Pentagon has ‘tremendous confidence’ in intel leading to drug boat strikes, Rubio says

Published October 5, 2025 12:25pm ET



Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the United States’s most recent strike against a Venezuelan boat said to be smuggling drugs to the United States amid concerns from outside the Trump administration.

“The Department of War has tremendous confidence in the way they are gathering information. They know who’s on those boats. They know what those boats are doing,” Rubio said on Fox News’s Fox News Sunday. “They have the highest confidence in this because of the work that goes into us, because of the tremendous amount of caution they’re taking in deciding who to strike and who not to strike.”

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