CARIBBEAN — For the first time in nearly a year, the U.S. military’s campaign of lethal strikes on suspected drug-trafficking vessels has gone quiet. It has now been more than three weeks since the last reported strike in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific — the longest gap since Operation Southern Spear began in September 2025.
The pause offers a natural moment to ask a question that has mostly been overshadowed by the campaign’s drama: has it actually reduced the flow of drugs into the United States?
What the Campaign Has Accomplished
Operation Southern Spear began after the U.S. deployed warships to the Caribbean in mid-2025, framed by the Trump administration as a necessary escalation against cartels it has designated foreign terrorist organizations. The first strike, on September 2, killed 11 people aboard a vessel the administration said was linked to Venezuela’s drug trade. Since then, the campaign has expanded to more than 60 strikes across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, with a death toll estimated at over 220 people as of late June, and has grown to include land operations in Venezuela and Ecuador, plus the January capture of Nicolás Maduro himself.
A Pentagon Inspector General report put the campaign’s cost at roughly $647 million through the end of March; outside estimates, including one from Brown University, have put the broader regional campaign’s cost above $4.5 billion.
The administration points to this as evidence of resolve. President Trump has said maritime drug trafficking is down sharply as a result of the strikes — telling reporters at the G7 summit that “drugs are down by water 97%” — and has framed the pivot toward land-based operations, including strikes inside Ecuador (with the aid of Ecuadorian military forces) and the capture of Maduro, as the next phase of the same strategy.
Officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have repeatedly described the campaign as sending an unmistakable deterrent message to trafficking networks across the hemisphere.
Multiple Fronts
Multiple U.S. officials have said internally that cartels and criminal groups have adapted to the sea strikes conducted by U.S. forces, diversifying routes and methods in response to the strikes, and that traffickers appear to be treating the losses as an operating cost rather than a reason to stop.
Narcotics experts cited by the New York Times have said the campaign has not measurably slowed cocaine’s arrival in the United States, and a Drug Enforcement Administration field official in Miami reportedly told a local outlet in the spring that street-level cocaine prices had hit record lows — the opposite of what a supply disruption would typically produce.
The campaign has also drawn sustained scrutiny on legal and humanitarian grounds. The administration has not publicly released evidence tying specific struck vessels to drug trafficking, a gap that has drawn criticism from legal scholars, retired military officials, and members of Congress from both parties.
The Pentagon’s own Inspector General opened a review this year into whether strikes followed the military’s standard targeting process, and the Senate passed a bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act amendment aimed at constraining the campaign’s legal basis, though it had not been taken up by the House as of this writing.
A Pause, Not Necessarily a Pivot
It isn’t yet clear whether the current three-week gap reflects a deliberate change in strategy, a temporary lull tied to the administration’s stated shift toward land operations, or something more incidental. The administration has not announced an end to the maritime campaign, and officials have continued to describe land-based strikes in Ecuador and the broader Southern Spear architecture as an extension of the same policy rather than a replacement for it.
What the pause does offer is a rare space to take stock. A year in, the campaign has produced a substantial death toll, a large price tag, and a string of high-profile events — the Maduro capture chief among them — that the administration counts as successes.
Whether it has meaningfully reduced the amount of cocaine and fentanyl reaching U.S. streets remains, on the available evidence, an open question, and one that officials within the government itself appear divided on.
