Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Admiral Holsey's Resignation and the Failure of the War on Drugs
Last week, Admiral Alvin Holsey’s startling resignation from the U.S. Southern Command wasn’t insubordination—it was a rare moment of strategic clarity in a decades-long policy failure. Holsey isn’t the first to recognize that America’s approach to the drug war is broken. But his resignation forces us to ask why, nearly 50 years in, we’re still fighting the wrong war, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong targets.
The Evidence Was Already In
In 2005, the RAND Corporation—hardly a fringe institution—released a sweeping assessment of U.S. drug policy titled How Goes the War on Drugs? Their conclusions were damning:
• Enforcement-heavy strategies offer diminishing returns.
• Treatment is far more cost-effective than incarceration.
• Source-country control and interdiction have had little measurable impact on drug consumption in the U.S.
That was twenty years ago. Since then, we’ve spent billions more chasing the same failed tactics—only now, we’re escalating to kinetic military operations against suspected drug runners in small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Admiral Holsey understood what RAND documented and what civilian leadership continues to ignore: we’re attacking symptoms, not the underlying disease. This isn’t strategy—it’s inertia in uniform.
A System That Refuses to Learn
What makes this failure so persistent? In The Fifth Discipline, systems theorist Peter Senge describes how organizations develop “learning disabilities”—mental models that blind them to feedback, block innovation, and reward continuity over change.
Systems thinking recognizes that complex problems can’t be solved by attacking individual components in isolation. The war on drugs isn’t a collection of separate problems—it’s an interconnected system where actions in one area create consequences in others. Attacking supply without addressing demand raises prices, which increases cartel profits and incentivizes more smuggling. Each point solution generates new problems that sustain the very system it was meant to disrupt.
That’s exactly what we see in drug policy. The prevailing mental model remains unchanged: The problem is supply. The solution is interdiction.
Holsey’s resignation—like RAND’s report before it—was an attempt to break that model. But when the system is optimized for continuity, not results, even the truth has a hard time finding traction.
The Real Enemy Isn’t in a Boat
To understand Holsey’s decision, we have to ask: What war are we actually fighting?
The cartels we analyzed last week are not street gangs who hold up convenience stores—they’re sophisticated, self-healing enterprises that recover from disruptions faster than our operations can adapt. Trying to dismantle them with boat interdictions is like trying to bankrupt Amazon by seizing one delivery truck in Fargo. It’s performative theater, not strategy.
Holsey, as a combatant commander, would have asked the right questions:
• How do we verify that a boat is carrying drugs? • How do we define success? • What are the legal and diplomatic consequences? • What happens if cartels escalate in response?
When the answers didn’t support the mission, Holsey chose not to play along.
That’s not surrender. That’s professional integrity.
Why the System Can’t Change
So why hasn’t the U.S. changed course?
One answer lies in what President Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address: the gravitational pull of the military-industrial complex. Drive through Crystal City or Reston, and you’ll see its skyline—glass towers filled with contractors whose core competency is not solving intractable problems, but monetizing them through the byzantine federal procurement process.
In 2020, General Dynamics was awarded a $350 million State Department contract to counter money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and other transnational criminal activities. The General Accounting Office reported that the program was poorly managed and executed.
This isn’t a one-off example of misaligned strategy and ineffective performance. Like Vietnam, which H.R. McMaster documented in Dereliction of Duty, the war on drugs has become self-sustaining—fueled by a lack of institutional accountability, weak congressional oversight, and a sprawling consulting ecosystem that profits from failure.
In this system, success is not defined by outcomes. It’s defined by continued funding.
Financial Complicity: The Quiet Keystone
Here’s what we rarely talk about: the drug trade is built on capital flows, not just cocaine bricks. If cartels move $150 billion annually, that money must be cleaned, legitimized, and moved through the global financial system.
So why aren’t institutions like major banks or crypto exchanges held to account more frequently when cartel funds pass through their platforms?
The same government agencies that spend billions chasing low-level smugglers rarely prioritize disrupting the financial networks that make the drug economy viable. This is not just a policy oversight. It’s a strategic blind spot.
What an Integrated Strategy Looks Like
If we were serious about defeating the cartels, we would stop pretending this is a law enforcement problem—or a military one. It is a systems problem. And it requires a systems solution.
Financial Disruption
Use the weapons we honed post-9/11 to dismantle terror financing:
• Target and freeze cartel-linked assets. • Penalize financial institutions that fail to stop laundering. • Treat cartels like multinational corporations—and destroy their capital infrastructure.
We’ve deployed these tools against terror networks and rogue states. We haven’t used them aggressively against cartels—not because they wouldn’t or don’t work, but because major financial institutions oppose the regulatory burden and potential liability.
State Capacity and Corruption
Invest in justice systems, not just weapons systems.
• Fund institutional reform in source and transit countries. • Shield prosecutors, police, and judges from cartel intimidation. • Rebuild U.S. agencies (like USAID) to strengthen civil society where the cartels have weakened it. • Use the Export Import Bank and US International Development Finance Corporation to drive investment that encourages capital formation and business creation in countries devastated by the drug cartels.
Demand Reduction and Public Health
Drug use is driven by despair, not just criminality. The same economic forces that closed the Winona knitting factory and St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chippewa Falls created the demand that fuels the cartels. You can’t interdict your way out of structural economic devastation.
• Treat addiction as a health crisis. • Invest in treatment, education, and harm reduction. • Expand drug courts and diversion programs that reduce incarceration while maintaining accountability. Pair criminal justice reform—eliminating mandatory minimums, investing in reentry support—with treatment infrastructure.
Together, these don’t just suppress supply—they turn the cartels’ own business model into a vulnerability. That’s how you win: with the right weapons, used in the right battles.
The Real Strategic Risk: Escalation
There’s one final question we’re not asking: What happens when the cartels stop playing by the rules?
Right now, most cartels avoid direct attacks on U.S. civilians because it’s bad for business. But if U.S. policy shifts from law enforcement to military aggression—if we begin destroying infrastructure or assassinating leadership—they may start seeing terrorism not as escalation, but as leverage.
We’ve seen this before. When Colombian President César Gaviria intensified operations against Pablo Escobar in the early 1990s, Escobar responded with a bombing campaign that killed hundreds of civilians, judges, and police officers. In Mexico, President Calderón’s 2006 militarization of drug policy triggered a cartel response that left over 100,000 dead by 2012. The pattern is clear: when criminal enterprises with military-scale resources face existential military threats, they respond in kind.
The Sinaloa Cartel has more resources and global reach than many of the adversaries we fought for two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan. We should ask ourselves: are we prepared for that fight? Or are we walking into it blindly, one boat at a time?
A Resignation That Should Resonate
Admiral Holsey’s refusal to launch ill-conceived attacks wasn’t surrender. It was a final defiant act of leadership. He looked at the enemy, looked at the plan, and decided not to send American forces into a strategically incoherent mission for the sake of optics.
That should stop us cold.
The war on drugs won’t be won in the Caribbean, in the jungles of Colombia, or on the banks of the Rio Grande. It will be won—or lost—in the financial records of international banks, the health systems of forgotten communities, the drug courts we expand or abandon, and in our willingness to deploy economic statecraft where we’ve only deployed destroyers, Navy SEALs, and the DEA.
We know what works. We’ve known for twenty years. The question is whether our leaders have the courage, competence, and conviction to act on what we know.