CNN
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According to open source data and three US authorities, the US military has significantly increased surveillance of Mexican drug cartels over the past two weeks, with sophisticated spy planes 18 in international airspaces around the southwestern US and the Baja Peninsula Flying on a mission. I’m familiar with missions.
According to current and former military officials, flights conducted over 10 days from late January to early February represent a dramatic escalation of activities, with President Donald Trump securing the border and cartel drug smuggling. He now instructed the military to stop him. operation.
Historically, the pentagon has only flew a month’s surveillance mission around the US-Mexico border. Authorities usually focus these planes on gathering information about other priorities, such as Russian activities in Ukraine and hunting Russian or Chinese submarines.
The action highlights that the military has begun to focus on the southern borders where Trump has declared a state of emergency, moving the already finite US national security capabilities away from overseas threats.
At least 11 of these recent flights around the US were made by the Navy P-8. This is a particularly respected plane that specializes in submarine identification, but has a sophisticated radar system that can collect images and signal intelligence.
The nearly six-hour flight on February 3 was by a U-2 spy plane, one of the most respected reconnaissance planes in the US military, designed during the Cold War to collect high-altitude images of the Soviet Union. It was done.
Current and former military officials with deep experience in studying countercatics at the border said they could not recall the U-2, which had previously been used for this purpose.
The flight routes are missions in California, Arizona and Texas, and span the US-Mexico border. CNN also looped around the Baja Peninsula and identified at least one long mission to pass near Sinaloa on February 4th.
The loop around the Baja Peninsula has been in use “for a long time,” one defense attorney said. But it’s “I’m getting more use now.”
Despite flying along the border through US airspace, the aircraft are able to gather intelligence deep within Mexico, former officials said.
Rampup highlights Trump’s determination to use the military to address border security with advisors.
It is not very clear how the Trump administration plans to utilize the information it has acquired. It can even be used to construct a set of evidence for further foreign terrorist designations, or to identify information that could be given to the Mexican army to target cartel activities.
Some current and former US officials have expressed quiet concern to CNN that the intelligence reporting agency could be part of an effort by the US military to find a target to hit itself.
Trump dropped the bombs at the Fentanyl Institute and threatened to send special forces to take the cartel leaders.
Trump has begun the process of designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. This is a move that raises doubts about the possibility of US military action directly within Mexico.
The president has ordered thousands of additional active duty forces to the border, despite the lowest levels of immigration intersections since 2020.
According to sources familiar with the plan, these forces support the US border patrol and provide more intelligence reporting specialists to assess threats and immigration flows. The military is not permitted to play a law enforcement role, such as arrests or drug seizures. They are also prohibited from interacting with immigrants other than transporting them.
Current and former US officials are seeing clear efforts to shift more responsibility for the American countercatics mission to the military. This has decades of experience fighting other non-state terrorist groups around the world that have operational similarities with cartels.
“I think it’s stupid to take on the army, but I know they’ve taken them to the Mexican army before, but now they have US troops,” border emperor Tom Homan said Thursday. told ABC News. “Are you hoping that violence will escalate? Because absolutely, the cartels are making record money.”
However, former staff and analysts point out that cartels are also different from overseas Muslim terrorist groups in important ways. They are essentially commercial organisations, not ideological organisations. They are not interested in governing the population or seizing territory. They are sometimes deeply entangled with some of the Mexican government, where the US military actively partners and supports.
“Yes, some parts of the state are colluding with the cartel, but others are resisting. The Council of Foreign Relations wrote in a recent essay in the New York Times.
This makes the cartel a fundamentally different enemy from what the Department of Defense uses to counter. Part of the reason why most military counter-catic work has been carried out to support military enforcement agencies and law enforcement agencies such as the Ministry of Land, Land, and Land, in part.
Among the designated foreign terrorist organizations are groups such as ISIS, Boko Haram and Hamas, among others.
Oren Liebermann and Sanika Tank of CNN contributed to this report.
