Here’s What Trump’s Mexico Invasion Plan Could Look Like
A MQ-9 Reaper drone keeps watch above the caravan of SUVs as a pair of helicopters — a sleek MH-6 Little Bird and a UH-60 Black Hawk — shadows the line of trucks as it makes its way out of a Mexican town.
The sound of the helicopter engines grows louder as the Little Bird, with commandos perched on benches outside the cockpit, closes in. It descends in front of the caravan, as the Black Hawk hovers in perfect alignment with the lead truck. There’s a sharp crack from a sniper rifle fired from the Black Hawk. Oil splatters across the windshield and smoke pours from the engine block, forcing the caravan to stop. Commandos leap from the hovering Little Bird and race to surround the cartel leader’s truck.
In a matter of seconds, the cartel leader is in custody or killed, depending on whether the sicarios decide to go to guns, a former tier-one operator who performed missions like the scenario above in Iraq tells me. He says the vehicle interdiction mission would lead to follow-on raids against cartel leaders — called HVTs, or high-value targets — based on information from captured mobile phones, cyberhacks of computer networks, or from interrogation of captured leaders. This mission cycle would continue until the list of cartel leaders was exhausted. Then the commandos would move on to middle managers and finally foot soldiers.
“It’s Iraq all over again,” he says, adding his former unit mates have all done this already in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. “You’re going to find and fix the HVT first, and then start gutting the networks. Take out the key leaders, and then what they’re going to do after that is they’re going to just run the middle management right off the battlefield.”
Rolling Stone reported in November that Donald Trump’s incoming administration is considering a “soft invasion” of Mexico, in which American special operations would be sent covertly to assassinate cartel leaders. One Trump adviser said Trump “believes it’s necessary to take some kind of military action against these killers.” Trump’s Cabinet picks, including his choices for secretary of defense, secretary of state, and border czar, have publicly supported the idea. Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), Trump’s pick for national security adviser, and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) even co-introduced legislation last year to create an Authorization for Use of Military Force to target Mexican drug cartels. Crenshaw argued the U.S. needs to be on a “war footing” against the cartels.
“We must start treating them like ISIS — because that is who they are,” he said in a statement announcing the legislation.
Rolling Stone talked to half a dozen former special operations soldiers and intelligence agents to see what this saber-rattling might look like in practice. On paper, they argued it was an easy operation to dismantle the cartel leadership, something that our military — particularly units like SEAL Team Six and Delta Force — has mastered after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. To a man, all said they’d volunteer for the mission.
But Carolyn Gallaher, a professor studying guerrilla and paramilitary violence at American University’s School of International Service, calls the idea folly. She researched cooperation between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement in the mid-2000s and says one takeaway from the Mexicans was that it was a mistake to target cartel leaders.
“All you do is create a succession crisis,” she says. “And a succession crisis in a drug cartel looks different than a succession crisis in, like, [Rupert] Murdoch’s empire, right? It’s basically settled with violence.”
Case in point: After Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, was taken into custody in July, rival factions have been clashing in the state of Sinaloa.
Trump’s proposal is doubling down on a failed strategy, Gallaher says.
“You have to go back and think of a new strategy,” Gallaher tells me. “And going and killing capos is not only not a new strategy, but it is the most failed part of the strategy on both sides of the border.”
Mexico has already said it will not accept an “invasion” by U.S. forces, with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum describing the strategy as “entirely a movie.”
A former Green Beret who worked with the CIA says incursions would likely come with the Mexican government’s blessing, maybe not publicly, but through back channels.
“I think that it’s not beyond the possibility that they do invade that sovereignty and go and snatch people,” he tells me. “I think that’s the only way that you can start to defeat the cartels.”
Plans presented to Trump have included airstrikes on cartel infrastructure, assassinating cartel leaders, and training Mexican forces, Rolling Stone reported. The scheme would most likely include covert operations and patrols just over the border to stem the flow of drugs across the frontier.
“That sounds a whole lot like what we did in Afghanistan for 20 years unsuccessfully,” says a former Marine officer who worked with special operations in Afghanistan.
The former Marine officer says the Hollywood part is attractive, pointing to Harrison Ford’s Clear and Present Danger as a movie that tickles the imagination.
“Who doesn’t want to throw a satchel charge into an underground drug lab?” he says, laughing. “That’s super-sexy stuff that we sign up to do. But if you’re going to door-kick, you know what people forget is that gunfighting ultimately comes down to guns in the fight.”
A recent Cato Institute article noted the cartels have extensive tactical training from Mexican military defectors (who have been trained by American special operations), armored vehicles, armed drones, and heavy weapons.
“Directing American special operations forces against the cartels would put them up against a sizable near-peer competitor in asymmetric warfare, thus putting the U.S. government into a position of little escalatory advantage,” wrote Brandan P. Buck, a researcher at the Cato Institute. “Such a move would not just force the American military into another quagmire; it would drop them into a morass up to their metaphorical waist.”
But All Source News, an open-source intelligence analyst who spent the past three years tracking cartel violence, says the idea the sicarios have capabilities similar to U.S. special operations is laughable.
“Let me make this abundantly clear,” he says. “Cartel members are not even near peers to the Mexican military. The vast majority of times, cartel members just get whacked. They get rolled over.”
Cartel sicarios have no tactics. Most use American guns smuggled across the border, he says. They might wear a chest rack and body armor, but they lack heavy weapons, with only a few RPGs. He says one technique is mounting a .50 caliber sniper rifle — minus the scope — on trucks to use like a machine gun.
The real fear is that the violence wouldn’t stay confined to south of the border. A Green Beret turned CIA operator says past administrations considered using CIA Ground Branch — hybrid intelligence agents and commandos usually made up of former special operations soldiers — to combat the cartels, but the fear of cartel retribution against the operators and their families in the U.S. made it too risky. But the bigger danger could be to the estimated 1.6 million U.S. citizens living in Mexico, All Source News tells me.
Right now, cartels fear American retribution. After two American tourists were mistaken for Haitian smugglers and murdered in March 2023 in Matamoros, the Gulf Cartel apologized and turned in the culprits. But if the United States declares war on them, that changes.
“Will the cartels see the 1.6 million Americans in Mexico as targets for terror campaigns?” asks All Source News.
Sen. Marco Rubio — Trump’s nominee for secretary of state — has suggested military deployments would be acceptable if “there is cooperation” with the Mexican government.
Most of the former special operations soldiers and officers argued the best course of action would be working with and through Mexican security forces, by embedding American advisers with the Mexican military, much like it did with Plan Colombia, the U.S.-backed initiative to combat drug trafficking and insurgency in Colombia through military aid, economic assistance, and social programs. Started in 2000, it reduced drug production and weakened insurgent groups like the FARC, but it took more than a decade and $10 billion.
All Source News says the fixation on fentanyl and other illicit drugs creates a blind spot to the bigger criminal enterprise.
“The cartels will make money wherever they can,” All Source News tells me. “For example, in Michoacán, the cartels are fighting over like avocados and limes. No joke. They traffic avocados, limes, even avocado oil. They’re also into water, timber, extortion — anything they can use to generate income.”
If 20 years in Afghanistan taught the military anything, the U.S. can’t shoot its way to victory. An all-encompassing strategy that pressures the cartels politically, economically, and militarily might be the only path to success.
“If it’s to kill the cartel, how do you know when you’ve accomplished the mission?” the former Marine officer says. “What’s the metric that these people are going to use that says, oh yeah, we’ve achieved a victory? We’re not fighting an army. We’re fighting poverty. Let’s fight desperation. Let’s fight hopelessness.”
That starts with determining an end state — something the United States didn’t do during its last foreign adventures.
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