More And More, a Real War

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The Defense Department's new willingness to risk involvement in the battle against drugs is a reversal from its position that the armed forces are not equipped or trained for such duty. The military went along only reluctantly in 1988, when Congress, fed up with Pentagon foot-dragging, designated the Defense Department as the lead agency for "detection and monitoring" of drug smuggling. Now with the Soviet threat receding and Congress calling for defense cuts, the Pentagon welcomes any new mission. Says a Capitol Hill cynic: "The military sneered at drug interdiction -- until they saw the budget crunch coming."

Beyond the ineffective and brief Operation Blast Furnace, in which U.S. helicopter crews carried local raiding parties into Bolivian jungles to shut down a few coca laboratories in 1986, U.S. troops have done little antidrug work abroad. The Navy has permitted Coast Guard officers aboard its ships along likely drug routes to make arrests if they come across smugglers. Some 75 U.S. military and police advisers are in Colombia on antidrug training missions.

The military involvement in the drug crusade has been growing within the U.S. A joint military task force in Fort Bliss, Texas, has assigned 100 Army and Marine troops to support civilian agencies that patrol the border with Mexico. While the troops are not expected to engage smugglers, the danger was dramatized last month when four Marines working with Border Patrol officers near Nogales, Ariz., got into a nighttime firefight with drug traffickers on horseback. The smugglers fled, abandoning 573 lbs. of marijuana. No Marines were hurt.

National Guard units from California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona have joined in border stakeouts, searching cargo at crossing points and ports, eradicating marijuana fields and providing helicopter lifts for law- enforcement agencies. At Nogales a score of Arizona Guardsmen have helped Customs triple inspections of tractor-trailer rigs heading north.

Though Cheney's initiatives will add much needed support and equipment to the badly overextended interdiction efforts, the Pentagon's initial misgivings about its drug involvement were well founded. Troops trained to locate and destroy hostile forces are less effective at the more delicate task of tracking and arresting smugglers, which more often depends on good police work. In 1984 the U.S. Navy set up sea checkpoints off Colombia in an antidrug maneuver dubbed Operation Hat Trick. The operation was cut short, according to a U.S. military officer, because the results did not seem to justify the costs. Nor does the military have much of an interdiction success record: in Viet Nam it was never able to close the primitive Ho Chi Minh Trail; quarantining 88,000 miles of U.S. shoreline is at least as daunting.