A Lexicon of Kill Switches

The 22-second video released by the Department of War is a masterclass in narrative compression. It shows a boat, an explosion, and a pyre of fire on the open sea. It is a spectacle of power, clean and distant. What it omits, by design, is the tedious bureaucratic machinery that made the spectacle possible. It omits the judge, the jury, and the trial, because it has rendered them obsolete.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, now more accurately titled Secretary of War, calls the incinerated individuals “narco-terrorists.” This is the critical line of code. It is not a description; it is an instruction. The term does not exist to clarify reality, but to rewrite the rules governing it. A “drug smuggler” is a civilian, a criminal suspect entitled to the inconvenient protections of due process. A “narco-terrorist,” however, is a different object class entirely. It is a variable that, once declared, grants access to a library of lethal functions.

Let us not be distracted by the fire. The true event happened months ago, in the sterile quiet of government offices. The killing of these four people—and the more than 60 before them—was authorized on January 20, 2025. On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order designating drug cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” This was the semantic key that unlocked the armory.

What followed was a meticulous, legalistic process of re-engineering reality. In October, the administration informed Congress it was now in a “non-international armed conflict” (NIAC) with these newly defined terrorists. This declaration is a constitutional kill switch. Under the laws of war, one does not arrest an enemy combatant; one eliminates them. The messy, unpredictable domain of law enforcement—with its warrants, evidence, and trials—was cleanly bypassed. The Pacific Ocean was no longer a crime scene; it was a battlefield.

The architect of this new reality, Secretary Hegseth, is the perfect man for the job. A proponent of restoring the “warrior ethos” who once advocated for using the military against Mexican cartels, he now presides over a department explicitly renamed the “Department of War.” He is not administering a system; he is embodying its logic. His post on social media is not a news announcement; it is a confirmation that the algorithm is running as intended.

This is the algorithm:

1. DEFINE a criminal enterprise (e.g., drug cartel) as a political entity (Foreign Terrorist Organization).
2. RECAST its criminal activities (smuggling) as acts of war (predatory incursion, irregular warfare).
3. DECLARE a state of non-international armed conflict without congressional approval, citing executive authority.
4. RECLASSIFY all associated individuals, regardless of role, from civilian_suspect to enemy_combatant.
5. EXECUTE lethal force without imminence of threat, as permitted by the laws of armed conflict.
6. LOOP.

Legal experts and human rights groups call this “illegal” and an “extrajudicial killing.” These are the protestations of a deprecated operating system. They are arguing about features that have been deliberately removed. The Trump administration is not misinterpreting the law; it is implementing a new one. It has successfully demonstrated that if you have sufficient power, you can unilaterally redefine your enemy from a criminal to be tried into a combatant to be killed.

The Western Hemisphere, Hegseth declares, is “no longer a safe haven.” He is correct, but not in the way he intends. By replacing the rule of law with the rules of engagement, the administration has created a system far more efficient and terrifying. It is a system where the accusation is the evidence, and the sentence is delivered by a drone. The boat in the video is not just a casualty in the war on drugs. It is a proof of concept.