Here's What Trump's Mexico Invasion Plan Could Look Like

[Judi Lynn]

As Trump and his incoming administration threaten Mexican drug cartels, experts warn their plan could create more violence and put Americans in danger

By Kevin Maurer
January 2, 2025

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.”

More:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-mexico-invasion-plan-1235223266/

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