The Coast Guard caught its 30th cocaine submarine a few weeks ago, chasing it down in the western Caribbean with help from the Honduran Navy. Military.com news:
In the 1990s, as the Coast Guard was cracking down on speedboat smuggling, U.S. officials began to gather intelligence that the drug lords were building subs in the jungles of Colombia to launch an underwater drug-smuggling flotilla…
The semi-submersibles are typically 100 feet long, with four to five crewmembers on board and can carry up to 10 metric tons. They don’t go fast — perhaps 6 knots. But because most of the fiberglass vessel is below the waterline and the remainder is mostly obscured by ocean waves, it is difficult to see these craft on radar. Sometimes there’s a faux superstructure on top to make it look like a pleasure boat.
Even the Coast Guard knows that the few narco-subs it has found are a mere splinter of the “flotilla” that’s actually out there. The subs are usually undetectable by radar, but found when the Joint Interagency Task Force—which, the article says, “operates in secrecy”—provides foreign intelligence on when and where subs might be traveling. But the comments thread on the military.com website, just the fact that they’re having the conversation, is somewhat heartening:
- military.com
h/t to The Cap’n.
