 "Did US commit war crime when it painted jet to look like civilian plane?")
In what appears to be a clear war crime, the US military used a plane disguised as a civilian aircraft to strike a boat, according to The New York Times.
Such instances of feigning civilian status —disguising either personnel or equipment— are known as ‘perfidy’ and are considered crimes under both US military law and international law.
The Times reported that the military plane that struck a boat on September 2, 2025, in the Caribbean Sea had been disguised as a civilian aircraft using paint. It was the first in an ongoing wave of fatal strikes in international waters on boats accused of carrying drugs.
Since Sept. 2, the US military has carried out at least 35 strikes on boats in international waters in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean and killed at least 123 sailors. While the Donald Trump administration has labelled them narco-terrorists and declared these boats drug-carrying vessels, it has neither provided evidence nor identified those killed.
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While the entire campaign of blowing up boats and killing sailors is legally questionable, the Sept. 2 strike stands out as almost every aspect violated longstanding US military rules as well as international law.
In addition to painting the aircraft to conceal its military status, the plane also carried its munitions inside the fuselage rather than visibly under its wings like regular military aircraft, according to The Times.
Questions about the concealment have been raised in closed-door congressional briefings but have not been made public because the aircraft involved in the strike was classified, The Times reported.
Notably, this is the same strike in which the US military carried out a secondary attack to kill two unarmed shipwrecked survivors of the first strike. That too attracted accusations of war crime as killing unarmed shipwrecked sailors is outlawed under both US military rules and international law.
Quick Reads
View AllThe case for war crime
Under the norms of armed conflict, feigning civilian status to fool an adversary into lowering their guard before attacking is called ‘perfidy’. It is a war crime under both US military law and international law. Multiple former officials told The Times that the Sept. 2 strike amounted to a war crime.
If the military aircraft had been painted to disguise its military nature and approached close enough for those on the boat to see it —tricking them into failing to realise they should take evasive action or surrender to survive— that was a war crime under armed-conflict standards, Major General (Retired) Steven J Lepper, a former Deputy Judge Advocate General for the US Air Force, told The Times.
“Shielding your identity is an element of perfidy. If the aircraft flying above is not identifiable as a combatant aircraft, it should not be engaged in combatant activity,” Lepper said.
A US military handbook states that combatants at sea must use offensive force “within the bounds of military honour, particularly without resort to perfidy”, and stresses that commanders have a “duty” to “distinguish their own forces from the civilian population”, according to the newspaper.
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