The Department of Homeland Security is high off the prospect of using aerial spy drones to nab high-seas drug smugglers. DHS, which already operates nine unmanned Predator drones along the northern and southwestern borderlands, says it plans to expand unmanned surveillance flights throughout the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, where drug-stuffed cartel fast boats and submarines are cutting north in increasing numbers.It’s a ratcheting up of U.S. drone flights in the Western Hemisphere that stands to more than double the number of square miles observed by the department’s fleet today. More and more, it seems, the DHS doesn’t use drones – it is drones.But whether this counter-narcotics measure will make any sort of dent in the amount of drugs that eventually trickle their way up the eastern seaboard is unclear. True, drug seizures in Caribbean and Gulf waters have increased some 36 percent over the past four years alone, according to the DHS, which officials argue is testament to the department successfully plugging up a porous U.S.-Mexico border. And yet Predator drones have been spotty, at best, over water – their sensors simply cannot latch onto seaborne signatures as they would rutted trails or roads. “I’m not sure just because it’s a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] that it will solve and fit in our problem set,” Air Force Gen. Douglas M. Fraser, the top military officer for the region, recently told the Los Angeles Times.There’s the stop-at-nothing, ever-shifting smuggle-craft mentality of cartels that the drones will have to contend with, to boot. “Each innovation in drug trafficking,” as Dr. Miguel Angel Montoya once told Motherboard, “comes about when the current method reaches a state of crisis.” See what Montoya, a former Colombian drug-trafficking guru, is talking about in this rebroadcast of our submersive doc, Colombian Narcosubs.Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv @thebanderson
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