Man, it's so great seeing conservatives revive autistic liberal arguments of "We lost more people to gangs than 9/11, therefore 9/11 wasn't that big of a deal" argument.
And Vietnam? Vietnam had the exact same problems that your proposal does. HR McMaster makes it very clear that at the end of the day, the US government itself had no real idea what its objectives were in Vietnam. The JCS, Johnson, Taylor, the Whiz Kids, all had their ideas of what we were supposed to be doing, and they constantly were working at cross-purposes. The result was a muddled compromise where we would neither withdraw from Vietnam nor actually commit towards victory.
It's why I observed earlier that I have more respect for the people who think we should just straight up invade Mexico and occupy the north than this "lol the special forces can do everything" nonsense.
I think that asking what the objective is beyond the vague idea of "Smash the cartel" is already an operational plan.
If you asked me what I think we should be doing in the event of a Taiwan contingency, I could sum it up in a few sentences. Drive the invasion back, sink the navy, get allies on our side, impose a blockade, prepare to negotiate as a direct invasion of the Chinese mainland is excessively dangerous.
In your case it's: smash the cartel.
Okay, I'll lay it out in simple terms:
"Via a combination of killing cartel leadership, destroying key cartel infrastructure, and weakening the cartels compared to the Mexican government, seriously damage their ability to both operate and recruit. Ideally, this will break the current cartels, and a resurgent Mexican law enforcement will cripple such criminal operations long-term. Practically and more plausibly, this will establish a serious deterrent, making it clear to cartel leaders, both survivors and new leaders of new cartels in the future, that if they do not want to personally die, they will operate as quietly and non-violently as possible."
I, and most others who support the idea, don't have some fantasy-land conception that 'go blow up the baddies' is a magical solution to current problems. We
do think that major criminal organizations having a
very clear understanding where they are on the pecking order is a good thing. Arrogant and overconfident thugs will casually commit crimes against property and people. Intimidated criminals will try to operate quietly out of the way, making their money by selling illicit goods where they won't be noticed, because they know that if they are noticed,
that is a bad thing.
No. Worst case scenario is that the special forces straight up lose ala Mogadishu or Hostomel Airport, thousands die in the United States as the cartel launches terrorist attacks, the US global position turns into that of Russia as we're shut out from the entire world that is now utterly terrified of us, blue states and especially California attempt to get out of the war on their terms and we start to move closer to a split, Mexican dreams of undoing Guadulupe Hidalgo actually starts to become more than a fringe fantasy, the United States military is shown to be a corrupt paper tiger, and China and Russia take advantage of US distraction to fulfill their own Eurasian dreams.
"Mexico resists US special forces and we get stuck in a war where we don't know what we're doing" is far, far from the worst case scenario.
You are a black-pilled doomer.
Even if we assume the overall competence of the US military has been in free-fall across the Biden administration, it
still will not have fallen to the level of the Russian paper tiger. We simply do not have a completely institutionalized culture of lying and graft the way that they do, and four years isn't long enough for that to develop.
There are too many veterans with actual combat experience, too many support personnel who actually know how to do their damn jobs, and the Trump administration is already actively working to undo the damage the Biden administration has done. Further, the advantage of initiative rests in our hands. We can wait until we're sure we have a decent number of units in fighting shape before starting anything.
Past all of this, the idea that the USA would somehow turn into an international leper on a level meeting or exceeding that of Russia for engaging in a campaign
against organized crime syndicates is so far beyond laughable, it makes it clear that you are not engaging in rational thought here. There are so many reasons why this is nonsense I have a hard time deciding where to start, so I'll just put a single one of the key elements in simplistic terms:
When your sugar daddy heads over to the neighbors house and beats the shit out of the disobedient man-child there that's joined a gang and been harassing his children, you don't suddenly turn against him, especially when you're dependent on him for your own protection.
It's abundantly clear at this point that you have no clue what you're talking about, and are engaging in the same kind of irrational pessimism that anti-USA hacks have since at
least the anti-war movements preceding Pearl Harbor. The Cartels are not some sort of ubermensch that will be cutting down GIs like wheat, the Mexican government absolutely does not want to get into a tarrif war, much less a shooting war, with the USA, and if the Mexican leadership tried to tell the Mexican military to fight against the US military, they'd be more likely to coup out their own leadership than to actually fire on US forces,
especially since the recently-elected Mexican president is known to be at least partially in the pocket of the cartels.
Finally, the fact that you think the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu was some kind of humiliating defeat for America shows that you are operating on vibes, not anything remotely connected to reality. Depending on what sources you believe, casualties inflicted ran somewhere between 20:1 and *200:1* in the US's favor, and the objective of the raid, hitting a group of the local warlord's leadership, was successful.
It is a testament to the incredibly high standards of military performance generally expected of the US military that the whole operation was considered a mess, even though it achieved its objective and inflicted massively disproportionate casualties. You practically never will actually get it, but we train and expect our military to be aiming towards accomplishing all objectives with zero casualties.
The US
kicked ass in that battle, and the whole affair was yet another example of how the US military with very few exceptions wins absolute crushing victories in the field, but incompetent Democrat political leadership doesn't know how to actually accomplish anything meaningful with that.
But the Democrats aren't in control right now.