Is the US Navy not beyond using perfidy? The NY Times has run a story on US Navy antics during September 2025, bombing alleged ‘drug-boats’. Was it a war crime under armed-conflict standards, or misidentification by victims of Trumpian war policy in the Caribbean/eastern Pacific. Was the attacking aircraft actually a P-8, a military derivative of the Boeing 737? Or is this a smokescreen considering that Hellfire missiles launched from drones or other military aircraft were likely used.
Trump’s NSS document waves a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine that mimics the actual Roosevelt Corollary allowing for a gunboat diplomacy manifested as a drug-boat diplomacy, killing people indiscriminately and chasing down non-sanctioned oil tankers in the Caribbean. There’s enough perfidy to go around in the Trump administration, as well as a disinformation surplus.
The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first attack on a boat that the Trump administration said was smuggling drugs, killing 11 people last September, according to officials briefed on the matter. The aircraft also carried its munitions inside the fuselage, rather than visibly under its wings, they said.
Retired Maj. Gen. Steven J. Lepper, a former deputy judge advocate general for the United States Air Force, said that if the aircraft had been painted in a way that disguised its military nature and got close enough for the people on the boat to see it — tricking them into failing to realize they should take evasive action or surrender to survive — that was a war crime under armed-conflict standards.
“Shielding your identity is an element of perfidy,” he said. “If the aircraft flying above is not identifiable as a combatant aircraft, it should not be engaged in combatant activity.”
Amateur plane-spotting enthusiasts posted pictures on Reddit in early September of what appeared to be one of the military’s modified 737s, painted white with a blue stripe and with no military markings, at the St. Croix airport in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Regardless of the specific aircraft at issue, three people familiar with the matter acknowledged that it was not painted in the usual military gray and lacked military markings. But they said its transponder was transmitting a military tail number, meaning broadcasting or “squawking” its military identity via radio signals.
Several law-of-war experts said that would not make the use of such an aircraft lawful in these circumstances since the people on the boat probably lacked equipment to pick up the signal.
Among the legal specialists who said the use of a military transponder signal would not solve a perfidy problem was Todd Huntley, a retired Navy captain who formerly deployed with the Joint Special Operations Command as a judge advocate general, or JAG, and directed the Navy’s national security law division.
Captain Huntley said he could think of legitimate uses for such an aircraft that would make it lawful to have in the arsenal for other contexts, including a hostage rescue scenario in which munitions might be needed for self-defense but were not intended for launching offensive attacks.
www.nytimes.com/…
The US Navy’s P-8 is equipped with internal ordnance bays
The P-8 operates in anti-submarine warfare (ASW), anti-surface warfare (ASUW), and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) roles. It is armed with torpedoes, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and other weapons, can drop and monitor sonobuoys, and can operate in conjunction with other assets, including the Northrop Grumman MQ-4C Triton maritime surveillance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
