The Ships, Planes, and Submarines Busting the Cartel's Narco Subs
“Narco subs,” low profile vessels designed to smuggle drugs to North America and Europe, have become increasingly common.
In April, the U.S. military beefed up efforts to detect these and other drug smugglers, resulting in three narco subs captured in four days.
Although the photo op only shows the ship making the bust, a wide variety of military hardware designed for war is helping track down these tiny boats.
The U.S. military scored three high-profile drug busts in May 2020, intercepting a record three drug-laden narco subs in four days. The boats, designed to sit low on the water and avoid detection, were located and tracked by U.S. military hardware that were in many cases designed for big power wars.
Narco subs are custom-made boats built by drug cartels to ride low in the water. Their peculiar design allows them to avoid visual and some radar detection as they follow routes from the jungles of South America to Central America and the Caribbean. From there, the drugs are split into smaller shipments for smuggling into Mexico and the United States. At least one narco sub has made the trip all the way to Europe where it was abandoned off the coast of Spain.
Narco subs are difficult to detect, and undersea warfare authority HI Sutton estimates that only “5 to 15 percent” of the boats are intercepted, meaning that 85 to 95 percent of them aren’t. On April 1, 2020 U.S. Southern Command announced it would begin “enhanced counternarcotics operations in the Western Hemisphere to disrupt the flow of drugs in support of Presidential national security objectives.” The operations would take place in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean Sea, and would include the use of Navy destroyers and helicopters, Coast Guard cutters and helicopters, Navy littoral combat ships, P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft, and Air Force E-3 AWACS and E-8 JSTARS surveillance aircraft.
Much of this equipment was built not to chase narco subs but detect and destroy enemy submarines. Over at Forbes, Sutton breaks down the different systems SOUTHCOM is bringing to the operation. The P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft was originally designed to detect ships and submarines, but is also capable of conducting surveillance over a broad area. Submarines can and do participate in the counternarcotics mission—Sutton explains how in 2009 a U.S. Navy submarine received a commendation for “disrupting drug traffic.”
One little known military contribution to the drug enforcement mission: the role of U.S. special operations forces. Although unconfirmed at this time, U.S. special operations forces could very well be monitoring coastlines for evidence of narco sub construction. U.S. Army Special Forces, Delta Force, and Navy SEALS have participated in such missions in the past.
Source: Forbes
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