The Commandos Prepping Mexico Attacks
Trump’s war on cartels is a godsend for a special ops command with an identity crisis
When Special Operations Command North (SOCNORTH) cut the ribbon on its futuristic $55 million headquarters building at Peterson Space Force Base last November, it was the ultimate affirmation of an organization that had been struggling to find a purpose.
“SOCNORTH remains focused on the threats most prevalent to the United States,” said Col. Matthew Tucker, SOCNORTH Commander, who defined most prevalent as “strategic competition” with China and Russia.
Little did Colonel Tucker know how quickly “most prevalent” would be turned on its head. Trump came into office two months later he designated international cartels as enemy number one. The Arctic was traded for Mexico.
The special operations component of Northern Command, officially responsible for the defense of America, was established in November 2013, long after 9/11, because, well, every other geographic fighting command had a special operations component. Lacking terrorists to kill or counter-insurgencies to fight, SOCNORTH was assigned every task under the sun, a roller-coaster of missions that somehow contributed to “defending the homeland” against “unconventional threats.”
I’ve reviewed dozens of internal documents describing SOCNORTH’s evolution and growth, a wandering-in-the-desert of nothing to actually do until last year when the new headquarters screamed Arctic warfare. With the Pentagon’s post-Middle East shift to “great power competition,” SOCNORTH would defend the northern approaches to America against Russian and even Chinese threats. On the walls of the new headquarters were maps of the Arctic circle from Alaska to Greenland, and in the minds of SOCNORTH planners were commandos meeting Russian Spetsnaz as they made their way south through the ice.
Then came Donald Trump, and the Arctic maps were rolled up and put away as the border and Mexico became the top priority. “Defending” America would no longer be an ephemeral contingency plan set in some mythical future; the military was ordered to deal with the immediate threats of illegal immigration, drugs, and cartels.
Established during the Obama administration, SOCNORTH was originally tasked with “generating SOF options supporting counterterrorism and counternarcotics.” SOCNORTH was given a vast area of responsibility, from the western end of the Aleutian Islands to Canada, across the Homeland, Mexico, and portions of the northern Caribbean region to include The Bahamas, Puerto Rico, U.S. and U.K. Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos, Bermuda, and the Atlantic and Pacific approaches to the continental United States.
In its 12 year history, SOCNORTH embraced every possible mission that might justify its existence: killing terrorists! Stopping WMD! Intercepting Drugs! Stemming Human trafficking! Protecting critical infrastructure! Catching Russian agents! Thwarting Chinese investments! Countering small drones! Whenever the U.S. and Mexico could “partner” in pursuit of these missions, they did. But because Mexico was obsessed with its sovereignty and sensitive to the position of being subordinate to big brother, any significant operations were conducted by the CIA, the FBI, and by clandestine special operators of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) — officially called “other government agencies (OGAs) — to make sure that whatever was done was hidden from the public.
Until the Arctic came along, SOCNORTH never had a clear military mission. It just existed, because, well, every geographic combatant command had a special operations component, and the congressional Colorado delegation said that NORTHCOM, located in Colorado Springs, should have one too.
I mean, SOCCENT in the Middle East and SOCAFRICA in Africa were actively killing terrorists, and SOCEUR was covertly assisting Ukraine, and SOCPAC was preparing for war with China and aggressively thwarting North Korea, but SOCNORTH? It was carrying out standard military training and running around with the Bahamian police.
NORTHCOM has now formally directed SOCNORTH to “expand its scope and scale and establish a highly operational command that can defend forward, generate effects below the level of conflict, and conduct day-to-day campaigning.” In English that means: Do something!
The documents are now clear that SOCNORTH is directed to fight the cartels in the same way that the U.S. military has fought terrorists in the Middle East for the last two decades: characterize the nature of the enemy, identify the leaders and establish the links and relationship to the lieutenants and the fighters, locate command centers and bases of operations and stores of munitions, map vulnerabilities such as routes to the border, tunnels under the borders and routes inside the U.S. (called “illicit pathways”), get inside the decision-making to anticipate movements, and execute attacks to thwart those activities. This isn’t just about airstrikes or raids on the ground. SOCNORTH says it is also focused on cyber and financial attacks, ones that might disrupt cartel decision-making or degrade the cartel’s access to money. And it says it is conducting “information operations” against “transnational organized crime” networks in Mexico, a kind of modern-day influence campaign that seems a fruitless endeavor.
SOCNORTH carries out its Mexico operations through its two “X” directorates: J2X and J3X. The two, intelligence and operations, carry out the “sensitive” activities. Defense Department directives define “sensitive activities” as “operations, actions, activities, or programs that, if compromised, could have enduring adverse effects on U.S. foreign policy, DOD activities, or military operations, or cause significant embarrassment to the U.S., its allies, or the DOD.” The Army says that such sensitive activities include nine categories that should never be revealed, including any information on operations that might “violate a statute, treaty, or international agreement.”
SOCNORTH documents make reference to a gaggle of subordinate organizations that are involved in these sensitive activities:
Special Operations Forces Emerging Threat Operations and Planning Support (SOFETOPS) enterprise, which works together to translate national guidance into operational plans, concepts of operations, courses of action, and final operations orders.
SOCNORTH Sensitive Activities Fusion Element (SAFE), in charge of Mexico-related Operational Preparation of the Environment (OPE) by fusing intelligence and operational information into targeting data for specific potential strikes.
SOCNORTH Analytical Network (SAN), a dispersed but confederated intelligence analysis enterprise spread out from Alaska to Washington to the southern border that processes “multi-domain intelligence to discover, develop, and assist in the global target development of various threats and actors.” That multi-domain includes information from airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets, signals intelligence (SIGINT) from communications and data intercepts, specifically digital network intelligence (DNI), human intelligence (HUMINT), open source intelligence (OSINT) (social media), and geographic intelligence (GEOINT). SAN works with activity-based analysis, trend and pattern analysis, geospatial analysis, link analysis and network or social network analysis to populate and maintain unique intelligence databases.
SOCNORTH pattern analysis section (PAS), one of the early adopters of AI, responsible for fusing a wide variety of data such as human agents, intercepts, open source, and imagery to discover and illuminate threats in a way that could not be achieved through traditional intelligence means. According to one document, the aim is “to find patterns, trends and statistical anomalies that could be used to identify current and potential threats to the United States.”
SOCNORTH Joint Intelligence Support Element (JISE), which supports actual missions, from counter-intelligence to information sharing, particularly as it relates to “nation-state adversaries” operating in North America.
Direct Support SIGINT Element (DSSE), an NSA assigned element that intercepts foreign communications and also works with the FBI in the lawful intercept of communications inside the United States.
SOCNORTH Crisis Response Team (CRT), that can actually (in theory) conduct quick-reaction operations.
About half of the 300 person SOCNORTH headquarters, plus military augmentees and contractors (primarily CACI, an $8.6 billion defense consultant company) are involved in the war against the cartels. As people associated with the cartels are detained by law enforcement, SOCNORTH interrogators swoop in to “triage” them and conduct “strategic-level debriefing activities” to get immediate information, obtain biographical details and feed link analysis.
A super-secret Special Operations Command Forward Mexico (SOCFWD) element is also located within the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City that interacts with their Mexican counterparts, as well as with the CIA and FBI reps in Mexico. SOCNORTH also has a presence with the Strategic Intelligence Group at the San Diego Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building, under the FBI. According to the documents, some 50 military, civilian and contractor personnel are assigned to various government agencies, offices and embassies.
To understand the Trump approach to the southern border and the cartels, it is important to recognize that whatever SOCNORTH, the CIA, the covert special operators, the regular military, homeland security and the diplomats have been doing at the southern border and in Mexico over the past decades, they have little to show for their efforts. Sure al Qaeda and Hezbollah and ISIS didn’t infiltrate America from the south, but it wasn’t because a shield was established at the southern border. When it comes to the mission of countering drugs, the societal results are self-evident. After near 50 years of the “war” on drugs, narcotics are more plentiful and deadly than ever before. Illegal border crossings skyrocketed. And as for the cartels, they’ve established a firm foothold in America.
With the new Trump focus, one might imagine that SOCNORTH will settle down and have a laser focus on the cartels. But the current documents make reference to SOCNORTH carrying out its new new mission as a part of the Pentagon’s Counter Insurgency Targeting Program (CITP), a budget line item that is a follow-on to counter-improvised explosive devices (IED) campaign that emerged during the Iraq War. One 2025 document I obtained defines CITP as focused on “disruption of terrorist activities, transnational criminal networks, foreign intelligence services, proliferation networks [WMD], intellectual property theft, insider threats, unmanned systems, cyber, collection management, source validation, operations development, and sensitive technical collection exploitation.” CACI, the defense contractor that serves SOCNORTH, describes its day-to-day functions for the command as including operations to “Counter External State Actors (ESA)/AKA Maligned State Actors (MSA), Counter Terrorism (CT), Counter Transnational Criminal Organizations (CTCO), and Counter Threat Networks (CTN).”
In this word and acronym salad is everything that is wrong with the Pentagon and the national security state: not only does it include a ridiculously expansive set of missions that prioritizes nothing, but it shows that no program ever dies. Donald Trump and company might scream about the southern border and the cartels, but the corporate military has other ideas. Every one of these “missions” demands an advocate, generates meetings and paperwork, drives intelligence collection, and strains resources. Thus stopping counterfeit NFL football jerseys becomes as important as stopping fentanyl.
Both Biden and Trump have been expanding and empowering a special operations force who's territory includes the US. This is at least as scary as Trump continually mobilizing national guard troops to patrol US cities.
Thanks again for dispersing some of the dry ice and mirrors. It is hard to keep in mind with all the swooping Clancyesque Mission Impossible stuff that the constant is a massive glacial creeping bureaucracy. Somewhere there must be an elite unit still hunting for the NVA/VC's Central Office for South Vietnam!