And you know, given that we have the world's most powerful navy and intelligence monitoring services, it seems like a better use of our assets would be...oh I don't know, see where these dudes stop, who they meet up with, where the final stop is (if it's even in the US), try to trace things back to the source nation(s) and basically using that to build up a holistic picture of drug smuggling. Something that we've done many times in the past, and in the Middle East/North Africa with terrorists.
Because this did nothing to actually address drug smuggling - this *maybe* took a tiny amount of drugs off the streets, but it didn't, oh I don't know, deal with the originating organizations that grew it and shipped it, and it didn't deal with the network of distribution within the US mainland and/or the points between the Caribbean and the US or the Pacific and the US. And it didn't deal with the end users who are funding this. But it made somebody feel powerful, so I guess that's what matters.