WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth^[1] said Friday that he ordered another strike on a small boat he accused of carrying drugs in the waters off Venezuela, expanding what the Trump administration has declared is an “armed conflict” with cartels^[2].

In a post on social media, Hegseth asserted that the “vessel was trafficking narcotics" and those aboard were “narco-terrorists.” He said the strike killed four men but offered no details on who they were or what group they belonged to, following the U.S. designation of several Latin American cartels as foreign terrorist organizations^[3].

President Donald Trump said in his own social media post that the boat was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE” and implied it was “entering American Territory” while off the coast of Venezuela.

It is the fourth deadly strike in the Caribbean^[4] and the latest since revelations that Trump told lawmakers he was treating drug traffickers as unlawful combatants and military force was required to combat them. That assertion of presidential war powers sets the stage for expanded action and raises questions about how far the administration will go^[5] without sign-off from Congress^[6].

The Trump administration laid out its justification for the strikes in a memo obtained by The Associated Press this week.

“The President determined that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations,” according to the memo sent to Congress.

Trump directed the Pentagon to “conduct operations against them pursuant to the law of armed conflict,” the document says.

Sen. Jim Risch, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Friday that the president had the authority to go after the cartels without further authorization from Congress under “his general powers under the Constitution as the commander in chief.”

“What could be a bigger defense of this country than keeping out this poison that’s killing thousands of Americans every year?” Risch said.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a leftist leader who has clashed with the Trump administration^[7], accused the U.S. of committing “murder” and urged the victims’ families to “join forces.”

“There are no narco-terrorists on the boats,” he posted on X after the strike was announced. “Drug traffickers live in the U.S., Europe and Dubai. On that boat are poor Caribbean youth.”

Video of Friday's strike posted online showed a small boat moving in open water when it suddenly explodes, with water splashing all around it. As the smoke from the explosion clears, the boat is visible, consumed with flames, floating motionless on the water.

With it, at least three of the strikes have now been carried out on vessels that U.S. officials said had originated from Venezuela. The strikes followed a buildup of U.S. maritime forces^[8] in the Caribbean unlike any seen in recent times.

The Navy’s presence in the region — eight warships with over 5,000 sailors and Marines — has been pretty stable for weeks, according to two defense officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations.

In a post about the first strike last month^[9], Trump claimed the vessel was carrying members of the Tren de Aragua gang^[10]. Posts about all the subsequent strikes^[11], including Friday’s, have not provided any details about what organizations have been targeted. The four strikes have killed 21 people, the administration says.

Pentagon officials who briefed senators on the strikes this week could not provide a list of the designated terrorist organizations at the center of the conflict.

Officials in the Pentagon, when asked for more details about the strike, referred The Associated Press back to Hegseth’s post. The press office for Venezuela’s government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest strike.

AP writers Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.

Sikorsky is finalizing negotiations with the Department of War to produce Black Hawks, its workhorse helicopter, in Stratford and Bridgeport, Connecticut, for another four years.

Those talks come as the U.S. Army looks ahead to getting its hands on Bell Textron's MV-75 tiltrotor aircraft called "transformational" by one officer recently and a machine that might someday phase out the Black Hawk.

The UH-60 Black Hawk remains the Army's "utility helicopter for the near and midterm force" as worded in Pentagon budget documents the past few years. The Army now plans to purchase nearly 100 more over four years to maintain a fleet numbering more than 2,100 helicopters.

In the context of the Bridgeport-area economy, it is a major contract providing more work for more than 7,000 Sikorsky employees in Connecticut.

"Appreciation for the Black Hawk frankly dipped for a few years, and it was thought it could be less important than a lot of people knew it was — people who used it in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere all around the world," said U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, who sits on the Senate Committee on Armed Services. "The Black Hawk is one of the all-time, star successful assets in our military arsenal. It is resilient, versatile and battle-hardened. It's been shot at in a lot of wars; it's been used to rescue people who are in that golden hour where their lives can be saved."

Blumenthal noted a number of international militaries rely on the Black Hawk as well that will not have the opportunity any time soon to purchase MV-75 tiltrotors.

Rich Benton, president of Sikorsky, noted that last week as well in an interview that touched on international Black Hawk sales. Benton noted Sikorsky also offers Black Hawk variants for non-military uses, to include Jayhawk maritime helicopters for the U.S. Coast Guard and the Fire Hawk helicopter for wildfire suppression and rescue.

"We still see significant international demand internationally for the aircraft we're building, and we believe that will continue," Benton said. "I think our helicopter provides a unique capability for both civilian and ... international militaries to get after their mission."

The manufacturer did not make an executive available for an update on the outlook for the Black Hawk, but a spokesperson forwarded a statement saying contractual negotiations are ongoing and calling the Black Hawk "iconic to the U.S. and allies". On Tuesday, the Federal Register published a notice of a pending contract with Brazil for a dozen Black Hawk helicopters, at a contract value of $950 million.

The Army has cited the Bell MV-75 among a handful of key programs in a new Army Transformation Initiative, created in response to the rapid development of emerging battlefield technologies by other countries. In an initial statement outlining ATI goals, the Army indicated it plans to cease production of the Boeing AH-64 Apache combat helicopter.

The $732 million earmarked for new Black Hawk helicopters in this year's National Defense Authorization Act is the most for any model of rotary aircraft, ahead of the funding for new CH-47 Chinooks made by Boeing outside Philadelphia in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania.

Nearly three years ago, Bell Textron beat out Sikorsky, Lockheed Martin and Boeing for the U.S. Army's next utility aircraft. Bell won with a tilt-rotor aircraft it now calls the MV-75, beating out Sikorsky's Defiant X proposal designed with stacked rotor sets that spin in opposite directions for greater maneuverability than the Black Hawk and other traditional helicopters.

Bell Textron is now readying a Texas factory for mass production of the MV-75. The Army is looking to accelerate production beyond its initial timeline with an eye on an eventual fleet of about 1,000 MV-75 tilt-rotors, according to the industry trade publication FlightGlobal.

Rotary aircraft production is ramping up even as U.S. military planners eye the rapid development of drone technologies and strategies by Ukraine and Russia, and "area denial" weapons systems that were effective against helicopters in the early stages of the war.

"There's no question there's an arms race," Blumenthal said. "It's a heavily technology-based race to add stealth and armaments and electronic warfare tools to disable drones that may be sent at helicopters."

Speaking in June during a U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on the heels of a Ukraine drone attack on Russian bombers that caused billions of dollars of damage, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll acknowledged the raid was a wake-up call.

"The world saw, in real time, how readily available technology can disrupt established power dynamics," Driscoll said. "We as a nation have to set a moonshot to figure out, ‘How do we defend against these low-cost drones?’"

In the past few years, Sikorsky has been talking up the potential of Black Hawk helicopters to launch drone attacks from the air closer to their final targets, whether for attack or surveillance.

"I view drones as complementary, right? How are we going to be able to leverage this system we have and be able to use drones to do mission substitution?" Benton told CT Insider last week. "Our aircraft can be the node on the network providing that capability and integrating information."

© 2025 Journal Inquirer, Manchester, Conn..

Visit www.journalinquirer.com^[1].

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.^[2]

WASHINGTON — Historically, the U.S. military has been an engine for cultural and social change in America. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s vision^[1] for the armed forces he leads runs counter to that.

In comments^[2] Tuesday to hundreds of military leaders and their chief enlisted advisers, Hegseth made clear he was not interested^[3] in a diverse or inclusive force^[4]. His address at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, verbalized what Hegseth has been doing^[5] as he takes on any program that can be labeled diversity, equity or inclusion, as well as targeting transgender personnel.^[6] Separately, the focus on immigration also is sweeping up veterans.^[7]

For too long, “the military has been forced by foolish and reckless politicians to focus on the wrong things. In many ways, this speech is about fixing decades of decay, some of it obvious, some of it hidden,” Hegseth said. “Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading, and we lost our way. We became the woke department, but not anymore.”

Hegseth's actions -- and plans for more -- are a reversal of the role the military has often played.

“The military has often been ahead of at least some broader social, cultural, political movements,” said Ronit Stahl, associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. ”The desegregation of the armed forces is perhaps the most classic example."

President Harry S. Truman's desegregation order in 1948 came six years before the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation in the Brown vs. Board of Education case -- and, Stahl said, "that obviously takes a long time to implement, if it ever fully is implemented.”

It Has Been a Circuitous Path

Truman's order was not a short progression through American society. Although the military was one of the few places where there was organizational diversity, the races did not mix in their actual service. Units like the Tuskegee Airmen^[8], the Navajo Code Talkers^[9] and the Buffalo Soldiers^[10], formed in 1866, were segregated until the order opened the door to integrated units.

Women were given full status to serve in 1948 with the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act^[11]. There were restrictions on how many could serve and they were generally not allowed to command men or serve in combat. Before then, they had wartime roles and they did not serve in combat, although hundreds of nurses died and women were pilots, including Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs.

The WASPs and Tuskegee Airmen were among the first groups this year to be affected when Hegseth issued his DEI order^[12]. The Air Force removed training videos of the airmen along with ones showing the World War II contributions of the WASPs at the basic training base in San Antonio. The videos were restored^[13] after widespread bipartisan outcry over their removal.

Other issues over time have included “don't ask, don't tell,” the policy that allowed gay and lesbian service members to serve as long as their sexual orientation was not public. That was repealed during the Obama administration. Women were allowed to serve on combat aircraft and combat ships in the early 1990s -- then all combat positions after a ban was lifted in 2015^[14].

“The military has always had to confront the question of social change and the question of who would serve, how they would serve and in what capacity they would serve. These are questions that have been long-standing back to the founding in some ways, but certainly in the 20th century,” said David Kieran, distinguished chair in Military History at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. “These are not new questions.”

Generally the answer has come down to what “the military writ large” has concluded. “'How do we achieve our mission best?'" Kieran said. "And a lot of these things have been really hotly debated.”

Part of a Larger, Longer Debate

Kieran offered one example: changes the Army made in the 1960s when it was dealing with a climate of racism and racial tensions. Without that, he said, "the military can't fight the war in Vietnam effectively.”

The same considerations were given to how to address the problem of sexual harassment. Part of the answer involved what was morally right, but “the larger issue is: If soldiers are being harassed, can the Army carry out its mission effectively?”

While "it is important to see these actions as part of a longer history and a larger debate," Kieran said, "it’s certainly also true that the current administration is moving at a far more aggressive and faster pace than we’ve seen in earlier administrations."

Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, questioned some of the actions that Trump's Defense Department has taken, including replacing the chairman of the joint chiefs, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr^[15].

“He was a fine Air Force officer,” O'Hanlon said. Even if he got the job in part because of his race, “it wouldn't be disqualifying in my book, unless he was unqualified -- and he wasn't.”

Matthew Delmont, a professor of history at Dartmouth College, said the current attitudes he is seeing toward the military suggest a misunderstanding of the armed forces and why the changes have been made.

“The military, for more than seven decades now, has been more on the leading edge in terms of figuring out how to put together an organization that tries to take advantage of the talents and capacities of all Americans,” Delmont said. Since Truman signed his executive order, “the military has moved faster and farther than almost any other organization in thinking about issues of racial equality, and then later thinking about the issues related to gender and sexuality.”

Delmont said bias, prejudice and racism remain in the military, but the armed services have done more “than a lot of corporations, universities, other organizations to try to address those head-on."

“I wouldn’t say it was because they were particularly interested in trying to advance the social agenda,” he said. "I think they did it because they recognized you can’t have a unified fighting force if the troops are fighting each other, or if you’re actively turning away people who desire to serve their country."