Each year on September 11th, the nation pauses to honor the lives lost—ringing bells, reading names, and recalling faces forever etched in our collective memory. But remembrance without resolve is hollow. The pledge of “never again” demands action: fortifying the legal, geographic, and bureaucratic seams that our adversaries exploit so that grief never again revisits our shores.
Long before 9/11, warnings foreshadowed the U.S. border as a conduit for catastrophe. In 1986, New York Times columnist William Safire wrote words that land with more force today than when first printed:
“The day can easily be foreseen when one of our cities is held hostage by a terrorist group or a terrorist state; the stuff of novels can quickly become reality. At that point, we would be asking: how did they get the bomb into our country? Whose job was it to stop the incoming weapon at our border? Why have we spent trillions on defense when any maniac can fly in a bomb that can destroy a city?”
Safire’s foresight stressed a simple principle: accountability demands preemption. And in 1988, Congress responded—assigning the Department of Defense (DoD) lead agency status for detecting and monitoring air and maritime drug transit, codified in 10 U.S.C. § 124. That statute remains law. But for decades, America lacked the clarity, or the will to enforce it.
Today, the threat has evolved.
Mexican cartels, now designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), no longer merely smuggle narcotics. They function as hybrid threats—fusing terrorism, transnational crime, and political warfare. They extort communities, subvert governments, and calibrate violence to stay below the threshold that triggers our conventional military response. Cartel power in Mexico destabilizes not only the Western Hemisphere but the international order, threatening trade, governance, and sovereignty far beyond the Rio Grande.
Crucially, cartel power is sustained by elements within the Mexican state itself. This alignment makes Mexico not merely a victim of crime, but a de facto sponsor of narco-terrorism with global consequences. The Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG now operate in more than sixty countries, with recent arrests in Poland and Spain underscoring their expansion into Europe. Recognizing this reality is the first step to grasping the scale of the war we are in.
Not a metaphorical war. Not a “war on drugs.” A real war—waged through mass death, economic attrition, and territorial control. And finally, after years of paralysis, we now have the legal authority to fight it.
More than 112,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2023—a death toll greater than U.S. combat fatalities in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. The economic cost of the fentanyl epidemic is now estimated at $1.5 trillion per year. Entire regions of the U.S. are caught in a web of addiction, violence, and collapse. This is not just a public health emergency; this is drug warfare.
For decades, Washington approached cartels as criminal enterprises, relying on Title 21 law-enforcement tools and Title 50 intelligence authorities. That framework was too slow and too narrow. Cartels are no longer just criminal networks. They are hybrid threats: they control territory, coerce populations, corrupt institutions, and wage psychological warfare. Their tactics fall squarely under the definition of irregular warfare, where they fight below the threshold of conventional war to avoid provoking a decisive U.S. response.
In 1999, two Chinese colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published Unrestricted Warfare, arguing that states can cripple adversaries through non-military means: finance, propaganda, cyber, and even drug warfare. Two millennia earlier, Sun Tzu distilled the same principle: “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
Today, America’s adversaries have fused both lessons. China supplies precursors, cartels deliver the poison, and rogue regimes profit from the chaos. The result is a campaign that kills more Americans each year than our last three wars combined, while Washington hesitates behind legal debates and bureaucratic caution.
After years of pressure, the United States finally recognized this reality. The State Department designated major cartels and transnational organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. This action unlocked terrorism authorities across the interagency while aligning U.S. law with battlefield reality.
Crucially, the FTO designations overlay authorities the Department of Defense has held since 1988 under 10 U.S.C. §124, which directs DoD to detect and monitor aerial and maritime drug trafficking. Those authorities existed for decades. What changed this year is that the legal fog has cleared: Title 21, Title 50, and Title 10 are now aligned against a named foreign enemy.
And the shift is visible on the ground. On September 2, U.S. forces struck and sank a vessel in the southern Caribbean linked to Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth then traveled to Puerto Rico, where the USS Iwo Jima and ten F-35s are now deployed to secure maritime and aerial chokepoints. Addressing sailors and Marines aboard the Iwo Jima, Hegseth declared: “Make no mistake about it, what you’re doing right now is not training. This is the real-world exercise on behalf of the vital national interest of the United States of America to end the poisoning of the American people.” He added: “Narco-terrorists and drug traffickers are on notice.”
Meanwhile, the Coast Guard has intensified operations. Through Operation Pacific Viper, cutters have interdicted 14 vessels in the Eastern Pacific since August, seizing over 40,000 pounds of cocaine and apprehending 36 smugglers. In one night, the USCGC Stone captured, burned, and sank a suspected drug boat after three interdictions, seizing nearly 13,000 pounds of cocaine and detaining seven alleged smugglers. The largest offload in Coast Guard history followed weeks later, when the Hamilton unloaded over 76,000 pounds of drugs in Florida after 19 interdictions.
These operations mark a shift in posture; they are military operations carried out under Title 10 authority. The United States is at war—even if we have been slow to admit it.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Texas. Cartels exert operational control across key counties, imposing what amounts to parallel governance on U.S. soil. Landowners are threatened. Smugglers operate with impunity. Scouts with encrypted radios and drones direct cross-border traffic. This is not just crime—it is the projection of foreign power inside the American homeland.
Former ICE Director and now Border Czar Tom Homan put it plainly: “President Trump has designated these cartels as terrorist organizations and it ends when we wipe them off the face of the earth. They’ve killed more Americans than every terrorist organization in the world.”
For too long, America treated this as a border issue, an immigration issue, or a drug issue. It is none of those things alone. It is a sovereignty issue. It is war. And we finally have the authority to fight it.
“Never Again” was never a slogan. It was a pledge. This September, we must remember that pledge is not fulfilled by ceremonies alone. It is fulfilled by action: recognizing the cartels as the foreign terrorist adversaries they are, using the Title 10 authorities we already have, and waging war to win.
