The Air Force's quiet war on the Latin American drug cartels

In a panic, the smugglers scrambled to retrieve all the packages of cocaine aboard and then dumped them over the side one-by-one, like million dollar buoys spreading out in their wake.

"Think about it," said Lt. Gen. Chris Nowland, commander of the 12th Air Force under  at Air Combat Command, and of Air Forces Southern, said at that briefing. "If you’re in the middle of the Caribbean in a go-fast [a speedboat commonly used by drug smugglers] — 40 feet long, four or five 250-horsepower engines  — and suddenly a bomber comes out of nowhere and flies over the top of your vessel? It’ll get your attention, to put it mildly."That B-1 bomber wasn't there to blow them out of the water. In fact it was , It was an Air Force B-1 bomber on a routine training mission, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said at an April 15 roundtable briefing with reporters at the Pentagon. But And when the bomber’s crew saw the vessel, they and thought it looked suspicious and they took a low-level pass to check it outidentify them. The fearful panicked smugglers threw an estimated 500 kilos of cocaine overboard.

These situations now currently happen occasionally. But James hopes they become increasingly regular occurrences in Latin America. She wants the Air Force to figure out ways to work more efficiently and provide more assistance to the narcotics interdiction efforts of U.S. Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force-South out of Key West, Florida.

"We as Americans, we at our own peril, risk not paying attention to partner nations to the south," Nowland said in a follow-up interview May 2. "The drug lords have morphed themselves from the days of Pablo Escobar. They are the ultimate businessmen, because they don’t have to follow any rules. Cocaine, heroin, precursor chemicals [which are needed to produce other drugs such as methamphetamine], counterfeit consumer goods, wildlife, gold, female trafficking victims — which is the grossest one of all — to weapons, to smuggling migrants, to timber, to moving bulk cash. They’ve diversified, and they’re worldwide now."As the Air Force has been occupied fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bolstering European allies nervous about Russian aggression, and beefing up its forces in Asia, Latin America has faded to the background. That needs to change, James said. Not only do Latin American countries need assistance with counternarcotics efforts and stopping destabilizing cartels and other transnational organized crime, they need American assistance to train and improveing and training their own air forces and help with with other missions, such as humanitarian assistance peacekeeping.

"If you can move all these tons of cocaine or you can move the sex slaves or the precursor chemicals, it doesn’t mean that other people couldn’t move stuff," Nowland said of fanatical militantsideological groups such as terrorists. "We don’t want to have an open door on the southern flank of the United States."

But wWith ongoing missions in places like Iraq and Syria unlikely to lessen anytime soon, the Air Force simply doesn’t have airmen or aircraft to spare for a new counternarcotics mission. But B-52 aircraft assigned to its nuclear enterprise mission, for example, are always going to need to regularly fly long-distance training missions on a regular basis to stay sharp.

It shouldn’t take much to produce results, James said, although she couldn’t quantify how much the Air Force’s efforts in Latin America could increase. She’s ordered the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for operations, Lt. Gen. John Raymond, to redouble his efforts to find ways to piggyback missions such as counternarcotics on top of already -required training missions to increase the service’s reach.

Another example of force packaging — albeit one without a counter-narcotics element — came in early April, when a B-52 Stratofortress from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota flew a 27-hour nonstop, long-range training sortie to South America. First, the B-52 trained with the Colombian air force and conducted a planned intercept exercise with a Lear jet and the Colombians' Israeli-made F-21 Kfir fighter jets. Then it , and then conducted a flyover at the massive Feria Internacional del Aire y del Espacio air show in Santiago, Chile.

But cCounter-narcotics missions aren’t simply an airpower show, however,  – they’re multi-domain operations in which where the Air Force works hand-in-hand with forces such as the Navy, the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection and the militaries of Latin American allies.

A common practice, Nowland said, is to have E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar Systems, or JSTARS, aircraft take off from bases such as Robins Air Force Base in Georgia and head to a spot in the Caribbean where JIATF-South thinks might have some activity. Operating alongside other aircraft, such as CBP or Navy P-3s, the JSTARS uses its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to scan wide swaths of the ocean for suspicious vessels.

The bomber — which would typically fly out of Southern bases such as Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana or Dyess Air Force Base in Texas — or another aircraft then fixes the suspected drug boat with its sniper pod to visually identify it. But bBecause the Air Force has no law enforcement authority, it needs to call in the Coast Guard, or a Navy ship with Coast Guard personnel aboard, to track the drug boat, make arrests and confiscate the drugs or other contraband.

In addition to Besides taking drugs out of the supply chaincirculation, Nowland said, such that exercises provides valuable command and control training. The aircrews get experience talking to other aircraft, headquarters such as JIATF-South, Navy and Coast Guard ships run by other services such as the Coast Guard and Navy, and helicopters and rigid inflatable boats launched from Coast Guard cutters.

When scanning the ocean, JSTARS air crews looks for suspicious patterns to separate drug boats from legitimate vessels. For example, smugglers in a semi-submersible — a craft that operates just below the surface, leaving a snorkel-like structure above water for air — might occasionally disappear from the radar. That is a red flag for airmen looking for drug smugglers, Nowland said.

Nowland would not say how often these missions are conducted, but said the frequency ebbs and flows, in part based on aircraft’s' availability.

The vast majority of drug smuggling — roughly 93 percent — is done over the seas. But the Air Force also uses E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft temporarily assigned to from the 429th Expeditionary Operations Squadron at Forward Operating Location Curacao, an island nation just north of Venezuela, to search for airborne drug smugglers, Nowland said.

But what the Air Force does with that information depends on which nations are involved, and those nations’ policies on shooting down drug planes, Nowland said. For example, the United States stopped sharing radar intelligence with Honduras in 2014, after that nation passed a law allowing it to shoot down smugglers'ing planes.

"Legally, that puts our airmen at risk" if they passed on information that iswas then used to kill non-combatants, even if they are drug smugglers, Nowland said.

Instead of alerting Honduras, JIATF-South would keeps its own eye on that plane and notes where it goeswent.

But for Colombia, which has stricter shoot-down rules limiting how its military can engage with aircraft, JIATF-South would passes on the radar information so the Colombians y can interdict it on the ground. Colombia is now the only nation with an air interdiction program with which the U.S. shares real-time information, and uses force to try to get an airplane to land "only as a last resort, in very limited circumstances," JIATF-South said.

Nowland said that he would like to start rolling the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve training missions into force packaging as well.

Meanwhile, the Border Patrol Nowland also said CBP is trying to use radar-mounted MQ-1 Predator drones to expand the government’s view of the smuggling routes, and give Air Force surveillance aircraft a boost, he said. But that proposal has not yet been approved.

"Worldwide, that would take our [remotely -piloted aircraft] community to the next level," Nowland said.

"I come from Puerto Rico, and seeing all the mayhem and damage that it does motivated me to volunteer to work in this area," SrA Cesar said. "All the way from middle school, I saw friends drop out from school, high school, even college. The crime rate going up, organized crime. Just seeing this growing up, and then you're given one chance to have a hand in changing it, it was really a huge thing for me."

From March 2015 to April 2016, Nowland said the Air Force conducted 278 hours of force-packaged counter-narcotics flight operations and helped with the interdiction of 14 metric tons of cocaine worth roughly $437 million.