New SOUTHCOM Permanent Cartel Task Force Will Expand Air Force Role

As U.S. Southern Command shifts its counter-narcotics mission to a permanent task force, the Air Force piece of the larger war on cartels in Latin America and the Caribbean is likely to grow.

SOUTHCOM commander Marine Corps Gen. Francis Donovan announced on Aug. 3 on X.com and official video releases that the command had ended the temporary Joint Task Force-Southern Spear and Operation Southern Spear. The command, he said, would shift its mission to the Joint Task Force-Western Hemisphere.

“Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere is SOUTHCOM’s action arm for confronting threats across the hemisphere,” Donovan said.

He called the task force a “purpose-built and task-organized” headquarters that “brings together tailored military capabilities and trusted partnerships to increase total systemic friction, operational tempo, impose sustained pressure on criminal organizations and strengthen the security of the United States and our partners.”

Donovan did not specify which forces would comprise the tailor-made task force, which will be commanded by Marine Maj. Gen. Kevin Jarrad. Jarrad has most recently led humanitarian relief efforts in Venezuela.

The task force will work with 18 partner nations, members of the 5-month-old Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, which includes El Salvador, Ecuador and Honduras. Notably, Mexico and Colombia, both centers of cartel influence and drug production, are not included, even though Mexico is part of U.S. Northern Command.

The White House referred questions to the Pentagon, which deferred to SOUTHCOM, where a spokesperson said via email that the new task force “represents an evolution” from Southern Spear, reinforcing a “whole-of-government, multinational approach to defending the homeland and bolstering regional partnerships.”

The shift from a temporary task force and operation to a permanent, broader-ranging structure within the command came as no surprise to experts on the region and its military mission who were interviewed by Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“This is going to be an ongoing, large-scale type of operation to support the strategic desires of the President,” said retired Lt. Gen. Norm Seip, U.S. Air Forces Southern commander from 2006 to 2009.

That is likely to mean some more prioritization of assets for the SOUTHCOM commander, Seip said, and his air component lead – the 12^th Air Forces commander.

The 12^th Air Force, out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, played a key role in Southern Spear and will continue that work with JTF-WH.

“Our focus during Operation Southern Spear has been to provide rapid air mobility, comprehensive air domain awareness, and essential logistical support to joint forces, ensuring the overall success of the operation’s strategic objectives in the region,” an AFSOUTH spokesperson said in an email response.

The 12th Air Force executed 1,700 sorties, including transporting 27,000 tons of cargo and more than 4,500 personnel during the operation’s 10-month duration, the spokesperson wrote. They conducted that work largely through the 612th Air Operations Center, also at Davis-Monthan, the “never center” for all things air in SOUTHCOM.

That included a mix of airlift, air refueling, command and control, ISR, rotary wing, strike and tiltrotor aircraft to sustain operations.

At the peak of the operations, AFSOUTH oversaw 2,800 Airmen and 80 aircraft across seven operating locations. As the joint forces air component, the 12th had operational control over 150 aircraft across 15 separate land bases.

With the JTF-WH, AFSOUTH is integrating air, space and cyber capabilities to support the task force’s mission and provide agile combat support, ISR and interoperability with regional partners, the spokesperson wrote.

While components of Southern Spear’s work have included counter-maritime operations and drone strikes conducted by U.S. Special Operations Command assets with SOUTHCOM, a significant part of both the counter-cartel operation and overall tracking in the area depends on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms and personnel provided by AFSOUTH.

Those platforms, either in the fleet or assigned to SOUTHCOM missions, include the E-3 Sentry, the RC-135VW Rivet Joint, the MQ-9 Reaper drone, and the KC-135 Stratotanker for aerial refueling of the air assets needed to cover about 15 million square miles of territory.

“The number one thing we need in Latin America and the Caribbean is ISR, and air and space assets are absolutely critical for that,” Henry Ziemer, a fellow with the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Partner and allied nations in the region, such as Chile and Ecuador, have limited ISR capabilities, he said.

“So, if your partner forces can’t necessarily flag things for you, they are often relying on the U.S. to provide that intelligence or go out and spot some of the trafficking or illicit activity themselves,” Ziemer said.

The CSIS fellow identified space assets as additional pieces of the larger ISR puzzle.

U.S. Space Force’s space component of SOUTHCOM became operational on Dec. 1, 2025, about a month before the Jan. 3 raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported.

“This new organization reaffirms our commitment to address local threats of all shapes and sizes, ranging from malign state actors to violent extremist organizations and to transnational criminal organizations,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said at a Jan. 21 ceremony marking the component’s activation.

That space piece helps SOUTHCOM address its burgeoning responsibilities in counter-cartel work through the new task force. Seip didn’t always have immediate access to satellites and other ISR assets when he led 12^th Air Force and was jockeying for assets in SOUTHCOM while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drew much of the DOD’s operational resources.

At the time, his ISR assets were often assigned on a temporary basis for counternarcotics missions, said Seip, who now serves as president of the nonprofit American Security Project. That might change with a more robust task force and focus by the administration.

“It’s certainly a different world in SOUTHCOM than when I was there, based on force protection, security of the Western Hemisphere,” Seip said. “It was not written in the [National Defense Strategy] as it is now.”

The new task force and broader mission could help the command, which has historically ranked last in the Pentagon’s budget priorities for Unified Combatant Commands.

“SOUTHCOM is under resourced,” Seip said. “It’s getting better resourced now that there’s such a focus on that area of the world.”

And the command is always competing with other global theaters such as Pacific Command and Central Command.

Operation Southern Spear is estimated to have cost $820 million between September 2025 and June, according to government reports.

Operation Epic Fury, by contrast, is said to have cost $29 billion between March and mid-May, according to Pentagon figures, though other reports suggest the operation’s real cost could be much higher, between $50 and $110 billion so far.

A Growing Mission

During his first term, President Donald Trump launched the Enhanced Counter Narcotics Operations deployment, which bolstered regional counter-narcotics enforcement.

The first reported strike on a suspected drug boat in international waters occurred on Sept. 5, 2025. In November, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the formation of JTF-SS and Operation Southern Spear.

From the outset, the strikes received bipartisan rebuke, but efforts in both the House and Senate to curtail the President’s military actions in the region failed.

“What’s notable about Southern Spear is that it begins right on Sept. 5, 2025, with a U.S. strike in international waters,” Ziemer, the CSIS fellow, said. “There’s no coalition. There’s no notice, as far as we can tell, to our partners in the region.”

Trump then released his National Security Strategy in December, shifting security focus to the Western Hemisphere as alleged drug boat strikes continued. On Jan. 3, during Operation Absolute Resolve, a separate but outgrowth of Southern Spear initiatives, U.S. forces captured Maduro and extradited him to the United States to face criminal charges of leading a decades-long conspiracy to flood the United States with cocaine.

The watercraft strikes continued under Southern Spear, resulting in at least 67 vessels struck, killing at least 221 people between September 2025 and June 2026, according to a July DOD Inspector General report.

Though the “centerpiece” that has captured media attention in Southern Spear has been the boat strikes, Ziemer said that other counter-drug and cartel work by the task force and SOUTHCOM are eye-catching as well.

“We’re still seeing kind of unprecedented activity in the Western Hemisphere, post Maduro,” Ziemer said.