U.S. Southern Command said Thursday that the Defense Department carried out another “lethal kinetic strike” at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s direction on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean that killed four men.
“On Dec. 4, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization,” U.S. Southern Command wrote on X.
The Pentagon has repeatedly said targeted vessels are traveling along known drug routes and carrying narcotics when the United States conducts its strikes. U.S. Southern Command offered a similar explanation Thursday, saying intelligence “confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route.”
It’s at least the 22nd known time the Trump administration has launched a military strike against alleged drug-carrying boats in recent months. The last known strike was on Nov. 15. The strikes have killed at least 86 people. The Trump administration has not produced evidence supporting its allegations about the boats, their passengers or their cargo or the numbers of people who were killed or injured or who survived.
Both the House and the Senate have initiated inquiries into a pair of strikes the Trump administration conducted on a vessel in the Caribbean on Sept. 2, which has been met by criticism and claims that the second strike could amount to a war crime.
The White House has said Navy Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who then led Joint Special Operations Command, ordered a second strike on a boat coming from Venezuela and allegedly carrying narcotics that killed survivors of an earlier strike that day.
A defense official told NBC News on Thursday that Bradley viewed the two survivors as legitimate military targets.
Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson also defended the strikes in a statement Tuesday saying the operations “are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict. These actions have also been approved by the best military and civilian lawyers up and down the chain of command.”
President Donald Trump said this week that he would have “no problem” with releasing any available video of the second strike on Sept. 2 and said he supported “the decision to knock out the boats” when he was asked whether he backed the killing of survivors.
“Whoever is piloting those boats, most of them are gone, but whoever is piloting those boats, they’re guilty of trying to kill people in our country,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.