Before the Trump administration began attacking people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors, according to multiple U.S. officials.
The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with suspected cartel members, the officials said.
After the smoke cleared from a first strike on Sept. 2, there were two survivors, and one of them radioed for help, the U.S. officials said. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, ordered a follow-up strike and both were killed.
The military’s contingency plans have taken on new significance as Admiral Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are set to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday to answer questions about the attack amid an uproar over the killing of the survivors.
The men plan to present a vigorous defense, officials said, of what they will assert was a lawful follow-up strike on the survivors. That moment is just a small part of Mr. Trump’s legally disputed campaign of killing people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea as if they were combatants in a war, but it is now the focus of intense congressional scrutiny.
The details of the contingency planning could raise more questions about who was responsible for the second strike — the commander who ordered it or the defense secretary who approved the overall operation. Many critics, including some lawmakers, have said the follow-up attack could be a war crime.
Defenders of both Mr. Hegseth and Admiral Bradley said that once lawmakers learn more about the planning scenarios and the circumstances of the second strike, they will be exonerated.
President Trump on Wednesday offered his support for both men. The Pentagon did not respond to request for comment on the military’s planning.
On orders from Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth, the U.S. military has attacked 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 83 people, as part of a legally disputed policy of summarily executing people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were combatants on a battlefield.
The alleged radio communications by the initial survivors — including any recordings of intercepts the U.S. may have — may not be the only messages that lawmakers seek to scrutinize as contemporaneous evidence of what happened.
Several U.S. officials told The New York Times that military officials had used a written texting system known as “Strike Bridge” to communicate, both during planning scenarios ahead of the attack and during the operation itself. The written messages, they said, included communications between Admiral Bradley and the SEAL Team 6 operators piloting the drone.
Strike Bridge automatically saves those messages, officials said. Several congressional officials said lawmakers had asked to review logs related to the operation, along with written documentation like Mr. Hegseth’s “execute order” and the rules of engagement. It is not clear whether the Pentagon will turn them over.
U.S. officials said the military was also weighing whether it could show the full, unedited video of the Sept. 2 engagement with the boat to the lawmakers. Congressional officials said lawmakers needed to see the entire video recording to conduct proper oversight.
Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that he would release whatever video footage the administration had of the Sept. 2 strike.
Under the plans Mr. Hegseth had approved, Admiral Bradley interpreted the purported communications between the initial survivors and colleagues as meaning that the survivors were still in the fight, rather than shipwrecked and helpless people whom it would be a war crime to target.
The Pentagon’s law of war manual says that “to be considered ‘shipwrecked,’ persons must be in need of assistance and care, and they must refrain from any hostile act.” A U.S. naval commander handbook says combatants “qualify as shipwrecked persons only if they have ceased all active combat activity.”
The Pentagon’s defense of its actions rests heavily on the premise that there was a “fight” in the first place. In defending the campaign of summary killings at sea as lawful, the administration has relied on Mr. Trump’s disputed determination that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that people suspected of smuggling drugs for them are “combatants.”
A still-secret memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts Mr. Trump’s claims about the nature of drug cartels and that there is an armed conflict. Based on that premise, it concludes that the boat strikes are lawful.
One of its key related conclusions, according to people who have read it, is that suspected cargos of drugs aboard boats are lawful military targets because cartels could otherwise sell them and use the profits to buy military equipment to sustain their alleged war efforts.
The Pentagon’s emphasis on the purported radio communications appears to rely on that logic. The idea appears to be that without a second strike, another boat could have come to retrieve not only the survivors but also any of the alleged shipment of cocaine that the first blast did not burn up, so calling for help was a hostile act.
A broad range of legal experts reject the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s claim that this is an armed conflict. They say that there is no armed conflict, that crews of boats suspected of smuggling drugs are civilians, not combatants, and that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have been giving illegal orders to commit murder.
The second strike in the Sept. 2 attack appears to have attracted bipartisan oversight interest in part because Republicans can criticize it without directly challenging Mr. Trump. That is because even if one accepts Mr. Trump’s claim that it is an armed conflict, killing shipwrecked enemies is a war crime.
Mr. Hegseth issued the broad orders that authorized the military to sink the boats, destroy the drugs and kill the people aboard. Those orders, developed ahead of the first strike, have remained largely unchanged throughout the campaign, officials said. Admiral Bradley and his subordinates developed the specific plans and scenarios for the operation based on the broad order issued by Mr. Hegseth.
Mr. Hegseth reviewed those plans and gave approval for the specific strike on Sept. 2 based on the plans, but he turned the running of the operation over to Admiral Bradley.
U.S. officials said Mr. Hegseth was fully supportive of Admiral Bradley’s actions and believed they followed the plans he had presented to the secretary and other senior Pentagon officials.
Both Mr. Hegseth and General Caine were monitoring a live video feed of the strikes, officials said. Mr. Hegseth said on Tuesday that he did not “stick around” to see if there were any survivors or the second strike that killed them.
Dave Philipps contributed reporting.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
The post U.S. Military’s Boat Strikes Planning Takes on New Significance appeared first on New York Times.
