Assessing Operation Southern Spear Through Christian Just War Tradition

“For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong . . . if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.”

 – Romans 13:1-5.

1. The Legal Problem with Operation Southern Sphere

In September 2025, the Trump administration launched Operation Southern Spear, a series of air strikes on known and suspected drug trafficking cartel groups in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean. These groups are designated as terrorist organizations with which the United States targets in a “non-international armed conflict.” This campaign of over 21 kinetic strikes (to date) has killed over 150 people, none of whom have been identified or verified. This aggressive campaign and the preceding policy change to elevate drug trafficking as an act of war rather than a domestic crime raises serious ethical considerations for Christian policymakers. 

Does the administration’s use of military force to address drug smuggling – historically a domestic law enforcement issue – meet the standards of the Christian Just War Tradition? The strike campaign’s shaky initial legal designation, poor intelligence verification methods, lackluster justification methods towards Congress, and deliberate ‘double tap’ on survivors from a September 2^nd strike create substantial challenges for Christian policymakers to address. This paper will address these challenges by introducing the principles of the Christian Just War Tradition outlined by St. Augustine, summarize how the Just War Tradition has adapted over time to different legal worldviews, and then analyze the decisions and outcomes of Operation Southern Sphere through the lens of Just War Tradition.

Also related here is the deliberate obfuscation of Congressional war powers authority by the executive branch. While the lethal drone strikes that started on September 2 were permissible without formal congressional authorization, notifications to Congress within 48 hours are necessary when U.S. forces are engaging in “hostilities” or introducing “combat-equipped forces” into a country. This also starts a 60-day clock for the withdrawal of U.S. forces unless Congress enacts an AUMF or declares war. Previous presidential administrations have admitted that airstrikes meet the reporting thresholds of “hostilities” regardless of whether U.S. forces were in harm’s way. For example, the Clinton administration notified Congress properly when conducting Tomahawk strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, as did the first Trump administration in 2018 for its strikes on the Assad regime in Syria in retaliation for use of chemical weapons. Not so with the boat strike campaign. 

2. An Overview of the Augustinian Just War Tradition

St. Augustine is the intellectual father of Christian Just War tradition, having acted as a bridge thinker between ancient philosophy and the Christian medieval worldview. Paul Miller, a Christian political theorist at Georgetown,  emphasizes that Augustine is responsible for building out the Christian understanding of natural law and the idea that political sovereignty brought a sense of responsibility for the common good – something that had roots in the pagan traditions of Aristotle. In Augustine’s mind, warfare was acceptable and noble not purely when it came to self-defense, but also for defending the innocent and punishing the wicked as God’s arbiter on earth.¹ Miller argues that the Augustinian tradition innately understands just war as an act of love which has the power to create conditions of true peace and justice. Miller then goes on to outline the three key pillars of Augustinian Just War Tradition: Jus Ad Bellum (Justice Before War), Jus In Bello (Justice During War), and Jus Post Bellum (Justice After War). This paper will outline all three in order to build the framework for this paper’s analysis of Operation Southern Sphere and whether the campaign meets their foundational principles. 

First, Jus Ad Bellum (justice before war) argues that war must have a just cause such as self-defense, not for glory, conquest, or bloodlust. Miller notes that when justice of reconciliation, right relationships, and flourishing are violated, Augustine urges the state to step in and bring them to justice – a foundation not just for policing but also for international politics.² Wars under Jus Ad Bellum must likewise be fought under the right authority. In Augustine’s Questions on the Heptateuch, Book VI, Question 10 he puts the province of war on the state rather than the individual, arguing that “just wars are usually defined as those which avenge injuries, when a nation or state has to be punished for refusing to make amends for wrongs inflicted.”³ Wars under Jus Ad Bellum must be fought for the right intention, which is peace. In Letter 189 to Boniface, the Roman general, Augustine states that “peace should be the object of your desire; war should be waged only as a necessity and waged only that God may by it deliver men from the necessity and preserve them in peace…. war is waged in order that peace may be obtained.”⁴ Nation-states under Jus Ad Bellum cannot use violence or military force for purposes other than re-establishing the conditions of peace. Vengeance, intimidation, and prestige do not qualify as acceptable reasons to draw the sword. These same principles were carried on in the medieval world by Thomas Aquinas, who argued in Summa Theologiae, Part II–II (Second Part of the Second Part), Question 40, “Of War,” that “belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil.”⁵

Miller also interprets Jus Ad Bellum as a requirement to meet prudential considerations before going to war. There must be a reasonable chance of success, it must be conducted as a last resort, and the use of force must have proportionality in end-stated objectives. Rebeccah Heinrichs notes that

proportionality…weighs the military effect that you seek to achieve against the unintended but known negative effects that will happen. You have to seek to avoid them. You want to minimize civilian casualties even as you conduct this military operation. But the good that you seek, both in terms of the military objective and in what you’re trying to defend… both of those things. Is it proportionate? That’s an important nuance that many people fail to grasp.⁶

This means that nation-states under just war doctrine cannot use violence or force for purposes of vengeance. All military action must be proportional to the state’s desired military outcome. It should not be viewed in comparison to the enemy’s use of force or their potential capabilities, but only in terms of what is required for the military objective.

Jus In Bello (Justice During War) sets out to lay guidelines on the rules that guide military conduct. These include proportionality in force (using means on lawful targets rather than civilians), discrimination (the state’s use of violence must be for the purposes of justice, self-defense, protecting the innocent rather than vengeance), military necessity (no wanton use of violence for no clear military purpose), and distinction (combatants must only target lawful combatants rather than civilians or civilian areas). Just Post Bellum, per Miller, asks the question about the “day after.” What end state are we pursuing? Miller argues that, for Augustine, the state must pursue order, justice, and conciliation as its top objectives to emerge from any military action or campaign.⁷

3. Analyzing Different Just War Traditions

It is worth addressing the fact that there is not one single just war theory in the history of orthodox Christianity or the Western political tradition. Paul Miller argues that three branches have emerged – Augustinian, Westphalian, and Liberal. All three branches are useful for scrutinizing Operation Southern Sphere, and some espouse a more explicitly Christian worldview than the others.⁸ While Augustine’s just war tradition has already been analyzed in section 2, Miller also discusses a second model, known as the Westphalian model, born out of a period of bloodshed in the 16^th and 17^th centuries that cemented an alternate understanding of sovereignty than Augustine’s. Rulers were now responsible for imposing their own religion, rather than religion impacting a ruler’s interest calculus. This changed the reasons that governments used to justify wars. They no longer went to war to impose substantive justice on God’s behalf but to impose procedural justice like the enforcement of borders, controlling natural resources, imposing social contracts, enhancing prestige, or individual rights.⁹ With Augustine a millennia past and the Enlightenment in full swing, Miller argues that natural law became less about protecting an order made by God and more about self-preservation. The right authority to use force was whatever the state needed it to be, so long as it advanced principles like self-preservation, prestige, and power.¹⁰ One could be forgiven for mistaking this post-Reformation understanding of justice with the cold-hearted political realism of Macchiavelli. 

This Westphalian power model is less amenable to a Christian worldview and is useful for understanding the Trump administration’s defense of Operation Southern Sphere. Statements by administration officials suggest that use of force is the point of the operation – not the strategic objective of halting drugs coming into the country. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated point blank in October 2025 that “the Department of War is not going to degrade, or just simply arrest” drug trafficking boats coming to the country, and in a December speech, he indicated that “if you’re working for a designated terrorist organization and you bring drugs to this country in a boat, we will find you and we will sink you.”¹¹ 

The third model, Liberalism, emerged following WWII. The postwar multilateral consensus recognized that the rules of war needed to be strengthened after so much indiscriminate violence. More restraint was needed, civilians needed better protection, and individual democratic values were paramount. Miller argues that liberal just war doctrine was essentially a rebottling of Augustinian concepts with no theological foundation. Westphalia had unlocked a new focus on individual human rights and government accountability to the people, rather than natural law and divine justice. But post war proponents of just war believed they needed to apply outside higher standards to mitigate the violent impulses of nation-states – hence the rise in multilateral institutions like the United Nations, NATO, and the early foundations of the European Union. These proponents have been horrified by Operation Southern Sphere, calling for investigations into war crimes under humanitarian law and focusing their attention on international norms rather than natural law. 

4. Assessing Operation Southern Spear Through Just War Tradition

The Trump administration’s decision to launch kinetic military action against drug trafficking cartels in South America does not meet the standards of the Augustinian just war tradition because they violate, at  minimum, one principle of jus ad bellum, two principles of jus in bello, and potentially risk violating a principle of jus post bellum as well. At the core of this argument is the September 2^nd decision to conduct follow-up strikes on survivors from an initial drone strike, which violates the jus ad bellum principle stated by St. Augustine that the state’s use of violence must be for the purposes of seeking justice (such as self-defense or protecting the vulnerable) rather than seeking vengeance. The Pentagon’s rules of war, which are based on these principles, clearly state in Section 5.9 that persons who are in a state of hors de combat (“out of the fight”) may not be made the subject of attack if they are shipwrecked or incapacitated due to maritime disaster: “persons who have been incapacitated by…shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.” (§5.9.4).¹² Rebeccah Heinrichs likewise notes that jus in bello principles require that any military strike should be proportional to the desired military objective, not to the size of the opponent’s force or out of a desire to intimidate disproportionately.¹³ She argues that just war traditions understand the need for rulers to guard against mankind’s natural impulses to use violence indiscriminately, and so use violence solely for the purpose of accomplishing state objectives. Attacking combatants who were out of the fight, even if by mistake, is a clear violation of the just war tradition. 

The Trump administration also violated jus in bello in Operation Southern Sphere by publicly claiming that the United States could have interdicted these vessels and chose to launch military strikes against them anyway, violating the military necessity principle.¹⁴ In a joint press conference with Mexican Foreign Secretary Juan Ramón de la Fuente in Mexico City on September 3, 2025, Sec. Marco Rubio stated 

the United States has long — for many, many years — established intelligence that allowed us to interdict and stop drug boats. And we did that. And it doesn’t work. Interdiction doesn’t work… So the same information and the same intelligence mechanisms with maybe a higher focus was used to determine that a drug boat was headed towards, eventually, the United States, and instead of interdicting it, on the President’s orders, he blew it up.¹⁵

What this statement from Secretary Rubio showed was that the United States was no longer acting in self-defense, nor was it acting in military necessity. Since he acknowledged the U.S. government has a history of using non-military assets capable of addressing the immediate challenge of stropping drug cartel boats coming to the U.S., the argument that military force was necessary for this specific mission loses out. Rubio’s Westphalian logic does not justify a clear violation of just war tradition if the other proportional assets were available to use. One could even argue that the just war principle of jus ad bellum is also violated here, in which Augustine mandates that war is not for glory, conquest, or bloodlust of any sort.

As discussed in Section One, the faulty legal claim that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” with foreign drug trafficking organizations does not meet the military necessity principle of jus in bello, given that drug interdiction has for so long been a domestic law enforcement issue. JIB/JAB makes clear that the fundamental difference between Tren De Aragua and a terrorist group like Al Qaeda is their intent: Al Qaeda intended to destroy the United States and kill its civilians and uniformed servicemembers at home and aboard. But drug trafficking groups are fundamentally (with some notable exceptions) funded by revenue from narcotic sales in the U.S. market. Drug trafficking, as brutal as its consequences have been for American quality of life, can be likened more closely to gun violence – a form of tragedy that does not have the single active intent of destroying the nation. flag. Rather, the intent is the addiction of the consumer, illicit revenue, and expanded markets. It is understandable why the Coast Guard, DEA, and domestic intelligence agencies have historically led on this issue. 

A decision from the Trump administration to interdict and release survivors of an October 16^th strike also undercuts the legal justification (and moral claim) that these survivors were terrorists. Even while arguing that these targeted strikes were necessary because the traffickers posed imminent threats to the homeland, the U.S. Navy arrested the survivors and repatriated them to Colombia rather than charging them with a crime. The JIB/JAB Laws of War podcast rightfully questions this decision, arguing that if they were really terrorists who posed imminent threats to U.S. civilians, the administration’s decision not to prosecute remaining survivors from the strikes or even hold them in a military detainment center like Guantanamo Bay implies the Pentagon may have been trying to avoid one of the few legal challenges to the strikes themselves – the requirement to give a habeas challenge to the detention of individuals involved.¹⁶ If these individuals were not worth detaining, were they worth killing in the first place? 

Lastly, Operation Southern Sphere’s normative consequences have the potential to violate the just war tenant of jus post bellum – that the end goal of war must be to pursue order, justice, and a lasting peace.¹⁷ By turning these drug boats into military threats rather than criminal threats, the U.S. government is sending the message worldwide that massive combat powers are justified for non-proportional objectives.¹⁸ This campaign risks sending a signal that war powers are applicable to domestic security or to curtailing the individual rights of citizenry. Geoffrey Corn argues that “other governments dealing with problematic criminal threats might very well adopt the U.S. playbook, expanding “policing through combat” and asserting justification to extend combat operations into the territory of other states.”¹⁹ This in turn opens the door to more interstate conflict in areas already prone to violence along ethnic or sectarian lines (DRC, Rwanda, Myanmar, etc.). If more people suffer in the long run after this strike campaign, just post bellum would be violated. 

5. Conclusion

God gives earthly authorities clear permission to conduct lawful military activity that defends the vulnerable, eliminates sources of wrongdoing, and upholds principles of justice rather than vengeance. This paper argues that the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Sphere campaign of air strikes on suspected narco-terrorists in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific does not meet the standards of the Christian Just War tradition. While the strike campaign has clearly been influenced by the Westphalian just war political tradition, it rejects Augustinian and Liberal principles in five areas: 

1. The administration’s double tap follow-up strike on survivors from an initial drone strike violates the just ad bellum requirement that the state’s use of violence must be for the purposes of seeking justice rather than vengeance.
2. The administration publicly claimed that the U.S. could have interdicted these vessels and chose to launch military strikes against them anyway meaning that the jus in bello principle of military necessity was violated.
3. The administration’s faulty legal claim that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” with foreign drug trafficking organizations does not match the military necessity principle of jus in bello, given that drug interdiction has for so long been a domestic law enforcement issue.
4. The administration’s decision to release survivors of an October 16^th strike without charging them with a crime, also undercutting the proportionality principle of jus in bello.
5. The strikes set a dangerous normative precedent for bad actors elsewhere around the world, violating jus post bellum rules for establishing order and justice.

While the Christian policymaker can take confidence that God grants earthly governments the authority to conduct lawful military activity, it is fundamentally for purposes that defend the vulnerable, eliminate sources of wrongdoing, uphold principles of justice rather than vengeance, and move towards the ultimate goal of peace. This administration’s OSS campaign falls short of these standards.

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¹ Paul D. Miller, Just War and Ordered Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 18–52.
² Miller, Just War and Ordered Liberty, 24.
³ Augustine, Questions on the Heptateuch, VI.10.
⁴ Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, bk. 19, chap. 7, accessed July 15, 2026.
⁵ ST II-II Q. 40, a. 1.
⁶ Rebeccah Heinrichs, “Rebeccah Heinrichs Christianity & National Security 2023,” Providence, November 16, 2023.
⁷  Miller, Just War and Ordered Liberty, 24.
⁸   Ibid., 24.
⁹   Ibid.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹  David Klepper, “WATCH: Hegseth Delivers Keynote Address at Reagan National Defense Forum,” PBS NewsHour, December 6, 2025.
¹²  U.S. Department of Defense, Law of War Manual (Washington, DC: Office of General Counsel, Department of Defense, June 2015, updated December 2023), § 5.9.4.
¹³ Rebeccah Heinrichs, “Rebeccah Heinrichs Christianity & National Security 2023,” Providence, November 16, 2023.
¹⁴  JIB/JAB – The Laws of War Podcast, episode 41.
_¹⁵ U.S. Department of State, “Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Mexican Foreign Secretary Juan Ramón de la Fuente at a Joint Press Availability,” September 2025.
¹⁶ JIB/JAB – The Laws of War Podcast, episode 41.
¹⁷ Miller, Just War and Ordered Liberty, 24.
¹⁸ Geoffrey S. Corn, “Why U.S. Strikes Against Drug Boats Matter,” War on the Rocks, October 17, 2025.
¹⁹ Ibid.