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Take I wrote on increasing calls in Republican and bi-partisan spaces for a Military intervention into Mexico against the Cartels, and why this would inevitably lead to armed conflict within America itself, along with a possible death spiral of instability in the wider North American region.
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Notes -
On the one hand, I agree that US counter-insurgency '''doctrine''' is abysmal and the political dimension would be even worse. Other powers would be eager to fuel this conflict. China and Russia would love to tie the US down in their own hemisphere and so they might aid the cartels. Arguably, they already have been, China sending precursor chemicals to the cartels. A very reasonable argument.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that drug gangs are no match for state power, if used effectively. States have large forces of better equipped, better trained troops. The US has the surveillance infrastructure, wiretapping, hardware backdoors, drones, satellites. The US is (in theory) united while the cartels are divided. At bare minimum you don't see the FBI torturing their competitors in the CIA to death on Liveleak. The US has a stranglehold over drug financing - is it so hard to arrest the drug dealers? Drug dealers have to be contactable by the lowest-IQ, chemically unbalanced dregs of society - how can police be unable to find them and work their way up the distribution chain? They usually have huge tattoos all across their bodies! How could it be that a military acclaimed as the world's strongest is unable to root out some thugs on their own border, thugs that are effectively killing hundreds of thousands of US citizens?
Now I check, cartels are expanding into Europe, so it's not just an American problem: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230116-latin-american-cocaine-cartels-bring-violence-to-europe
If it is impossible for the US as is to defeat the cartels, surely this tells us something important about liberal democracy. China would whisk these people away, perhaps never to be seen again. That much is beyond doubt, China wiped the floor with its opiates problem in the 1940s and 50s, when it was much poorer and less technologically advanced than the US. Addicts were sent to compulsory camps to get clean. Drug dealers disappeared. They did a similar intensive suppression operation as soon as some Uyghur separatists got violent. The insurgency was crushed. China has a similar kind of serious viciousness to the cartels in that they don't pull their punches. The post assumes a half-baked, ill-planned hesitant series of reactionary operations, where the cartels get to adapt to drones and each new tactic the US deploys in series, rather than being overwhelmed. Cartel tactics of assassinating leaders would also be effective, causing oppressive checkpoints and blowback. Incompetently targeted US drone strikes would also cause militias to form against the government, he says. This is fairly believable.
In contrast, Afghanistan, under the new Taliban government, has pretty effectively smashed poppy production. Afghanistan was 80-90% of world heroin production! They just ban it and enforce the ban and It Just Works, even though there are a million good reasons why it shouldn't.
https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/06/talibans-successful-opium-ban-bad-afghans-and-world
In Helmand, by far Afghanistan’s largest opium-producing province, the area of poppy cultivation was cut from over 129,000 hectares (ha) in 2022 to only 740 ha as of April 2023.
(I personally interpret the rest of the article as disguised seething at the Taliban's success where the expert-led US approach failed, from one of said US experts. Maybe he's right and the ban will fail.)
The cartels, the Taliban and China seem to have a level of viciousness that pays off for them, while the US doesn't. Even El Salvador even managed to suppress the cartels fairly effectively, despite tiny resources. If El Salvador can win where the US would lose, the US model is seriously flawed. There's no straight tradeoff between liberty and safety in this issue - if the government can't keep you safe and free from cartels as in 30% of Mexico, then you're just living under a different and worse government. No safety, no freedom.
I think you're misunderstanding... The US probably could cripple 50% of the domestic US drug trade by 5x-ing the US prison population, which in and of itself might start a hot ethnic conflict on a par with the 1970s (not all Americans use drugs equally, and of those that do they're certainly not equal in their likelihood to get caught)...
The challenge is Hostily imposing this on another country of 126 million, where something like 30-50% of the local government is just pretending to be an ally whilst taking bribes and actively integrating with the cartels.
China has a problem like this, it's called corruption, and Chinese Corruption is absolutely impossible to root out not least because there isn't really a non-corrupt faction and every arrest for corruption is really just backdoor purging by the various factions.
So lets say America goes balls to the wall in Mexico, Full invasion of Iraq. HALF A MILLION US military personnel and then 200-400 thousand continuously once established, This is basically all the US can spare, with 1.4 million active-duty military personnel total, this is everyone but the people actually maintaining the bases and operating the Ships back in the US and around the empire...
The thing is that wasn't enough in Iraq. There was the entire war during the occupation which was only reduced down to a dull roar with the surge.
And this was Iraq with a population one third the Size of Mexico, a Shia Majority, and Kurdish minority that were being empowered by the US intervention against their hated Sunni minority rival who was the one actually fighting the US... And even then it didn't work, and Sunni ISIS arose within a decade, and the country is still divided between militias and local warlords.
You do that in a country with 3x the population, 2x the GDP, several massive cities, and insurgent networks that are basically already adapted to resist US surveillance (these guys have been paranoid about cellphones since the 80s, many cartel bosses simply do not allow cellphones within 200 meters of them, since they assume the NSA is already going full tilt spying on them, and that will be all of them instantly if the ones that don't start getting picked off)...
And also 10 cities with populations over a million where drone strikes basically can't be done, one of which is a ten-million-person mega-city that will just devour an army that tries to occupy it...
Oh ya and it's a permanently profitable trade. So you have to maintain this, for decades... because there's no way you're getting rid of all the corrupt Mexican officials, many of whom are popular and elected, and many of whom are the military... and it will instantly replace itself the second you leave.
Rand had a paper to the effect that The golden ratio for hostile occupations of conquered people is 1 soldier per 50 civilians... that's what was used in Germany after WW2 and Kosovo, America's 2 successful occupations.
America would need 2-3 million to do that in Mexico, or twice the number of people in the entire military... so you'd need a draft, which would be resisted, the resistance of which would be funded by the cartels... which would require further military force and straining of America's already stretched thin police to put down...
You see how this quickly becomes the American state itself being stretched thin, across AMERICA, even if the government magically bites the bullet and goes full force from the start, instead of making the easy call like they did in Vietnam and Iraq and massively under-committing thus letting their enemy organize and create networks, and adapt to the hardest hitting tactics, whilst the politicians are still calling their forces in country "Advisors" and telling the American people they're not at war, whilst various military planners are actually kind-of secretly hoping something will happen and dozens of Americans will be killed so they can have popular support to actually do something that might be kindof effective...
It'll inevitably be something America sleepwalks backward into with some minor commitment, turning into casualties, turning into bigger commitments, turning into more casualties, turning into outrage, turning into a war, turning into a Quagmire... turning into Vietnam...
Except America would never be able to pull out of this Vietnam because it's RIGHT THERE, and the conflict would immediately be inside America's border.
El Salvador succeeded in its campaign because it's a country that was both unnecessary to the drug trade (so once the margins got high enough the trade could go elsewhere), it had the security force fully committed, it had local political will... and it did vastly less than you're thinking because they took out only 3 specific gangs not the trade itself (strongly suspect the El Salvadorean regime is backdoor participating in the international trade for personal profit just like Noriega, and their policy is just making a deal with the people to not let it affect El Salvador directly... so there was a massive profit motive in El Salvadorean security forces crushing MS-13, they were probably their rivals)
Agreed with the general direction of your argument, but nitpick concerning post-war Germany: Firstly, the presence of the Soviet zone with Soviet occupation methods provided an additional "good cop/bad cop" dynamic. Secondly, it's not like the West German state was built ex nihilo without any relation to pre-war regime (probably it would have been impossible as everyone who strove to be someone had no option than associate with pre-war regime or become resistance fighter, a heroic but also often a dead-end career choice; random google result.)
The point is, replicating the feat that was "post-war Germany" would require more than 1 to 50 ratio of soldiers, but also a big stick in form of a "worse option" (better yet, a common enemy) and a buy-in from the prominent members of civil society and state apparatus. The case for post-war Japan had many similarities; less sure about post-war South Korea, but they had a military dictatorship. Conclusion: If wants to run an occupation with sheer force only, counting sufficient soldiers, one would need to study other case studies, from someone else's books. Maybe Soviet methods, which generally worked for maintaining the Soviet control for some time (at a cost which they finally were no longer willing to pay, thus not lasting a full century).
And all of the above is ignoring the difference between fighting a state or a polity (who have state-like-goals) and fighting a drug enterprise (which have other kind of goals). What good is sending 2m soldiers to fight the War on Drugs in the enemy territory if the enemy general's reaction is "many potential customers have moved closer to supply, saving on the logistics costs"?
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