Four more people are dead after the U.S. military blew up an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea on Tuesday, the second such strike in a matter of days and the latest salvo in a campaign that has now claimed more lives than some small wars.

U.S. Southern Command said the vessel was struck as part of what it calls precision operations against "narco-terrorist networks." Gen. Francis Donovan, who leads the effort, said in a statement that "Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere continues executing precise, lethal operations against the cartels. We will hunt, disrupt, and defeat these narco-terrorist networks." As with nearly every strike before it, the Pentagon offered no hard evidence the boat was carrying drugs — just a seven-second video clip showing a vessel underway moments before it vanishes in a flash, according to Stars and Stripes.

Tuesday's strike brings the campaign's toll to at least 227 people killed in 68 publicly acknowledged strikes since it began in September 2025, a run of maritime bombings unmatched in scale by any prior U.S. counter-narcotics operation. President Trump has described the effort as an "armed conflict" with drug cartels, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has since locked in joint-operations agreements with Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras to widen the hunt.

"Where is Congress?"

The killings have drawn a wall of legal pushback. United Nations human rights experts and civil liberties groups have branded the strikes extrajudicial executions carried out with no due process, no charges and no trial. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the government over an earlier September strike, arguing two of the dead were Trinidadian fishermen and farmers heading home from work in Venezuela — not traffickers. Sen. Tim Kaine, after reviewing classified briefing material on the operation, echoed the alarm.

Administration officials and Republican allies insist the strikes are lawful and necessary; Democratic lawmakers and legal scholars counter that the killings amount to murder, if not war crimes, under international law.

The Pentagon has never publicly identified any of the 227 dead or released the intelligence it says justifies each strike, according to reporting compiled by the Washington Office on Latin America and WOLA's ongoing tracking of the campaign, which noted experts calling the mounting toll extrajudicial as early as March.

With no sign the strikes are slowing — two in the space of days this week alone — pressure is building in Washington for public hearings and for the administration to release the intelligence behind its target list, something it has so far refused to do, as The Hill reported. For now, boats keep going up in flames in the Caribbean and Pacific, and the count keeps climbing.