The Pentagon’s Long Struggle To Stop Drug Boats Without Killing

A Coast Guard helicopter sniper takes aim with a .50 caliber rifle in a training exercise to knock out a fast boat engine without injuring the crew

U.S. Coast Guard

Pete Hegseth has strongly defended the current approach approach of stopping drug boats with lethal strikes by laser-guided Hellfire missiles.

“We’ll keep killing them so long as they’re poisoning our people with narcotics,” Hegseth stated at a defense forum on Saturday.

It is worth noting though that the Pentagon previously worked hard to avoid using lethal force in this mission, and not only introduced special tactics but developed a whole range of novel weapons technologies to stop fast boats without harming the occupants.

Operation New Frontier: Flying Snipers Who Do No Harm

Drug smuggling in the Caribbean became a major issue in the 90s.. Smugglers had adopted ‘go-fast boats’ or ‘cigarette boats,’ speedboats packed with fuel and drugs. Reaching speeds of 80 mph or more, the new fast boats easily outpaced the Coast Guard’s ships.

“These guys were running right past our cutters and were waving as they went by,” Lt. Cmdr. Chris Adair, of the Coast Guard’s Office of Law Enforcement Policy told the Lexington Institute in a 2000 interview.

The response was to supply the Coast Guard with MH-90 Enforcer helicopters able to operate from the cutters, and arming the helicopters with M-240 machine guns and .50-caliber Robar sniper rifles. The machine guns were used for warning shots, kicking up lines of spray (“stitches”) in front of a boat. If a boat failed to stop, a specially trained sniper used the .50 Cal to place shots into the outboard motor, bringing it to a halt.

This operation was so successful it was expanded to form the Coast Guard’s Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON), which continues to operate in the counter-drugs role. From one helicopter, HITRON now has eight , currently Augusta A109Es. In fiscal year 2024, HITRON stopped 34 vessels, detained 114 smugglers, and interdicted 52 tons of cocaine valued at nearly $1.4 billion. This total has reportedly been surpassed in 2025.

While HITRON tactics are tried and tested, commanders expressed an interest in methods which did not involve firing live ammunition and the risk of killing or injuring suspects who may turn out to be innocent.

Vessel Entanglers, Super Slime, And Engine Zappers

This requirement led to the development of various types of ‘Running Gear Entanglement System’ (RGES), basically nets dropped into the water which snarl up the boat propeller. The air-launched version is typically fired from a bazooka-like weapon with compressed air.

“What we want to be able to do is stop it without actually having to kill the people in the boat, or risk killing the people in the boat,” Admiral West, then the U.K.’s counter-terrorism minister, told the BBC in a 2012 interview at one demonstration.

Diamond Nets offers a variety of GGES made from ultra-high strength Spectra fiber to law enforcement agencies and the military .

“There are different versions of RGES to suite different applications from lightweight shoulder launched to stop go fast boats on the move to hand launched versions that will stop a displacement hull ship,” according to the company website.

However the propeller often gets so entangled that a diver is needed to free it. This led to a 2018 US Navy project to develop a new biodegradable RGES based on hagfish slime.

The hagfish protects itself by ejecting protein threads which absorb thousands of times their own weight in water and forms a cloud of protective slime. The weaponized version uses a similar synthetic substance to choke boat propellers. Like hagfish slime, this dissolves after a short period, and so does not require any clean-up afterwards.

Boats with jet-type propulsion cannot be entangled with RGES, but there is another weapon for that, a device like a rubber jellyfish. This is dropped into the path of the jet ski, a ‘tentacle’ gets sucked into the intake and the body of the jellyfish clogs up and stalls the engine.

The Navy has also poured money into developed an even more science-fictional weapon, the Directed Energy Vessel Stopper. Mounted on a helicopter or boat, this disables a boat engine from a distance by burning out the electronics with a pulse of high energy microwaves. Similar weapons is now being used to down drones, and microwaves could be the answer to harmlessly stopping fast boats – if the Pentagon is still interested.

Lethal Vs Nonlethal Approaches

According to research by an NPR visiting Venezuela , smuggling boat crews are typically low-level criminals from fishing villages, paid about $500 per run. To the cartels, they are as expendable as the $100k go-fast boats, and as easy to replace.

Capturing speed boats intact rather than destroying them, and with the crew alive, allows the captors to gather intelligence about the boat’s cargo, its origin and destination. The crew can be interrogated about their operation and who they are working for. Even if they are not co-operative, biometrics such as fingerprints will identify individuals and help establish which cartels are operating where. Dead men, on the other hand, tell no tales.

Drug enforcement agencies have always preferred to work their way up the ladder and tackle cartel bosses and high-level traffickers to cause strategic damage to the organization. Targeting individual smugglers tends to cause only minor disruption, and the current campaign goes against that accepted wisdom.

One theory holds that the lethal approach is better because killing smugglers will act as a deterrent. There is a parallel with the war in Ukraine, where Russian casualties – estimated at a million so far – are mainly ‘mobiks’ who sign up voluntarily for a cash bonus and the promise of a payout to their families if they are killed. The vast number of Russian deaths has done little to deter around 30,000 a month from signing on. Venezuela, like Russia, is an economic disaster area, and there are plenty of desperate people willing to risk their lives for what to them seems like a big payout.

Pete Hegseth is committed to lethal airstrikes which will, in his words, “stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists.” If legal challenges or other factors lead to a change in direction though, there is no shortage of non-lethal ways to continue the mission of targeting small boats.