"MadBomber, wasn't that your job?"

God no.

This is idiotic.

You kill a cartel leader, and the lieutenants fight it out. Typically, the one who is the most brutal is the one who takes the big seat.

IMO, a better alternative would be shaping the leadership structure to ensure that the dude who wound up in charge was the one who was going to cause the least amount of havoc.

What I do know is that so long as you want your expensive drugs, someone will be there to ensure you get them.

"While I don't think it's much prescribed outside of medical facilities, Fentanyl is actually used for pain treatment during hospital stays. It was given to my wife after her shoulder replacement."

I went under twice in 2021. I'm pretty sure the doc said that the stuff he gave me right before going under, the stuff that made me giggle like a teenage girl, was fentanyl.

"The question I have is to what degree these cartel leaders are our enemies."

They're not. They're businessmen.

No one is forcing USans to buy drugs. And I am all for them being able to do so.

That aside, Trump is talking out of his ass. First, he would need to divert (very rare) IC assets to collect on the cartels and do target development. Second, he would need to demonstrate that they were a legal threat to US national security. Then you would need to get the targets through a legal review. Then, assuming that the host nations approved the attacks, he could order the attack. If they didn't, the US would likely be viewed much in the same light as Russia bombing Ukraine. Or maybe the Islamic Resistance going after Israeli civilians, although the Islamic Resistance were engaging in political violence rather than trying to achieve any sort of strategic military objective.

"I've said this over and over, the locations of the labs are known, as well as the cartel leaders' mansions, and the routes used to transport the drugs to the border."

None of those are valid military targets. Even if by chance the labs were declared to be valid targets, the people working within them would not be considered enemy combatants. Bombing them would be like bombing the banks the cartel does business with, or the factories that produce the precursor checmicals.

Thier mansions, similarly, would not be targetable unless they performed some military function. The best options would be persona-based targeting, where the cartel leaders themselves were the targets. Then you could theoretically bomb them any time at any place, although I doubt any JAG would sign off on it or military commander order the strike.

The US did bomb narcotics labs in AFG, but the rationale was that they were vital centers of gravity to the Taliban's funding effort. It was still a lengthy process to get approval.

"Even the lying POS that he is, if Trump says he's going to attack targets in Mexico, I would not be surprised when he does it."

You're not the sharpest on this stuff.

Maybe you're smart on something...but government, constitution, and international law is not it.

"He could just use nukes. No approval required. POTUS has sole authority to launch a nuclear attack and no one can stop him, and no one needs to approve it."

Sort of. That order would need to be judged as a legal order.

Giving an order judged to be illegal is like giving no order at all. And anyone who followed the order could be prosecuted criminally.

"Judged by whom?

At the very least, the CJA at USSTRATCOM would conducts a legal review of any potential targets to determine they were, in fact, valid military targets, and the use of nuclear weapons was proportional. Those targets may be judged at a higher level though.

"From what I have read there are only two people involved in ordering a nuclear attack."

Sort of. But we can't really get into that here, I think. But whomever is the execution authority, it's against pre-planned military targets that have already been deemed legal to strike.

"POTUS, who orders the attack on whatever target he wants for whatever reason he wants, and the Secretary of Defense, whose only role is to confirm that the attack is being ordered by POTUS."

That's not at all true. The president could not order a strike on anything, anywhere. The "football" contains the codes that would initiate the execution sequence, but it provides no ability (that I've ever been made aware of) to dynamically target nuclear weapons. The execution authority could only orders strikes against targets that had already been planned. That's different than with conventional weapons, which can easily be retargeted by the pilot in flight.

Here is some information you might find interesting:

"A nuclear attack is an act of war. A major act of war. In order for POTUS to engage in an act of war congress must first declare we are at war. W Bush spent well over a year securing an AUMF from congress so he could ride into Iraq and engage in warfare. Since then, we've had some small and limited "war attacks" without congress authorizing the use of force. But nothing even remotely on the scope of a nuclear attack."

The reason the policies reside they way they do has to do with the likely conditions under which a president would authorize the launch of nuclear weapons.

During the Cold War, the basic assumption was that the USSR would launch a massive strategic attack on the US. Time of Flight for those weapons is ~30 minutes. Strat warning and confirmation would eat up around ten of those minutes. There would be no time to bring congress together and get a declaration of war, and in 35 minutes most of congress is going to be ash.

Without the president being able to solely retain this authority, there would have been no practical way to hold the USSR at risk if they were thinking about using a massive attack option. MAD would not have worked.