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As a former career military officer, there are many aspects of our current military policy that bother me. I’m not writing today on President Trump’s War on Iran (that he refuses to call a war because that would require Senate action). Instead, I want to talk about the not-so-new American Way of War and a mistake started as early as the Obama administration, a mistake that has only gotten worse since then: unrestricted drone warfare.

There is something immoral if not illegal about raining death down on people designated by somebody as military targets, particularly if the targets themselves are not in the military nor in a country we are legally warring against. Under Obama and subsequently, occasionally terrorists were designated as drone targets and killed. The “war on terrorism” notwithstanding, we were not at war with those individual’s countries. In fact, frequently the terrorists themselves opposed their country’s government, which may or may not have been a U.S. ally. What’s different in the Trump administration is that we are now using drones to assassinate people at sea, regardless of their nationality. Here is one way that works.

The Navy owns some Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV’s) called Saildrones, 20 of which are supporting the U.S. Southern Command off South America. These vessels can patrol unannounced off the coast of Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama and send real-time information to the SOUTHCOM headquarters. In the past, SOUTHCOM has used U.S. Coast Guard ships and USCG detachments aboard Navy ships, to stop civilians at sea as a law enforcement organization and arrest smugglers. For example, in October 2025 Saildrones helped in one operation that confiscated $81 million worth of cocaine.

But now, we are sending armed aerial drones to strike boats suspected of carrying narcotics. As of August 4, there have been 88 strikes with at least 221 people killed. We can call this a “war on drugs,” but it is not legally a war, something only the Senate can declare. And those killed are only “suspected” of any crime. It should not need stating that we as a nation do not kill suspected criminals except in self-defense, we arrest and hold them for trial. It takes a real stretch to describe such assassinations off South America as self-defense.

But they work, don’t they, in reducing the flow of drugs into our country? No, they don’t. A report made to the U.S. Congress and covering April 1 to June 30, 2026, found that drug organizations are just using alternate routes, and the strikes have not reduced the flow of cocaine into the United States. Fentanyl is a larger problem, but it is not trafficked by sea near South America.

These assassinations should not be done by U.S. military forces. The respect our military has earned is based on the high moral ground our military has always claimed. Using drones to find people, designating them as “suspects” in a criminal enterprise, and assassinating them also by drones, erodes that respect. Further, it doesn’t work. In the words of St. Mark, “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”