There’s more to unpack with the latest U.S. strike on a drug-carrying boat in the Caribbean. The Trump administration has cast its series of operations against such boats — there have been at least four over the past month — as a necessary step to stem the flow of deadly drugs such as fentanyl and methamphetamine into the U.S.

Mr. Gertz has a look inside the Drug Enforcement Administration’s latest Drug Threat Assessment. The document was released in May, but its contents shine a light on the administration’s rationale for its quickly escalating war on cartels and the goals it hopes to achieve.

The DEA paper identifies criminal cartels in Mexico and gangs in Venezuela as major narcotics trafficking and security threats to the U.S. The report lists details on six drug cartels with the two criminal gangs, Tren de Aragua and MS-13, as foreign terrorists. The largest drug-runners were identified as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Mr. Trump last week declared that the U.S. is at war with those cartels. He designated their members as unlawful combatants, offering a new legal justification for military strikes such as the one seen on Friday.

It’s a question at the heart of national security conversations in the 21st century: In an age of drones, artificial intelligence and autonomy, what role will human forces still play? Tomer Malchi, the founder and CEO of Israel-based Asio Technologies, believes that role will remain irreplaceable.

On the latest edition of the Threat Status weekly podcast, Mr. Malchi explains how the Israel Defense Forces campaign in the Gaza Strip and the Russia-Ukraine war have proven that even in an era of unprecedented leaps forward in technology, there’s still no replacement for ground troops.

“No airplane in the world, and no F-35, no F-16, with any massive campaign could generate … ‘this is mine.’ You have to go in and plant the flag like you had to do 100 years ago,” Mr. Malchi said. “I think that the massive interest in the troops today is very correct. That’s the vector that we’re seeing.”

The flip side of that dynamic is ensuring that those human troops are outfitted with the most cutting-edge tools, referred to as “soldier-borne capabilities” in military circles. Mr. Malchi explained that while humans can benefit from wearable sensors, AI-powered goggles and other tools, there is eventually a point of diminishing returns.

Soldiers, he said, will make it clear when they’ve reached that point.

“Everything you don’t need or you don’t want, if your life depends on it and it’s a weight, you just leave it in the tent,” Mr. Malchi said. “If you try to push technology and the soldiers just don’t use it, they leave it in the tent. That’s your biggest indication that that’s too complicated, too massive, the soldier won’t take stuff that would hold them back.”

Asia Editor Andrew Salmon has an in-depth look at Sanae Takaichi, the 64-year-old who on Saturday won the leadership of the country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party and looks to be on a glide path to be the next prime minister. While she would be the first woman to hold that post, Ms. Takaichi is no wilting geisha, Mr. Salmon reports.

A champion of her party’s right wing and a protege of Japan’s longest-serving premier, the conservative Shinzo Abe, she cites the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as her political role model. Some supporters hope she’ll tighten immigration laws and take other steps that would align politically with right-wing movements around the world, including in the U.S.

But she would be walking into a difficult job. Japan is facing a demographic plunge, a long economic malaise and a threatening regional security environment in which the country faces an expansive China, a warlike Russia and a nuclear-armed North Korea.

There’s a key geopolitical opportunity inside the Trump administration’s revisiting of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the major trade deal that during Mr. Trump’s first term replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement. Some analysts believe the negotiations, if done properly, could strengthen North American supply chains and help the U.S. stay ahead of its leading global rival China in automotive production.

Mark Vargas, a former Pentagon official who served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2007 to 2010, explains in a new piece for The Washington Times that the U.S. and Mexico must view the trade talks as an opportunity to jointly build the most competitive automotive supply chain in the world.

“Mexico brings talent, scale and proximity. The United States brings innovation, capital and unmatched market power. Together, we can re-anchor the global auto industry in North America,” Mr. Vargas writes.

• Oct. 6 — Big Deal, Small Deal or No Deal? Possible Outcomes of a Trump-Xi Summit, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Oct. 8 — Investing in the North Korean People: Broadening Access to Information in North Korea, Stimson Center

• Oct. 8 — Relearning Great Power Diplomacy: A Conversation with Wess Mitchell, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 9 — Countering the Axis of Aggressors with Retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and Retired Gen. Laura Richardson, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Oct. 13-15 — AUSA 2025 Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA)

• Oct. 21-22 — Missile Defense Agency Small Business Conference, Tennessee Valley Chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA)

• Oct. 22 — Europe’s Energy Transition: From Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine to Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’ Agenda, Brookings Institution