WASHINGTON – The Pentagon’s internal watchdog will investigate whether US boat strikes in the Caribbean followed targeting guidelines, amid claims from outside groups that the attacks were illegal.
“The scope of this evaluation includes the joint process for targeted vessels in the US Southern Command area of responsibility as part of Operation Southern Spear,” the Inspector-General’s office said in a statement to Bloomberg News, referring to the operation.
The probe was self-initiated and not in response to a congressional query, the agency said.
The evaluation’s objective is to determine whether the Pentagon adhered to a six-phase process called the Joint Targeting Cycle, wrote Bryan T. Clark, assistant inspector-general for evaluations programmes, combatant commands and operations in a May 11 memo to General Joseph Donovan, the leader of US Southern Command, and Bradley Hansell, undersecretary for intelligence and security.
“We will perform the evaluation at the Pentagon and US Southcom headquarters” and “we may identify additional locations during the evaluation”, Mr Clark said.
The Joint Targeting Cycle, according to a 2018 Joint Chiefs of Staff document, provides a framework for carrying out a military mission and achieving its goals.
Through last week, there have been as many as 58 attacks on vessels in the Southern Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, according to a database maintained by the legal analysis website Just Security – with the latest on May 8.
Southcom said in a social media post that the vessel in that instance was “operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations” in the Eastern Pacific, killing two people and leaving one survivor.
Pentagon officials did not have an immediate comment.
The Trump administration has asserted that the boats were operated by drug cartels and carried narcotics bound for the US. Scores of people have been killed in the assaults, and the military often releases videos of the vessels being blown up.
Democrat lawmakers, human rights organisations and other critics, however, say that the administration has provided little evidence that the people killed were criminals and that due process has been ignored. They point out that some survivors have been allowed to return to their home countries.
The attacks, which began in 2025 as the US stepped up its campaign to oust president Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, have drawn less scrutiny since the US war against Iran began on Feb 28.
Still, Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat and member of the Armed Services Committee, on April 30 sharply questioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine on the classified legal opinion supposedly underpinning the strikes and the targeting criteria.
“I would urge all of my colleagues” to read “the targeting criteria and get briefed about it and then also look at all of the files of all of the strikes that have taken place”, General Kaine said.
“I’ve done that with the first 46 strikes or so, and I think there’s a profound mismatch between what is occurring and the underlying assumptions in the legal opinion.”
“I would just urge my colleagues to dig into this,” he said. BLOOMBERG
