You mentioned weddings. The moment you say 'gangs' you are assuming more knowledge than you can reasonably be expected to have. Unless of course presence on a boat is proof of being in a gang.
> "Due process" is a legal concept in Anglo law that describes the legal process required for the sovereign to deprive a subject of life, liberty, or property. The Anglo concept has no applicability to what the military can or cannot do to foreigners.
You may have noticed this - or not, you're a lawyer, after all - but ordinary people have this thing called 'ethics' that gives them a hint about what is and what isn't right or permitted. It's crazy, I know, they don't even need laws to be able to do so. On average people have a pretty good idea what is right and what is wrong even when there are no bits of paper and togas involved. And bombing foreigners off the coast of their own countries or in international waters without provocation is very much wrong - at least in my book.
A good test if you think something is wrong is to try to meditate on what you would feel like if the situation were reversed. If it was you and/or your family members on a boat off the coast of your own country and some other country decided to bomb you.
> And I'm not aware of any western nation having an equivalent to due process that applies to military action.
Absent due process you exercise a thing called 'restraint'. It is why for instance Ukraine isn't indiscriminately bombing the Russians, and because they don't have it is is why the Russians are indiscriminately bombing the Ukrainians. It shows that Ukrainians value the life of people in general, whereas the Russians appear to care only about the life of people with their own citizenship (and even then, plenty of times they do not but they appear to at least have some difference).
What you can do and what you should do is a massive difference.
> The U.S. didn't provide anything resembling "due process" before it nuked Hiroshima or Nagasaki or bombed Dresden.
Indeed, they did not. It may surprise you that this leads to mixed feelings in many places.
> It makes no sense to use the word "right" to describe what the U.S. as a sovereign state can or cannot do to foreign actors on foreign soil.
We are not discussing capability here. Nobody doubts the US has that capability.
> The U.S., as a sovereign state, can do whatever it wants because nations exist within a state of anarchy as to each other
International law is actually a thing, but if we for the moment ignore that what you are describing is not anarchy, it is war.