United States Unrestricted Warfare in the Caribbean?

Twenty-first century equivalent of
unrestricted submarine warfare?

A little over a century ago, the United States joined Britain and France in their war against Germany.  Many Americans in and out of government had sympathized with the Allies in their grinding war and were outraged by the murder of civilians in Belgium and Northern France by occupying German forces.  What finally encouraged those recalcitrant to enter the war were the revelations that Germany was encouraging Mexico to join in the war against the US and the German decision to allow unrestricted submarine warfare against ships at sea.  Contemporary laws of war codified in treaties in the late nineteenth century stipulated that civilian ships could not by sunk without warning.  Germany's adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare unleashed submarines (U-boats) to sink any ship at sea without regard to combatant status or cargo.

German WWI Submarine and sinking merchant ship

Fast forward to the present day.  In recent weeks, the American military has sunk four ships at sea without warning on the suspicion the craft were carrying drugs (as of September 23, 2025).  This has drawn criticism internationally because of the acts' possible violation of international maritime and human rights law as well as American law.  

In recent years the United States has participated in efforts to deter piracy and murder off the coast of East Africa and in Asia as part of the long standing American interest in protecting the freedom of the seas, with a history going back two centuries to the war against Britain in 1812.  That tradition has, like other American norms, has been abandoned with the destroying of ships at sea.  Vivid video of their destruction, echoing the displays of video games played by couch bound suburban soldiers and pilots, do not identify who is being destroyed, making them merely targets.  

Even with the commitment to freedom of the seas, the US has a long history of deterring the traffic in illegal drugs at sea. For decades the US Coast Guard has intercepted and boarded ships suspected of carrying drugs.  Those operating ships carrying drugs have been prosecuted in courts of law.  Such efforts fall within United Nations Conventions to curtail the traffic of illegal drugs, supported by nearly every nation of the world.  The traffic in illegal drugs is subject in all nations to criminal law, to be deterred and prosecuted as other crimes are dealt with, by the police and courts of nations.  

Destroying ships at seas, killing their crews, is a drastic departure from that tradition, transferring what was previously part of law enforcement to the realm of war.  In February 2025, Secretary Hegseth eliminated the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Plan office whose responsibility was to make certain the US abided by the laws of war with respect to civilians, an effort ironically initiated during the first Trump Administration by Secretary Mathis in response to civilian casualties from American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Secretary Hegseth's ethos of lethality over legality places the United States in the same camp as our adversaries where any means can be justified in pursuit of goals of the moment, ignoring their long-term consequences.  

In some ways the recent attacks at sea mirror the killings of suspected terrorists in drone attacks by the United States by the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.  Such attacks supported with varying levels of credible intelligence--each administration had different rules determining what evidence would support a drone strike and who could authorize it--circumvented national sovereignty and laws of war, making war zones arbitrary to the taste of those wishing to kill at will.  The tradition of arbitrary war initiated by the drone attacks in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan sets a nebulous precedent for the arbitrary destruction of ships at sea.  

Just as there were civilian casualties in the American drone campaigns in the Middle East, there are sure to be civilian deaths in the new war in the Caribbean.  The difference between the two is in the evidence:  bodies of civilians killed in the Middle East could and can be recovered in the towns and villages where they died whereas any casualties of the boat attacks will lie at the bottom of the Caribbean.  At least Americans won't have to look at the bodies of the people we kill.