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The United States of America is now at war with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Dozens of Venezuelan military targets have been bombed in the last few minutes, including a major army base just outside the capital. American Chinooks have been seen flying across the Caracas skyline.
This could be the most important geopolitical happening since the Ukraine War. We do it yet know if this will be a limited run of bombing like the Kosovo strikes, or a full on Iraq style invasion and regime change. If it is the latter, it will be an important test of America’s military might, and failure could very well be America’s Suez moment. I have speculated here several times that I thought the US would have difficulty conducting a thunder run of a non-peer or near-peer adversary in its current state, and it looks as though my theory may be put to the test. On a geopolitical and moral level though, I have little sympathy for Venezuela, for the same reason I have little sympathy for Ukraine. If you repeatedly antagonize your neighboring superpower, you get what you get.
This will also no doubt further fracture the Republican base in a major way, as interventionist neocons clash with America-First isolationists.
This is also adds to an intensifying pattern of conflict in multiple theaters that could lead to global war. It also increases the likelihood of a Chinese attack on Taiwan as American asserts are entangled in multiple theaters.
I will post more information as I hear it.
A true gentleman scholar post “inb4 source” and is vindicated in the light of history.
Edit:
There are now multiple airstrikes occurring within Caracas. The United States FAA has issued a NOTAM warning that civilian aircraft should avoid overflying the entire territory of Venezuela.
Reuters is now reporting that there are US ground troops active within the capital of Venezuela.
If this does actually end up being a ground war then how long it takes us to capture Caracas will be a strong indicator of how much pur military has (or hasn't) been weakened over the last few decades. Took us 3 weeks to capture Baghdad and month to take Kabul, if we don't see a comparable timetable here then it means our military competence really has declined. I do consider South American militaries to be slightly more competent than Middle Eastern/South Asian ones, so if it takes more than 2 months I'll consider that our military competence probably really has declined. If we do it in 2 months or less I'll need to readjust my priors and mot think so poorly of our military's competence (the opposite of how I adjusted my priors about Russia after their failed push on Kiev).
Why would you think of Venezuela as tougher for the US military than Iraq? It seems to me that there are a lot of factors that make it easier - it's right in America's backyard, its capital city and basically everything major are on the shore (and so there is nothing resembling strategic depth at all), it's less consolidated than Iraq (current government hasn't been in power for that long, and there is a sprawling opposition apparatus the US has long nurtured), and the lower cultural distance means that US soft power is much more effective to encourage defection (for starters, no Venezuelan army member has to fear, rationally or not, that surrendering to the US means that his wife will get defiled in some unspeakable haram ways).
There are a few big differences. Venezuela's geography is much denser than the open deserts of Iraq.
Yemen showed that a few desert tribes with some drones from Iran can tie down a third of the US Navy for over a year and win. The Gulf of Mexico is within striking range of weapons that can be built with parts ordered of wish.
The US wasted two trillion trying to occupy Iraq and largely failed. The US military was larger in 2003 than today, the recruitment standards were higher and they weren't trying to compete with China over who can have the biggest navy off the coast of China.
Also drones are going to make occupying a country complete hell.
There's another big one: Our military speaks spanish and doesn't speak the six thousand dialects of the middle east. Having reliable communication with the locals is a pretty big deal.
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Yemen showed that if you're not willing to commit boots on the ground, it's very hard to permanently take out 100% of mobile/distributed launch sites with just air strikes.
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Large operations are hard to hide logistically. Given the complete lack of rumors about troop deployments (Iraq had announced call-ups of tens of thousands of reserves in advance), I have trouble believing this is more than a few already-deployed special forces and airstrikes. How many (active duty, even) folks could go missing from their normal places without being missed? Any "military exercises" going on, like Russia was doing in Belarus in 2022? IMO the number of pieces on the board can't be that large.
ETA: Nonzero chance it's already over, and the rest of us don't know it yet: the US-Iran conflict this year lasted a few hours.
Yea its already over; either the HVT objective has been met or a new narrative spin will be executed to justify why the shock and awe is a sufficient first demonstration. Either way, bringing in rotary assets unmolested into Caracas is fucking ballsy and signals total degradation of any Venezuelan air control, especially given the lack of even preliminary SEAD/DEAD.
It might be a fait accompli if Maduro stayed put because he believed his own copium regarding air defense or bigbrains asserting that USA doing this was retarded. For all the degradation of the US military as a strategically independent thinker they do at least maintain kinetic capability and wont put boots on the ground without a decisive vetted go signal. At least for their sake I hope so.
This is not really true, there were substantial airstrikes on air defense assets for a few hours before the helicopters arrived, continuing through their arrival. Details are still limited as of now but the pre-positioned US assets included over 100 fixed-wing aircraft including fighters, bombers, and EW/jammers. All on an extremely short timetable, absolutely, but the image of the helicopters just popping up in the capital (in the largest military base, in fact) without support is not correct, this was a really enormous and tightly-timed air operation.
While pretty much all of the large-scale and medium to long range anti-air equipment in the area seems to have been destroyed by US airstrikes, it is definitely notable that there seemed to be no serious presence of Venezuelan MANPADS. One US helicopter was hit but not shot down, which could have been from an Igla, but that’s pretty minimal. The Venezuelans were supposed to have something like 5000 Iglas available, even if many existed only on-paper you’d think the ones they did have would be clustered around Maduro and, again, the largest and best-defended military base in the country.
The US had a fleet of RQ-170 stealth drones overhead during the operation, is it possible they were able to observe all of the anti-air troops setting up and blow them away with air support? This certainly could have contributed but is somewhere between extremely unlikely and impossible at scale. Were the Venezuelans simply in such disarray from the shock-and-awe raid that they couldn’t muster their defenses in time? This seems to be the case. The Venezuelan army is large, but not exactly known for high standards of training or strong morale. We’ll find out more in time but by all appearances they didn’t really believe this raid was going to happen and were taken totally by surprise. The speed and coordination with which the first airstrikes took place seems to have both ruined their defensive plans and scared the absolute pants off the defenders. It seems likely to me that large swaths of troops probably ran away or hid rather than die for Maduro, once the bombs started falling. And by the time they would’ve started reorganizing, the whole thing was already over!
There are rumors that at least some of the Venezuelan army knew about the raid ahead of time but this seems unlikely imo, at least at scale, the chance for a leak would be too great. We do know the CIA had at least one asset reporting on Maduro’s whereabouts at essentially all times, so clearly they were infiltrated, but that’s very different from whole army units defecting at once (and not telling anyone). Fear and disorganization seem like plenty of motivation, without any conspiracy needed.
Edit: I forgot to include, in my mention of Venezuelan disarray, that (according to Trump) the US also used some sort of nebulous cyberwarfare capability to selectively shut down power to parts of Caracas, and presumably forcing the military bases to run on back up power. This is a very effective way to instill fear and disorder in its own right. It also allows the possibility of even greater penetration into Venezuelan military and/or civil infrastructure systems, this is not necessarily true but could have been another contributing factor to the seemingly spectacular disorganization of the Venezuelan army.
You're right, but by preliminary I am referring to the months long campaigns in Iraq that suppressed and destroyed pretty much everything large enough to fit a box and the boxes themselves. A tactical DEAD on short window still lets a rapid evacuation occur so the combination of cyber warfare to paralyze all comms and cnc definitely expanded the window of opportunity from minutes to maybe half an hour. Still a lightning raid by any account, though I do take back the strength of the word "preliminary".
Regarding air defense, I mainly attribute the lack of response to the fact that low alert troops on midnight duty are always going to be sleepy shits and likely not on post. If they were on post they weren't hauling the MANPADs everywhere and if they had the MANPADs available they might have preferred to wait for command authority: what if the flying helo was Maduro making his escape? Mass defections are not likely but lazy troops as tripwires rarely succeed in defending an asset, a QRF tasking typically gets the actual job done if the tripwire does its job of slowing the advance.
Whatever the case is, the military comes off looking horrible. Now the Generals have to figure out who is to blame, and the ghost soldier paradox will bite them in their ass: is Pfc Gonzales a real guy on duty or is he someone I invented to fund the downpayment for my yacht?
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To tag-team off of this a bit, if we knocked out Venezuelan communications it seems quite possible that many Venezuelan troops did not fire or attempt to fire simply because they received no orders to. A lot of us here are military nerds so we know if we were in the Venezuelan armed forces and we looked out the window and saw an MH-47 we would be like "oh crap the Americans!" but I wonder if your average Venezuelan air defense troops, even if they were under standing orders to shoot US assets, could confidently PID the target.
I agree that it's "unlikely and impossible" if you properly distribute them but (along the lines of above) I wonder if the Venezuelans just set up static AD posts that could be mapped and then targeted pretty easily.
Whatever the case, I think your typical US plan involves assuming the enemy is competent, so either we were confident in our ability to map and strike their AD troops, we were confident in our countermeasures, or just relatively risk-tolerant. Probably a combination of all three.
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I wonder if we trust our countermeasures against their MANPADS or we have guys on the ground passively or actively making that a non-issue for us or both. Really seems like it should not be hard to have a few squads of dudes with Iglas or something wherever you go.
On the other hand, for all I know at this point the helicopters we saw were the extraction forces and the ingress was by covert assets on foot. Will be interesting to see how much we can learn about what exactly happened.
At this point I'm convinced whoever was on air defense duty was told to go for a midnight taco raid and the presidential guards rushed maduro out made a wrong turn straight into a delta team and oh no the clumsy americans dropped a usb with 10 bitcoin on it what clumsy fumblefingers they are.
Quite possibly.
I actually think the longer-ranged air defense elements (like the S-300s) just wouldn't be able to target low-flying helicopters (doubly so if jammed) so the real question to me is where the short-ranged stuff was at.
Seeing as how Trump was toying with Venezuela like a cat with a mouse I think someone deciding to Maduro offer up as a sacrifice makes total sense, particularly if there are bitcoins in it for you.
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