I feel like everyone’s ignoring a distinct difference between the cartels and the Taliban or other terrorists orgs. Die hard believers in the cause, these people are not.
The cartels are not ideological or ethnic independence movements. The entire point of their existence is to make money via illicit means. You cannot make money, if you are dead.
I feel like the calculus for the average cartel member suddenly changes if they now stand a good chance of having their head popped by spec ops or coast guard.
Thank goodness.
I thought I was going to catch up with this thread, and find people still arguing
around the primary differences.
The Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and every other organization we fought the protracted GWOT in the sandbox against are literal death cults who think that dying in the conflict is literally the only guaranteed way into heaven.
Drug cartels are in it for the money, prestige, and fun.
Trying to directly equivocate the nature of such conflicts is
absolutely ridiculous.
Jihadis will deliberately seek death, and be willing to do incredibly dangerous things even when they aren't deliberately
trying to die.
Cartel enforcers are
not interested in dying. You'd probably find a few oddballs here and there, but that'd be one in thousands, not 'every third enemy rifleman.'
Past that,
Sympathizers to the radical jihadis were in every nation and neighboring nation we fought the GWOT in. Most famously, the Taliban could never be finished off, because they just retreated into Pakistan every time they got their asses kicked, and politicians wouldn't allow or make a way for the military to actually pursue them to finish them off.
Who, exactly, are the cartels going to retreat to cover themselves behind? The Cartels fight
each other, and while some desperate alliance against the USA isn't out of the question, that still doesn't actually protect them from getting attacked by US air power.
Past
that, the logistics chain for conducting such operations is hilariously short. Literally just fly or drive across the border, and you're in your Area Of Operations, instead of needing to build a military logistics chain that stretches across the entire planet. You can have air power from US-soil airbases over any part of Mexico in a couple of hours, and that's
without making special preparations.
To loop back around to one of the most important consequences of the first point,
how will Cartels replace lost numbers once they start getting slaughtered?
Some of the Cartel members are fairly competent combatants, a lot of them are hardened killers. They have a fair bit of pseudo-military equipment; assault rifles, grenades, heavy machine guns, etc.
At
best a small percentage of them are competent to the level of regular US line infantry. They sure as hell don't have access to large volumes of APCs, tanks, artillery, air strikes, and a functionally-unlimited amount of reinforcements.
Once cartel members start dying, and dying
fast, how exactly are the cartels going to recruit more people? It's a lot harder to sell 'money, prestige, women, booze and drugs,' when the combined might of the most powerful military in the world is coming down on you like a hammer.
The Jihadis saw dying in glorious Jihad as a
selling point for joining up.
For the cartels, it is the worst outcome possible. How do you spend your ill-gotten gains when you're
dead?
Nobody knows for sure
exactly how limited special operations attacks on Cartels would go, or full-on military hammer attacks either. There have been some past precedents, and its usually gone poorly for criminal syndicates fighting professional militaries (though IIRC they sometimes do well against conscript militaries), but modern drone-warfare is a major enough variable it's hard to say for sure how things would go.
My money would still be on the side backed by the largest economy and military-industrial complex in the world. The US military can get their hands on every drone cartels could, and then some. It can also get its hands on military-grade E-war equipment that the cartels either flat out
can't, or only could in very limited quantities if certain nations (China, Russia) wanted to risk pissing Trump off to try to prop up these criminal syndicates.
A 'Great War on Cartels' probably wouldn't be completely bloodless for team USA, but I see little reason to think the Cartels could fight any more effectively than the Jihadis (some of whom funded themselves through narco-trade as well...), and a lot of reasons why it could go much,
much worse.
Finally,
winning.
It's hard to outright win a war against a suicide cult, especially when your political leadership won't let you actually conduct an extermination campaign, or even attack their religious apparatus.
It's a lot easier to win a war against what's ultimately an armed business organization, first off because they're a lot more afraid of dying, and second off because once you smash enough of their business apparatus, they can't fund the conflict anymore. They can't just raise money and volunteers from other members of the cult.