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Notes -
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/white-house-admiral-approved-second-strike-boat-venezuela-was-well-within-legal-2025-12-01/
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/some-us-republicans-want-answers-venezuela-strikes-despite-trump-2025-12-01/
Aaand (after previously denying it?) the White House confirms that a second strike killed survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat. (Hegseth is joking about it) It even seems the purpose of the second strike was solely to leave no survivors.
Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...
Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?
The stupider this becomes, the more likely it seems that this conflict is a result of Trump's fixation with spoils of war and that he actually thinks we can literally just "take the oil."
The “laws of war” aren’t real and don’t apply to terrorists. This kind of bloviating about moral principle might work on the DC politicians who read the Washington Post, but we here simply don’t have to participate in this. We do not have to accept moral lectures from the same politicians behind Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. The purpose of a military is to kill people. We’re not playing these nice legal lawyer games where we can’t kill our enemies or else they win. We don’t have to care about the latest high-level inflammatory anonymous “sources familiar with say” nonsense story about how Trump is doing this evil evil thing that was normal until five minutes ago.
My position is that it didn’t happen and it’s a good thing if it did.
If your belief is that Trump is lying about who was killed, you should just say that. Because a passing knowledge about American satellite tech reveals that we have an extremely good idea of who we’re targeting and the risk that these drug smugglers are actually innocent fish peddlers is on the same order of magnitude as discovering we lost the moon.
The purpose of a military isn’t actually to kill people. It’s a tool for asserting the national interest. Sometimes that means accepting limitations—when you actually get something in return. That’s civilization for you.
I don't have reason to believe that these strikes were actually illegal. But if they somehow were, Hegseth would be undermining an equilibrium that really does benefit the U.S.. And for what? A little extra assurance that those narcos wouldn’t get rescued? There’s no reward.
Our current Secretary of War has written a whole book (The War on Warriors) about how treating the US military as an instrument of policy and social change, rather than an instrument of violence, is the root cause of much dysfunction from the Vietnam-era to the present day.
Social change has nothing to do with it.
When we signed the CWC, we were binding our hands with respect to chemical weapons. We’d decided that was a fair price for binding all the other signatories. Cooperate-cooperate.
We don’t bomb lifeboats so that other states don’t bomb ours. Even though narcos will never be in that position, bombing their lifeboats would set a bad precedent for our relations with other states. They might reasonably assume that we will, in fact, ignore the rules we’ve supposedly endorsed.
Secretary Hegseth would disagree. As @gog and @YE_GUILTY observe above, there has been a societal shift towards the idea that discipline should be done away with. Hegseth argues that this attitude is fundamentally incompatible with the "warrior ethos" and by extension winning wars, and I feel like he makes a reasonable case for this position.
Which of those things applies to bombing lifeboats, though?
Who's bombing lifeboats?
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