About a year and a half after he was fired by President Donald Trump, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper published a tell-all memoir about the inner workings of the Trump administration. One of the book’s more remarkable allegations was that Trump, frustrated by the flow of illegal drugs coming across the U.S.-Mexico border, asked Esper twice about launching U.S. missile attacks on fentanyl labs run by Mexican cartels. While Trump denied most of the assertions about him in Esper’s book, in a nugget little noted at the time, he gave an entirely different answer about the missile strikes: “no comment.” The implication: It was entirely possible Trump thought bombing the cartels was a good idea.
Apparently, the concept never left the president’s head. Four years later, using U.S. military force in Mexico remains a real option for Trump. On April 8, NBC News reported that the White House, the Defense Department and the intelligence community were discussing possible drone strikes on cartel infrastructure. Ideally, the U.S. would conduct these strikes in cooperation with the Mexican government, but might do so unilaterally as a last resort. If this sounds surprising, it shouldn’t; Trump’s second administration is stacked with senior officials, from Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Ronald Johnson, Trump’s recently confirmed ambassador to Mexico, who either genuinely believe the U.S. military should be prosecuting a war against the cartels or are at least open to the proposal.
The only problem? It’s a risky, counterproductive and utterly boneheaded idea.
Using military force to curtail the cartels and limit the flow of drugs into the United States is not a novel concept.
What proponents view as a necessary and justifiable assault against some of the world’s most notorious criminal organizations is in reality a further militarization of the failed “war on drugs” framework that has dominated U.S. counternarcotics policy for decades. With respect to Mexico specifically, further militarization is more likely to result in a rising death toll, a broken U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship and little reduction in the fentanyl trade.
Using military force to curtail the cartels and limit the flow of drugs into the United States is not a novel concept. Beginning with former Mexican President Vicente Fox at the turn of the century, successive Mexican governments have provided the Mexican military with ever more power for the purpose of going after the cartels and their leaders. The results were catastrophic. While some high-profile narcotraffickers were killed or captured and the Mexican government increased its presence in areas of the country that were once off-limits, violence skyrocketed. The cartels retaliated with ever more merciless, indiscriminate attacks against the Mexican state, which they largely avoided during the 1980s and 1990s. Civilians bore the brunt of the bloodshed, both during intracartel clashes and in fighting between the cartels and the Mexican security forces. Whatever progress was made was short-lived and geared more for public relations.
The cartels’ capacity to inflict terror over the population was never impacted. In 2007, Mexico registered roughly 11,000 homicides; in 2023, the last year full data is available, the number reached more than 30,000 for the sixth year in a row.
The Trump administration might scoff at this history. The U.S. military, after all, is more capable than its Mexican counterpart. And unlike what Mexico did, any U.S. military action, like drone strikes, is likely to be more discriminate and less top-heavy. U.S. troops, for instance, won’t be patrolling Mexican cities and performing counterinsurgency operations like they did in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Yet this is cold comfort. Striking cartel operatives from the air is really just an extension of the so-called Kingpin Strategy that the Mexican government has implemented for roughly two decades. Yes, the United States is likely to kill some cartel leaders, and those assassinations will certainly give us the illusion of progress. But neutralizing the leadership won’t kill these cartels; far from it. Instead, there will be jockeying among potential replacements and significant intracartel violence until one of two things happens: a new regime is constructed after somebody consolidates power at the top of the organization, or the organization itself splits into multiple factions. Moreover, other cartels will attempt to muscle into their rival’s territory to grab more of the trade. As long as the gravy train is running and the demand is high, the cartels will continue to find a way to produce. This is precisely what happened when Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the most infamous drug lord since Pablo Escobar, was captured by the Mexican security forces in 2016 and extradited to the United States for prosecution. One study by the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico program found that killings actually spiked after Guzman’s 2016 arrest, a consequence of his lieutenants fighting for power. A similar dynamic played out after the 2024 capture of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel. Since then, the cartel has been in a state of civil war between El Mayo’s faction and the Chapitos, the wing led by Guzman’s sons, for control. Culiacán, Sinaloa’s capital city of 1 million people, has been a war zone since last September. Finally, if one of the Trump administration’s goals is to decrease the flow of fentanyl into the United States, then military action against cartel infrastructure is highly unlikely to accomplish it. Unlike coca or opium, which require land and are therefore exposed from the air, fentanyl is a synthetic drug that can be produced with very little technical skill in the single room of a building. Fentanyl is also very cheap to produce. According to a 2023 Justice Department indictment against a list of Mexican cartel members, $800 worth of precursor chemicals can be turned into millions of dollars in profit at the street level. As the Drug Enforcement Administration has said, the cartels have already earned billions of dollars off the fentanyl trade. As long as the gravy train is running and the demand is high, the cartels will continue to find a way to produce. The monetary incentive is too great to do anything less. You can’t blame the Trump administration for wanting to address the drug crisis in America. Although overdose deaths declined by nearly 24% between September 2023 and September 2024 from the same period a year earlier, overdoses remain the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 44. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl are responsible for the bulk of those deaths, so U.S. officials have a sense of urgency. But drone strikes, however showy, won’t fix a problem that doesn’t have any easy solution.
Daniel R. DePetris
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune. 
