Three US B-52 bombers took off from Barksdale Air Force Base in the state of Louisiana last Wednesday and flew south to the Caribbean.
The jets, which the air force considers the “backbone” of the American strategic bomber fleet, can drop a wider array of bombs and missiles than any other US aircraft. They proceeded to fly in circles off the coast of Venezuela, not far from Maiquetía, the main airport serving Caracas.
Experts said the B-52s’ tour aimed primarily to send a signal to one man: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“I think we’re just trying to send a message to Maduro that ‘we can deploy, we can do whatever we want’,” said a former senior military officer. It was a power projection “designed to indicate we’re paying attention, we have the capability, and we’re demonstrating it for you”.
Close to Venezuela, whose revolutionary socialist government has long been at odds with Washington, the US has carried out its largest military build-up in the Caribbean for decades. About 10,000 troops, eight warships, a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine and F-35 fighter jets have been deployed to the region since August. The operation appears open-ended, with no date yet given for it to conclude.
The government of oil-rich Venezuela has raised fears of a US invasion, but the American forces in the region are not enough for a full-scale invasion, experts said. Rather, they appear to be aimed at both tackling drug smuggling — the Trump administration’s stated purpose — and pressuring Maduro out of power, according to former defence officials, military analysts and regional experts.
Since early September, the US has struck at least seven speedboats that it said were trafficking drugs north in the Caribbean, killing a total of 32 people in strikes, including as recently as last Friday.
At the same time, it is showcasing a selection of assets designed for flexibility, keeping US President Donald Trump’s military options open should he wish to take action beyond blowing up small boats. “The capabilities that the US has do give policymakers choices,” said Seth Jones, a former US Special Operations Command official.
The warships include three guided-missile destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser, a littoral combat ship, and a three-ship amphibious assault squadron carrying roughly 2,200 Marines.
As of Monday, roughly 8 per cent of American warships deployed globally were in the Caribbean, according to a fleet tracker from the US Naval Institute. Until destroyers arrived to start the build-up in August, the only US ship spotted in the region by the tracker this year was a hospital ship.
The destroyers are “like the Swiss Army knife of the navy. They can do it all,” said a former defence official. The cruiser has similar capabilities.
The amphibious assault squadron “would have a lot of aviation power” and “in a really extreme scenario . . . they’re built for Marines to go from sea to shore”, the former defence official added. Those Marines could also conduct rescue missions.
Along with the B-52s, MQ-9 Reaper drones, P-8 Poseidon spy planes, MH-6 Little Bird attack helicopters, MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and a special operations ship have been spotted near Venezuela on satellite imagery, flight trackers, or footage posted to social media.
The MV Ocean Trader is a commercial ship that was retrofitted to become a floating special operations command centre but still resembles a cargo ship. Special forces can do “a lot” from the vessel, but its presence “indicates to me that we are really, really focused on the intelligence collection aspect of this”, said the former senior military officer.
They said it had been a long time since the US military had focused on Latin America in this way. “We really need to make sure we got a good handle on what’s going on down there,” they said.
The US has reopened its Roosevelt Roads naval base in Puerto Rico for this mission, which is the first time it has been used since it closed in 2004.
With the assets in place, special forces can do “pretty much anything”, said the former defence official. “Those operations can range from ‘operational preparation of the environment’, which is like reconnaissance, to the highly dangerous missions to seize a high-value target.”
Special operations could also include raids by boat or helicopter, surveillance, drone strikes, missile strikes, underwater strikes or gathering human intelligence.
But there is only so much that special forces can do, said Jones: “If you wanted to put pressure on Maduro more broadly, getting him to step down or even to attempt to replace him, special operations forces are going to be helpful, but only to a point.”
Opposition figures in Venezuela and analysts have said they believe the aim of the operation is to force the departure of top Venezuelan government figures, preferably via resignation or arranged handover, but with the threat that if they hold out, they may be captured or killed by US forces.
The last major US military occupation in the region was in 1994, when it entered Haiti with UN backing following a military coup there.
Earlier, when American medical students were held captive in tiny Grenada in 1983, the US responded with ships and more than 7,000 soldiers and Marines, plus elements of the 82nd Airborne, the army unit specialising in parachute operations. The Grenadian government was overthrown.
And in 1989, the US deposed dictator Manuel Noriega in Panama, a much smaller nation than Venezuela, with about 30,000 troops, or three times the number in the Caribbean today.
The current Caribbean build-up “shouldn’t just immediately imply that we’re planning something larger than what we’re doing”, said Bradley Martin, a former Navy surface warfare captain now at think-tank Rand. “There could be uses of force that fall below the level of a full-up invasion, but it would be fairly limited because of the size of the force.”
Mark Cancian, a former Pentagon official, said that 50,000 US troops “would be the absolute minimum” needed to invade Venezuela. But “the war planners would want something more like 150,000”.
Still, he said, the possibility of the US striking on Venezuelan soil in some form was greater now than even a few weeks ago.
Last week, the US president said he was considering launching strikes on Venezuelan “land” and had authorised the CIA to conduct covert operations in the country. He also said that Maduro should not “fuck around” with the US.
A “strike against any kind of land-based target will tell you a lot about not just the risk appetite that the administration has, but frankly about the evolving objective of this mission”, said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank.
“Trump likes strikes that leave US service personnel at a safe distance from their target,” he added, predicting that a precision-guided missile would be used in any strike on Venezuela.
Hitting energy infrastructure or oil production “would probably be the highest amount of risk appetite”, said Berg. “I doubt that they would go to that right away because that seems like a pretty significant escalation.”
Regardless of what, if any, military actions do come against Venezuela, a prolonged presence in the Caribbean presents longer-term risks to the US in other parts of the world, particularly in Asia.
“There’s no free chicken here”, said the former senior military officer. “If you move resources from one place to another, then you’re accepting risk in other places.”
The Caribbean operation could be “diminishing forces that we would likely want to have focused out in the Indo-Pacific against the Chinese problem.”
Additional reporting by Charles Clover in London
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