterte was recently arrested by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity over his violent drug policy.) In general, studies comparing crime rates between jurisdictions that do or do not have the death penalty fail to find a correlation. 'Whether you're a consumer or a trafficker or money launderer, every person gets into [drugs] because they think they'll get away with it — and by and large, they do,' Tree said. 'And so using death as a deterrent, it's very difficult to get that to stick. [But] the drug warriors, they don't want to promote harm reduction. They want to promote harm maximization — that the wages of sin ought to be death, because that's how you send a message to all the other people not to do drugs. And of course, that has not worked ever.' Then there's another aspect: capital punishment in the U.S. has been disproportionately inflicted on minorities, particularly Black and Indigenous people. From 1998 to 2024, 60% of federal death penalty cases have convicted non-white defendants. Both Vigil and Tree, despite their differing perspectives, agreed there was a racist element to the bloodlust. 'Donald Trump does not mention any white supremacist groups that are distributing drugs like the Aryan Brotherhood, the Aryan Circle, the Aryan Kings,' Vigil said. 'The Aryan Brotherhood has between 15,000 and 20,000 members in this country that distribute drugs. But he focuses on Hispanic groups because it goes along with his racist narrative that migrants are all criminals.' 'He's not talking about going after, you know, white suburban kids whose daddy is a CEO,' Tree said. Interestingly, Trump appointee Robert F. Kennedy Jr, now in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, has been accused of selling cocaine while at college. Finally, another part of Trump's strategy is a PSA campaign telling youngsters that 'when you take certain drugs, the drug fentanyl … it destroys your skin, it destroys your teeth, it destroys your brain, it destroys everything.' 'When some young kid is sitting down watching this commercial a couple of times, I really don't think they're going to be taking drugs,' Trump said. 'This is a big statement, but I think we can drop [drug use by] 50 percent by doing this.' The '80s called, they want their propaganda back. For readers too young to remember, that decade was full of ominous voices on the television telling folks 'this is your brain on drugs' behind an image of some fried eggs. There was also the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program consisting of police officers visiting schools and warning children to stay sober. 'Those programs were scare tactics, right?' said Sanho, who was a student activist when the government first invited 'Officer Friendly or Not-So-Friendly' to come into the classroom. 'And it backfired because they threw the baby out with the bathwater. They would lie and say, 'kids, if you smoke a joint, you'll be doing heroin in six months.' And a lot of kids, my older siblings didn't go through that. And they think, well, what other lies are the grownups telling me?' Follow-up studies in the '90s and 2000s proved DARE had little effect on youth drug use; at least for one study cohort, drug use even increased. But just as the drug war for Richard Nixon was an excuse to suppress leftist, countercultural and civil rights movements, so Donald Trump's drug war may have ulterior motives. Some have speculated that sending the troops is just a ploy to grab the rich coal, oil and gas deposits in Mexico's northeast. 'I think these tariffs have nothing to do with reducing fentanyl,' Tree said. 'He needs an emergency declaration. The power to tariff used to belong to the legislative branch, but they've given it away over the decades to the executive branch. But the way the executive branch can do it unilaterally is to declare an emergency. So you have a fentanyl emergency, you have an invasion by migrants. They use this language very carefully, very specifically. And I think they're laying the groundwork for something even worse, which is the Insurrection Act, which would eventually become the basis for martial law.' The White House and Department of Homeland Security are already referring to undocumented immigration as an 'invasion,' in-line with years of white nationalist rhetoric which has infected the Republican Party. Then there's Trump's own personality to consider. 'He's obsessed with discovering any unilateral powers he has, whether it's the power of commutation and pardon, or taking the FBI directly into the White House and operating it as his personal police service, or tariffs,' Tree concluded. 'And so he's unlocking each unilateral power that he can discover and using them to the max. Number two, he gets to humiliate and beat allies and adversaries, which plays well to his base.'
Yahoo
04-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How Trump Could Use Military Force Against Cartels In Mexico
President Donald Trump, who has frequently suggested he might use U.S. military force against the cartels in Mexico, currently has options to do so. However, even with the new executive order he signed designating cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), Trump would still face several legal and policy hurdles, as well as geopolitical considerations, before he could broaden the scope of any actions across the border, according to former military, intelligence and government officials we spoke with. Such a move would be unprecedented – the U.S. military has never directly attacked cartels in Mexico, some of those former officials told us. The most recent indication of Trump administration's intentions came last week when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked if he would use the military to combat cartels. 'All options will be on the table if we're dealing with what are designated to be foreign terrorist organizations who are specifically targeting Americans on our border,' he told Fox News. Hegseth did not provide any specifics because he didn't want to get ahead of Trump on the issue. The president has yet to publicly divulge his plans. Pete Hegseth on possible military strikes in Mexico: "All options will be on the table." — AlexandruC4 (@AlexandruC4) January 31, 2025 However, a number of actions have to take place before we see anything like the scene depicted in the 1994 movie Clear and Present Danger, in which a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornet carries out a missile strike on a Colombian cartel leader. 'Presidents – and especially this President – assert very broad power to use force unilaterally, at least up to a certain level, without congressional authorization' under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, Matthew C. Waxman, Liviu Librescu Professor of Law at Columbia University, told us. 'The claim is generally that as commander in chief and chief executive, the president has power to military force to defend the United States.' A direct attack by cartels north of the border would give Trump the widest latitude for responding with military force inside Mexico, Javed Ali, who worked in the National Security Council's (NSC) counterterrorism unit during the first Trump administration, told us on Monday. There is already reported chatter about that, with claims that cartels are discussing using weaponized drones against U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) and law enforcement personnel along the border. In addition to spurring Trump to invoke Article II, such an attack would allow him to respond under United Nations Article 51's self-defense provisions, noted Ali, now an associate professor of practice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan teaching courses on counterterrorism and domestic terrorism, cybersecurity, and national security law and policy. Trump could also invoke the War Powers Act, which would give him 60 days to carry out military operations before seeking Congressional approval, Ali explained. Meanwhile, the new executive order on cartels, which has yet to be enacted, would not greatly open the aperture on U.S. military actions in Mexico, Waxman stated. That executive order is one of several Trump signed to deal with the problems of drugs, unchecked immigration, and human trafficking. After signing an executive order designating Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, Trump says he could send U.S. Special Forces into Mexico to liquidate the Sheinbaum won't be happy hearing that… — Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 21, 2025 'Designating cartels as FTOs has some legal effects and some political ones,' said Waxman, who served in senior positions at the State Department, Department of Defense, and National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. As a National Security Council aide, he was involved in the White House response to the attacks on September 11, 2001. 'Legally, [the executive order] triggers a range of criminal law enforcement and immigration authorities, as well as financial measures, that can be used to squeeze them and cut off support for them. Politically, it can help elevate their threat by treating them like other grave national security threats, and thereby lay some groundwork for future actions. However, FTO designations do not directly trigger authorities to use military force.' The designation, for instance, would not automatically give Trump the ability to carry out special operations forces raids against cartels akin to the U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 Operation Neptune Spear mission that killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan on May 1, 2011. However, there is an existing law that could make such an action against cartels possible. President Barack Obama invoked Title 50, the U.S. law permitting a president to carry out clandestine operations in foreign countries, to justify that operation. 'Every president has a powerful tool under Title 50 in which military operations could be approved and conducted against a priority U.S. target in a foreign country, but without the consultation or coordination of the foreign government in which the target is located,' explained Ali. 'It's possible that the president could authorize and notify to the congressional intelligence committees a covert action program against the cartels,' under Title 50, Waxman noted. 'I don't know if Trump or a previous president has done so, or what the parameters are of such a covert action program. The intelligence oversight statutes allow the president quite broad authority to initiate covert action programs, subject to certain special procedures and reporting requirements.' There are other precedents for using force against terror groups on foreign soil. U.S. drone strikes like those that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in 2019, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps leader Qassem Soleimani in 2020, and the airstrike carried out last week against ISIS leaders in Somalia were all conducted against terror groups. You can see the latest attack in the following video. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2025 However, those actions were justified under the Authorization for the Use of Military Forces (AUMF) against Islamic terror organizations enacted in the wake of Al-Qaeda's 2001 attack on New York and Washington D.C. The 2001 AUMF was enacted to allow then-President George W. Bush to go after that operation's planners and those who aided and harbored them. Another AUMF was authorized in 2002 to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq and subsequent administrations used it to justify actions against Islamic terror groups around the world. At present, cartels are not considered to be directly connected in a significant scale to these Islamic terror groups. Should Trump want to launch an airstrike, a special operations forces raid or even a wider military strategy against cartels in Mexico, he would likely need a new AUMF specifically tailored for those organizations, Ali posited. Waxman, however, had a different take, suggesting that Trump would not need a new AUMF to go after cartels, but might want one 'to make his legal arguments stronger.' Either way, a cartel-designated AUMF is something that has been considered before. In a piece he co-authored for Lawfare, Waxman noted that in 2023, some Republican House members introduced an AUMF against fentanyl-trafficking cartels. Current U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was one of the co-sponsors when he was in Congress. The measure never passed. While a Title 50 operation in Mexico would not require an AUMF, such a mission would likely be a one-off, Ali suggested. 'Using the 2011 [Bin Laden] raid as an example, given the risky cross-border nature of that kind of operation, the U.S. would probably only do that once under Title 50 versus a new AUMF from Congress that would authorize a longer pattern of military operations similar to the campaign against AQ and the Taliban in Afghanistan or against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in the mid-2010s,' stated Ali. There is another option at Trump's disposal. CIA Special Operations Group (SOG) teams could conceivably target cartel personnel. 'This would require a presidential finding and compliance with covert action oversight laws, and because assassinations are barred by an executive order, the CIA would need to argue that this is not a political killing but is something else,' Waxman explained. Regardless of whether he followed required authorizations or not, Trump's first option would likely be airstrikes — with drones and/or standoff weapons being the most likely option — for several reasons. As we have previously reported, Mexico's increasingly well-armed drug cartels pose a serious threat to external forces. Some cartel units are extremely well-equipped and have adopted some of the latest features of warfare. They have been using drones to attack enemies for years now, for instance. This is terrifying. Video released by the Mexican cartel and paramilitary group CJNG show the extent of militarization of their special forces. Scores of armed & kitted out fighters in standardized uniforms line a large convoy of up-armored troop transport vehicles and technicals — Hugo Kaaman (@HKaaman) July 18, 2020 These organizations also often move around in increasingly well protected so called 'narco tanks.' Cartels can also have defacto control over large areas with lots of support at the ready. Inner circles around key drug lords are among the most heavily defended and fortified positions in these areas, which makes them challenging targets. But the same 'find and fix' tactics that have been used to take out terrorists in the Middle East, especially with the help of drones, could potentially be brought to bear to help solve that problem. Unless Mexico agrees to their employment, they would not be operating in totally permissible airspace. While Mexico's air defenses are extremely rudimentary, this could still be an issue. Any sort of ground raid without prior authority from Mexico raises the concern that any U.S. troops inadvertently left behind or otherwise captured could be without legal protection. That's why U.S. military deployments frequently take place with Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) giving military personnel and civilian contractors protection from being subject to unfair criminal or civil justice systems. 'This is important not only to protect the rights of U.S. service members and to vindicate the United States' interest in exercising disciplinary jurisdiction over U.S. uniformed personnel, but also because U.S. willingness to deploy forces overseas – and public support for such deployments – could suffer significant setbacks if U.S. personnel were at risk of being tried in an inherently unfair system, or at any rate, in one that departs fundamentally from U.S. concepts of basic procedural fairness,' according to the U.S. State Department. While far less risky to U.S. troops, the downside of relying solely on airpower is the loss of valuable intelligence U.S. forces could gather on the ground to rapidly exploit, as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Either way, whether an airstrike or a raid, the U.S. directly attacking the cartel in its own bastion would be a huge escalation and could spark and wider, sustained crescendo of hostilities, especially along the U.S.-Mexico border. Even cartel reprisal actions inside the U.S. are possible. Beyond direct military action, designating FTOs as terror organizations would also not necessarily increase the ability to collect intelligence against them, a former senior U.S. intelligence official told The War Zone. 'As long as they're not a U.S. person, you can collect on all you want,' said the former official, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'Drug traffickers would certainly fall into that category.' In one example of that underway already, a U.S. Air Force RC-135V/W Rivet Joint surveillance jet on Monday was spotted by an online flight-tracking site executing an unprecedented set of mission through the narrow Gulf of California. This is directly adjacent to notorious cartel hotspots. The use of U.S. military surveillance aircraft in the counter-narcotics role is far from new, but placing one of America's most capable strategic aerial collection platforms right in the Mexican cartels' backyard certainly is. A U.S. Air Force RC-135V 'Rivet Joint' Signals Intelligence Platform from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, was flying within Mexican Airspace after the Mexican Government agreed to work with the United States concerning the security of the aircraft was seen flying… — (@Kagan_M_Dunlap) February 4, 2025 Regardless of what Trump decides, U.S. military efforts to fight the cartels on the ground in Mexico, or at all, would greatly benefit from the approval of the host nation. That does not seem to be forthcoming from the Mexican government at this point. This would be another complicating factor for any assault, even if a one-off operation, as it could end up with the Mexican military confronting U.S. soldiers if things go deeply awry. Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum recently said that Trump's executive order would only be applicable if there's close coordination between the two governments, The Associated Press reported. Mexico would defend its sovereignty and independence while seeking coordination with the U.S. in the wake of the order, she stated on Monday. 'We all want to fight the drug cartels,' Sheinbaum said at her daily press briefing. The U.S. 'in their territory, us in our territory.' A retired special forces officer we spoke with noted that there have been times in the past when the U.S. was kicked out of a country by its leadership. He pointed to Bolivia as one example. 'If you don't have the host nation backing, it will get bad,' he said. 'We had a situation with [then president] Evo Morales in Bolivia. He was upset and asked the DEA to leave. We had traditionally sent two SF teams there since 1986. We had a good relationship with them.' While there is a lot of conjecture about what could take place, the U.S. military has a long history of efforts to counter cartels in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. These have been advise and assist missions to help host nations conducted by the U.S. Army Special Forces, better known as Green Berets. As part of their Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission, Green Berets help host nations fight cartels without taking direct action themselves. These missions have traditionally fallen to the 7th Special Forces Group, the experts we spoke with explained. That's because that group, headquartered at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, has Latin America as its area of responsibility and many members are fluent in Spanish and knowledgeable about the region and its customs. 'They would be the right guys,' said the retired SOF officer, who spent a dozen years assigned to the U.S.-led Plan Colombia. That was the counterinsurgency/counternarcotics fight against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a guerilla group heavily involved in the drug trade that undermined security and the rule of law in Colombia and across Latin America. 'During the Plan Colombia period that I participated in from 1999 to 2011, the 7th Special Forces trained the 3,500-man Colombian Army Counterdrug Brigade, the 600-man Junglas (Police Airmobile Antinarcotics Unit), the Colombian Army special forces units: the Lancero Battalion and the Commando Battalion,' said the expert. 'They organized the instructor cadre for the Police Mobile Carabinero Squadrons (80 x 120-man police units that operate in rural areas), and they trained the 80-man national unit, the AFEU.' The expert foresees similar efforts with Mexico's special military and law enforcement units who take the lead in the fight against cartels. They also noted that these are law enforcement missions, and these special units are employed when greater force, advanced military skills, and special equipment are needed to provide the decisive edge in confronting the heavily armed cartels. He laid out several steps that have already been taken. 'US Special Operations Forces (Army, Navy, Marines) can train Mexico's special military and police units in operations planning and execution,' he stated. SOF liaison officers, known as LNOS, 'are assigned to the Embassy Working Group. They meet with the Mexican special units to assist in planning and provide the US Embassy with situational awareness.' 'All of these missions (border and Mexico) have been done by the U.S. military in the past,' he explained. 'They can be implemented quickly and with no foreign or domestic controversy.' The chances of Trump ordering some sort of unilateral action against the cartels in Mexico may have somewhat diminished as of yesterday. He reached a deal with Mexico to delay the imposition of a 25% tariff on goods imported from there over what he perceived as that government's unwillingness to stop the flow of drugs and people across the border. Meanwhile, Sheinbaum announced a series of steps she is taking. 'We had a good conversation with President Trump with great respect for our relationship and sovereignty,' she stated on X. '…Mexico will immediately reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, particularly fentanyl' while 'The United States is committed to working to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.' Both nations, she added, 'will begin working today on two fronts: security and trade.' Sostuvimos una buena conversación con el presidente Trump con mucho respeto a nuestra relación y la soberanía; llegamos a una serie de acuerdos:1.México reforzará la frontera norte con 10 mil elementos de la Guardia Nacional de forma inmediata, para evitar el tráfico de drogas… — Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (@Claudiashein) February 3, 2025 While this moment of detente may seem encouraging, and the results could help slow the flow of drugs and human trafficking across the border further, the cartels remain. Strangling their cash flow, which can often lead to turf wars amongst themselves, certainly is a critical aspect to any fight against them. But if Trump really plans on going after the cartels directly, it will take more than that, and what that could look like remains to be seen. But clearly, he does have options. Contact the author: howard@
