JTF Southern Spear killed one aboard suspected narcotics vessel in eastern Pacific; 29th strike, ~105 campaign deaths

On Dec. 22, 2025, at the direction of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a "lethal kinetic strike" on a low-profile semi-submersible vessel — a so-called "narco-submarine" — transiting international waters in the eastern Pacific, U.S. Southern Command announced on X. SOUTHCOM said the vessel was "operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations" and moving along a known narco-trafficking route, and that the strike killed one person aboard. The command made no evidence of narcotics public, identified no one, filed no charges, and reported no attempt at interdiction or arrest; the only material released was the SOUTHCOM statement and accompanying imagery.

CBS News independently reported the strike, confirming that the U.S. military hit a "low-profile" vessel in the eastern Pacific on Dec. 22, killing one person, and that it was the 29th strike of a campaign that had killed 105 people since the boat strikes began Sept. 2, 2025. It was only the second known strike on a semi-submersible in the series; the first, in October, left two survivors who were repatriated. As with every strike in the campaign, critics in both parties questioned the president's legal authority to kill suspects at sea without due process or congressional authorization, while the administration justified the operations by asserting the United States is in a "non-international armed conflict" with drug cartels. The strike came amid intensifying pressure on Venezuela, including a declared "blockade" of sanctioned oil vessels and the seizure of oil tankers that same week.

The Standing records this as the chronologically earliest single strike in its archive of the Southern Spear campaign — the use of lethal military force to kill a person on the basis of an unproven trafficking allegation, with no judicial process, no charges, and no attempt at arrest (extrajudicial actions), carried out by uniformed forces redirected to a counter-narcotics mission framed in political "armed conflict" terms (politicization of the uniformed services).