U.S. Has Limited Knowledge of Those It Kills in Boat Strikes

The U.S. military has killed more than 80 people since the campaign began in early September. But it does not know who specifically is being killed.

In decades of war against terrorist and insurgent groups, the military and spy agencies learned that to take down a network, they had to first understand it.

That often meant rounding up low-level people who could lead them to more important people.

While the United States had successes, it also made mistakes, sometimes hitting the wrong target or causing collateral damage, angering local populations and creating more opponents than were eliminated.

As a result of those errors, the United States worked to create detailed intelligence dossiers so that civilians approving the strikes could have confidence in who was being targeted and more clearly see the potential unintended consequences of a strike.

But those lessons of the long war against terrorism appear to have been cast aside as the Trump administration attacks boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that it says are carrying drugs.

The U.S. military has killed more than 80 people since the campaign began in early September. But it does not know who specifically is being killed, and the strikes were not designed to take out high-ranking cartel leaders.

Instead, the military has killed, at best, low-level people, whose role in the drug trade may have been taking a payment for moving cocaine from one spot to another. (At worst, some of the people killed could have been fishermen, migrants or others who had nothing to do with the drug trade.)

“Traditionally, our counternarcotics efforts have always been targeted at the head of the snake,” said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “This is obviously the opposite of that. Now we’re going after the tail of the snake. We’re going after some, you know, poor ex-fishermen who took 300 bucks to run a load of cocaine to Trinidad.”

The strikes are also at odds with any effort to understand the cartels moving the drugs. Taking apart a network, experts said, requires capturing people and interrogating them to find out the financiers and leaders. By blowing up the boats, the United States is also destroying the intelligence and evidence.

“If what you wanted was to stop the drug trade, obviously this isn’t what you’d be doing,” said Annie Pforzheimer, a former senior U.S. diplomat who specialized in counternarcotics during her career. “Because you’d be capturing the people in the boats, turning them to get the next level of the organization, turning those people to the next level and getting to the top.”

The military knows that someone on the boats has a connection to a drug cartel, and it has some level of confidence that drugs are on the vessels, according to people familiar with the military’s classified briefings. But in most, if not all, of the strikes, the Pentagon does not know precisely whom it is killing, those people said.

And Democratic lawmakers say that presents a real danger.

“There are two reasons you’re really super careful about this stuff,” Mr. Himes said. “One would hope that you might have some qualms about killing innocent people — there’s the moral dimension, and I’d like to believe that still matters. And then No. 2, there’s the blowback issue.”

During America’s long fight against terrorism, the C.I.A. and the military learned that when they killed terrorism suspects, the family members of those people could become radicalized, turning against the country that had killed their brother or son.

Mr. Himes said each and every boat strike carried the same risk.

“These are guys who made a bad decision to take 500 bucks to run a fast boat up to Trinidad,” Mr. Himes said. “They’re the street-corner hustlers. And if the United States is sending the signal that life doesn’t matter, that’s coming back to us, that is absolutely coming back to us.”

Supporters of the strikes have noted that overhead surveillance by both drones and satellites has improved in recent years and that there is less chance of collateral damage from striking boats at sea compared with targets on land.

Trump administration officials have also pointed out that their Democratic predecessors approved counterterrorism strikes even when they were unsure exactly who was being killed.

During the Obama administration, the C.I.A. conducted antiterrorism strikes in cases in which the United States did not know specifically whom it was killing. Instead, the strikes were based on intelligence assessments from a “pattern of life” and other information that showed connections between the targeted people and known terrorists.

These attacks were called signature strikes because they were based on actions that looked like terrorism, or had a terrorism “signature,” but were not backed up by specific knowledge about who was at a site being targeted or what exactly they might have been planning.

The term, however, was tainted from the beginning. Critics maintained that strikes on large groups of unidentified people suspected of being militants did little to stop terrorist attacks but risked mistakes that could lead to civilian deaths and turn local populations against the United States.

Because of the controversy, restrictions were placed on signature strikes. And when the Obama administration later began targeting militants in Yemen whose identify they did not know, it started calling the operations “terrorist attack disruption strikes.”

While there are some similarities between the boat strikes and the old signature strikes, the military has rejected the idea that the attacks on the boats are signature strikes. In briefings with members of Congress, military officers have asserted that they are confident there are drugs on the boats — and that the drugs are the real target of the attacks.

But lawmakers say that means the people on the boats are, in effect, collateral damage.

“They told us it is not a signature strike, because it’s not just about pattern of life, but it’s also not like they know every individual person on the boats,” said Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California and a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Ms. Jacobs said she believed the strikes were wrong.

“I didn’t hear any evidence that convinced me that these weren’t extrajudicial killings,” she said.

John Ismay contributed reporting.

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