A rabbit hole about speed boats

The United States military killed more people on your behalf today, targeting a boat somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared footage of the destruction on social media, thereby fulfilling one of the apparent objectives of the strike. Hegseth used various Clancyesque vocabulary (though not “opsec”) while Trump celebrated the positive benefits for you, a U.S. resident.

The boat, he claimed, was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE” but was stopped off the coast of Venezuela before it was able to “[enter] American Territory.”

As journalist Matt Novak pointed out, though, Venezuela isn’t terribly close to the U.S. So — even granting the administration’s claim that the boat was smuggling drugs, which one might be justified in not immediately granting — how imminent was the threat to the U.S.?

To answer this question, we need to know two things. First, how far was the boat from the U.S.? Second, how fast was it going? The second question is actually the trickier one, so let’s tackle it first.

The only information we have at our disposal is contained in the shared video. It shows a small vessel with what appears to be two outboard motors on the back. (See the pink box below.)

The appearance is consistent with what are called “go-fast” boats, boats stripped down to do little more than carry a lot of drugs a long way very quickly. In 2016, the FBI published a report on these sorts of vessels, explaining how the government tracked and captured their occupants. The story does not involve the extrajudicial invocation of capital punishment.

What the report doesn’t include is an estimate of speed. So, for that, we turn to analysis from Jake Tunaley of the London Research and Development Corporation.

“The hulls are usually made of fibreglass with a sharp, vertically rounded bow and a transom stern,” Tunaley writes of such boats. “They are typically 30 to 50 feet long with a narrow beam and powerful engines delivering up to 1000 hp. This gives speeds of greater than 80 kts in calm waters, 50 kts in choppy waters and 25 kts in 1.5 to 2 m Caribbean seas.”

The “kts” there refers to knots, nautical miles per hour. That’s what we’ll use for our calculations.

Next, we need to figure out the distance the boat had to travel. That means figuring out (roughly) how far it is from the “Coast of Venezuela” to “American Territory.”

The territorial boundary of the U.S. is generally 12 miles from our coastline. If a go-fast boat left from the point closest to the boundary in Florida, weaving between Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as shown below, that’s about 1,000 nautical miles.

Assuming calm seas, a constant 80-knot speed and no aerial or surface interdictions, a smuggler could cover that distance in about 12-and-a-half hours. Perhaps not as long as one might think.

But Florida is not the closest American Territory to Venezuela. Puerto Rico is. And it’s less than 400 nautical miles away.

That means that the boat could have covered the distance in about four-and-a-half hours. (You can see the math here.) The vessel could also have chosen a shorter route by heading to the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, but that was probably not a desired destination.

These are very rough estimates, mind you, but the idea that a boat from Venezuela was headed to U.S. territory in short order is not that far-fetched. So we can instead spend our time wondering why, if the vessel was spotted near the Venezuelan coast, there wasn’t a way to impede its progress (and determine its intent and cargo) other than shooting ordnance at it to generate a social-media post.