US spy planes hunt for intel on Mexican drug cartels with constant surveillance flights
The US military has significantly increased its surveillance of Mexican drug cartels over the past two weeks, with sophisticated spy planes flying at least 18 missions over the southwestern US and in international airspace around the Baja peninsula, according to open-source data and three US officials familiar with the missions.
The flights, conducted over a 10-day period in late January and early February, represent a dramatic escalation in activity, current and former military officials say, and come as President Donald Trump directs the military to secure the border and deter cartels’ drug smuggling operations.
The Pentagon has historically flown only about one surveillance mission a month around the US-Mexico border, according to one former military official with deep experience in homeland defense. Typically, officials instead focus these planes on collecting intelligence on other priorities, such as Russian activity in Ukraine or hunting Russian or Chinese submarines.
The activity highlights how the military has already begun shifting finite US national security capabilities away from overseas threats to focus on the southern border, where Trump has declared a national emergency.
At least 11 of these recent flights around the US have been by Navy P-8s, a prized plane with a sophisticated radar system specializing in identifying submarines but capable of collecting imagery and signals intelligence.
One nearly six-hour flight on February 3 was conducted by a U-2 spy plane, one of the US military’s most venerated reconnaissance aircraft, designed during the Cold War for collecting high-altitude imagery of the Soviet Union.
Current and former military officials with deep experience in counternarcotics work on the border said they could not recall a U-2 being used for this purpose before.
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