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There are schisms on these issues within the U.S. military.

Drug smuggling is not a capital crime; at the time of most of the attacks, neither the president nor Congress had declared a war on drug smugglers, who in any case were not attacking Americans in the same way that, say, al-Qaida hijackers and militias attacked U.S. citizens or soldiers.

In September, a few days after the first military sinking of a boat, the U.S.

Looking at the straight-faced generals and admirals—the nation’s top officers, entrusted with the 2.1 million members of the U.S. armed forces and a nearly $1 trillion budget designed to deter and, if necessary, fight wars against real threats and adversaries—one could only wonder what they made of the juvenile fist-bumping by their two highest-ranking civilian overseers, the commander in chief and the secretary of defense.

The new acting director of the U.S.