The U.S. military has cut back sharply on its drug-interdiction efforts as more resources have been devoted to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 22.

The military has been tasked for decades with the job of intercepting drug shipments bound from South America to the U.S., but since 2002 many of the planes and boats once used in the drug wars have been transferred elsewhere. For example, anti-drug surveillance flights over the Caribbean and Pacific have been cut by 62 percent during the past four years, and the Navy has sent out one-third fewer patrol boats. A major Caribbean anti-drug task force also may soon lose 10 of its Black Hawk helicopters.

"The [Department of Defense] position is that detecting drug trafficking is a lower priority than supporting our service members on ongoing combat missions," the Pentagon recently told Congress. Pentagon officials also said that they only detected about 22 percent of possible smuggling boats, and only pursued about one in five of these because of lack of resources.

The Coast Guard and Homeland Security agencies have tried to fill the gaps, but also lack resources.

"DOD is in no way lessening our support" for the war on drugs, said Edward Frothingham III, acting deputy assistant Defense secretary for counter-narcotics. "But in the post-9/11 world, some of these assets are needed elsewhere."

The cutbacks come despite the drug war being integrated into the broader "war on terror."

"In the post-9/11 world, where both securing and detecting threats to our nation's borders have become critical national security objectives, we cannot continue to neglect the fact that narco-traffickers are breaching our borders on a daily basis," said a report from the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.

"What you've had is a significant downsizing of the counter-narcotics effort in the transit zones, and that has very direct national security implications," said Robert B. Charles, former assistant secretary of State for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.