MILITARY HAS CUT ROLE IN DRUG WAR

WASHINGTON - Stretched thin from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the U.S. military has sharply reduced its role in the war on drugs,
leaving significant gaps in U.S. narcotics interdiction efforts.

Since 1989, Congress has directed the Pentagon to be the lead federal
agency in detecting and monitoring, by air and sea, illegal narcotics
shipments headed to the United States, and in supporting Coast Guard
efforts to intercept them. In the early 1990s, at the height of the
drug war, U.S. military planes and boats filled the Southern skies
and waters in search of cocaine-laden drug vessels coming from
Colombia and elsewhere in South America.

But since 2002, the military has withdrawn many of those assets, said
more than a dozen current and former counter-narcotics officials. A
review of congressional, military and Homeland Security documents
showed the same thing.

Internal records show that in the last four years the Pentagon has
reduced by more than 62 percent its aerial surveillance flight hours
over Caribbean and Pacific Ocean routes that are used to smuggle in
cocaine, marijuana and, increasingly, Colombia-produced heroin. At
the same time, the Navy is deploying one-third fewer patrol boats for
detecting and catching smugglers.

The Defense Department also plans to withdraw as many as 10 Black
Hawk helicopters that have been used by a multi-agency task force to
move quickly to make drug seizures and arrests in the Caribbean, a
major hub for drugs heading to the United States.

The Department of Defense defended its policy shift in a budget
document sent to Congress in October: "The DOD position is that
detecting drug trafficking is a lower priority than supporting our
service members on ongoing combat missions."

It's hard to gauge the impact of the pullback, because authorities
said they know only how much narcotics they are seizing, not how much
is getting through, especially with fewer surveillance planes and
boats to gather intelligence.

In the budget report to Congress, the Pentagon estimated recently
that it detected 22 percent of the "actionable maritime events" in
fiscal 2006 because it "lacks the optimal number of assets."