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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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