Military engagements turn focus from war on drugs

WASHINGTON – Stretched thin from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has sharply reduced its role in the war on drugs, leaving significant gaps in U.S. narcotics interdiction efforts.

Since 1989, Congress has directed the Pentagon to be the lead federal agency in detecting and monitoring by air and sea illegal narcotics shipments headed to the United States and in supporting Coast Guard efforts to intercept them. In the early 1990s, at the height of the drug war, U.S. military planes and boats patrolled skies and waters in search of cocaine-laden drug vessels coming from Colombia and elsewhere in South America.

But since 2002, the military has withdrawn many of those assets, according to more than a dozen current and former counternarcotics officials, as well as a review of congressional, military and Homeland Security documents.

Internal records show that in the past four years the Pentagon has reduced by more than 62 percent its aerial surveillance flight hours over Caribbean and Pacific Ocean routes that are used to smuggle cocaine, marijuana and, increasingly, Colombian-produced heroin. At the same time, the Navy is deploying one-third fewer patrol boats for detecting and catching smugglers.

The Defense Department also plans to withdraw as many as 10 Black Hawk helicopters that have been used by a multiagency task force to move quickly to make drug seizures and arrests in the Caribbean, a major hub for drugs heading to the United States.

And the military has deactivated many of the high-tech surveillance “aerostats,” or radar balloons, that once guarded the Southern U.S. border, saying it lacks the funds to restore and maintain them.

The Department of Defense defended its policy shift in a budget document sent to Congress in October: “The DOD position is that detecting drug trafficking is a lower priority than supporting our service members on ongoing combat missions.”

Members of Congress and drug-control officials have said the Pentagon’s cuts and redeployments have hamstrung the U.S. drug interdiction effort when an estimated 1,000 metric tons of inexpensive, high-quality cocaine enter the country each year.

It’s hard to gauge the precise impact of the pullback, because authorities say they only know the amount of narcotics they are seizing, not how much is getting through – especially with fewer surveillance planes and boats to gather intelligence.

In the budget report to Congress, the Pentagon estimated recently that it detected only 22 percent of the “actionable maritime events” in fiscal 2006 because it “lacks the optimal number of assets.”

Even when they detected suspected smuggling vessels, U.S. authorities had to let one in every five go because they lacked the resources to chase them, Pentagon officials said in their report.

“We have not stopped trying to fix that gap. We’re very much concerned about it and working very hard to try and fix these problems,” Edward Frothingham III, acting deputy assistant Defense secretary for counternarcotics, said. “DOD is in no way lessening our support” for the war on drugs, he said. “But in the post-9/11 world, some of these assets are needed elsewhere.”

With Pentagon support dropping, the Coast Guard and other Homeland Security agencies such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection are trying to play a greater role in the interdiction effort. But current and former officials within those agencies say they do not have the resources to do the job because they, too, have had to dramatically redeploy assets since the sweeping post-Sept. 11 reorganization.

In November 2005, the Government Accountability Office raised serious concerns about the shortcomings in the interdiction effort and said it was particularly troubled by the lack of strategic planning by the Pentagon and Homeland Security to deal with a massive redeployment of drug war assets.

The GAO asked the departments to devise comprehensive plans on how to maintain the drug interdiction effort. More than a year later, the GAO’s Jess T. Ford said he has seen few signs of progress. “If that trend continues,” he said, “it just means we are going to miss more and more opportunities.”