A Venezuelan peñero cruises the Caribbean Sea moments before it was destroyed in a US military airstrike on Sept. 2. (Source: @realdonaldtrump, Truth Social)In a shift with far-reaching implications, the US military is now treating the presence of drugs on vessels as a battlefield threat, a new standard that helped justify the controversial Sept. 2 “double-tap” drone strike that killed two shipwrecked men in the Caribbean.That little-understood directive, contained in orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, placed the commander of the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command in a difficult position when the smoke cleared from the first strike and two survivors appeared in the water. JSOC, as it’s known, oversees SEAL Team Six, Delta Force, and other elite units typically reserved for counterterrorism missions, not drug interdiction.Hegseth himself gave the order to strike the vessel and its crew of 11. Speaking Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, Hegseth said that he left the room about five minutes after the strike as the boat burned. A couple of hours later, he said he was told that Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, then commander of JSOC, had ordered a second strike because there were survivors who “could still be in the fight.”Attention to the second strike intensified after a Nov. 28 report in The Washington Post that Hegseth had ordered Bradley to “kill everybody” aboard the boat—language many viewed as tantamount to a war crime. The Post also reported that SEAL Team Six led the attack.Now a four-star admiral leading US Special Operations Command, Bradley traveled to Capitol Hill last week to explain his decision in closed-door sessions with a small group of lawmakers. A US official familiar with the closed-door briefings provided to Congress last week described Bradley’s decision-making process in detail to The After-Action Report.Although Hegseth sharply criticized the Post’s reporting, calling it “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory” and complaining Saturday that the paper’s sources “suck,” the US official familiar with the briefings said that the initial story was essentially correct.Hegseth did direct JSOC to kill all 11 individuals on the boat. But that is not the same as the headline’s implication of a blanket order to “kill them all,” a categorical no-quarter directive expressly forbidden under US military law and a war crime under humanitarian law. Admiral Frank “Mitch” BradleyBradley told lawmakers he understood Hegseth’s orders to require killing the 11 individuals on the boat, destroying the drugs, and sinking the vessel. As NBC News first reported, the military knew the identities of all 11 designated “narco-terrorists” on board and had placed them on an approved target list.The wording of a military order matters a great deal, and a difference that might seem semantic is crucial: targeting named individuals on a pre-approved list and issuing an indiscriminate order to leave no survivors are treated very differently under the law of armed conflict.That distinction shaped what happened next. The two survivors remained on the approved target list. But Bradley still had to determine whether the men qualified as protected persons under the law of armed conflict and were therefore off-limits to attack.The US official said Bradley consulted his legal adviser before deciding how to proceed. The adviser, an O-6 officer serving as JSOC’s Staff Judge Advocate, was present at command headquarters at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when Bradley made his decision. As first reported in The Wall Street Journal, Bradley asked his Staff Judge Advocate for the legal definition of “shipwrecked” to determine whether the men were protected under the laws of armed conflict.The Defense Department’s Law of War Manual states that shipwrecked survivors, like the wounded and the sick, are in a “helpless state” and that it is “dishonorable and inhumane” to make them the object of attack. To qualify as shipwrecked, persons “must be in need of assistance and care, and they must refrain from any hostile act.”Reviewing the surveillance feed of the wrecked vessel, Bradley told lawmakers, the two men did not appear helpless or wounded. They did not appear to be bleeding or concussed. Footage shown to lawmakers depicted the men shirtless, at times standing on an overturned 40-foot speedboat and, at one point, attempting to right it. The men also waved as an aircraft passed overhead, but according to the US official, the gesture was not the two-handed overhead wave generally recognized by military forces as a signal of surrender.The more difficult question was whether the men were still engaged in a “hostile act.” Bradley’s decision to authorize a second strike illustrates the logical end of using the military to combat drug trafficking. According to the US official, it was the presence of drugs that led Bradley to authorize the second strike. Bales of cocaine wrapped in plastic were likely still inside the capsized boat, keeping it afloat, which meant the drugs could potentially be salvaged. Under Hegseth’s order, the drugs remained an active threat that had to be eliminated.Since that initial strike on Sept. 2, the US military has carried out 21 additional airstrikes on suspected drug vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing nearly 90 people. Hegseth said he is no longer making the decision to strike.Instructions for these operations were conveyed through an EXORD, an execute order that lays out the chain of command, who holds strike authority, and how the administration is using intelligence to identify targets. Lawmakers were provided a two-page summary of the EXORD but are demanding the full order. A provision inserted into the Defense authorization bill would compel the Pentagon to release it. The secrecy surrounding the order has kept a fundamental shift in how the military defines threats, targets, and lawful force out of public view. The lethal architecture developed to hunt members of al Qaeda is now being used to destroy suspected drug vessels—but with a critical difference. Operationally, the presence of drugs has replaced the imminent threat of a terrorist attack as the tripwire for lethal action. What once required clear evidence of hostile intent can now be inferred from contraband alone.“To characterize or classify these guys as narco-terrorists is a massive shift,” a recently retired admiral told The After-Action Report. “Mitch [Bradley] is universally admired, so I give him the benefit of the doubt, not having access to the information he has. However, if the argument is that guys floating in the water are still in the fight because the drugs are there, that is very thin reasoning to rely on.”“It’s a very slippery slope we are on, making the case that it is OK to kill people there off Venezuela,” he continued. “Why don’t we kill drug dealers on the street because the President said so? If we find someone selling fentanyl in San Diego, then why not just execute the person right there? No due process, no rule of law.”This shift also explains why two survivors of an Oct. 16 attack on a destroyed narco-sub were spared. The survivors had drifted some distance from the sunken vessel and its cargo of what President Trump later said was “mostly fentanyl.” With the threat in that case—the drugs—eliminated, the men were rescued and repatriated, and at least one was released.“We didn’t change our protocol,” Hegseth said Saturday. “It was just a different circumstance.”In the Sept. 2 case, however, the drugs remained aboard the capsized speedboat, and Bradley concluded the threat had not been removed.The decision has sharply divided lawmakers. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it a “righteous” strike on two men he said were trying to flip a capsized boat “so they could stay in the fight,” echoing the administration’s position that low-level drug couriers are combatants. Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut and the committee’s ranking member, said watching US forces kill two individuals in “clear distress” was among the most troubling moments of his public service.The Sept. 2 operation now sits at the center of a broader shift in how the United States is pursuing drug interdiction. By treating narcotics as a battlefield threat rather than a law-enforcement problem, the administration has created a legal and operational framework in which military force can be used far from traditional combat zones — and against individuals with no demonstrated ability or intent to attack US personnel.How far that authority extends remains unclear. Key questions, including how individuals are placed on target lists, what intelligence supports those designations, and how “hostile intent” is now defined, have yet to be answered publicly.As US naval and special operations forces continue to mass off the coast of Venezuela, the stakes of those unanswered questions are only growing.