The U.S. military conducted its eighth strike against an alleged drug vessel, killing two people, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said Wednesday.
The Tuesday night strike occurred in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The seven previous strikes all targeted vessels in the Caribbean.
According to Hegseth in a social media post, the strike killed two people, bringing the death toll from all the strikes to at least 34 people.
Yesterday, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel being operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization and conducting narco-trafficking in the Eastern Pacific.
The vessel was known by our intelligence to be… pic.twitter.com/BayDhUZ4Ac
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) October 22, 2025
In a brief video released by Hegseth, a small boat, half-filled with brown packages, is seen moving along the water. Several seconds into the video, the boat explodes and is seen floating motionless on the water in flames.
In his post, Hegseth took the unusual step of equating the alleged drug traffickers to the group behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.
“Just as Al Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people,” Hegseth said, adding, “there will be no refuge or forgiveness — only justice.”
President Donald Trump has justified the strikes by asserting that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels and is relying on the same legal authority used by President George W. Bush’s administration when it declared a war on terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Should the Trump administration continue to strike drug trafficking vessels?
However, the Trump administration has also sidestepped prosecuting any of the occupants of the alleged drug-running vessels after it returned two survivors of an earlier strike to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.
Ecuadorian officials later said that they released the man who was returned to their country, saying they had no evidence he had committed a crime in their country.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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