Imagine this: you’re just another tin-pot dictator cruelly and ineptly mismanaging your petro-state when you wake up one day to find several thousand US Marines floating off your coastline because the US President raped teenage girls on his buddy’s private island a few years back, and desperately needs a distraction.
Trump needs a prolonged diversion from his growing roster of scandals, some of which are actually starting to stick. What better, then, than the invasion of an unsuspecting banana republic? (I mean, other than his own, which he is also doing, spawning yet more scandals). Americans love a good war, or the chatter about one, even after having their noses fruitlessly bloodied for 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is not a more fertile target for some good ol’-fashioned sabre-rattling than a largely defenceless tin-pot communist petro-state. Spinning the globe, our finger inevitably lands upon Venezuela. It has all the great hallmarks: a whiff of communism, a fantastically weird dictatorship, lots of money sloshing around thanks to petroleum exports, an international pariah subject to crippling sanctions and even more crippling national debt.
Its military has some modern hardware, with ships sourced from Europe and Su-30 fighters supplied by Russia, and a mechanized infantry that includes ~100 armoured vehicles from China. Despite those fighters and modern fighting ships in limited quantities, air and naval assets are likely to be in some state of disrepair. And with a military hampered by extremely limited funding for maintenance and training, Venezuela could probably be dominated in the air and sea by a single US carrier group (and, given its proximity to Florida, the CG would not need to operate without USAF support).
Trump has been playing chicken with Maduro and Venezuela since his first term. It’s an easy game to win. Mostly this has just amounted to a bunch of feathers flying and name-calling. But since Trump’s domestic problems have been mounting, so has the chicken game begun to escalate. US Marines have begun to mass, afloat near the coast of Venezuela.
This task force (including two LPDs and an LHD) is capable of landing a bit more than 2 battalions worth of US Marines, and roughly 50-60 fighting vehicles (including Humvees). The presence of a Ticonderoga-class Cruiser would imply the offensive use of land-attack missiles, and the three Arleigh Burkes would quite adequately defend the fleet against air and sea threats. Conspicuous by their absence, though, is a US carrier battle group.
The US carrier fleet right now is stretched thin (by US standards) and it’s no surprise there isn’t a carrier battle group yet tasked to the region. I’m not privy to any more information than you, so it’s possible there’s a group coming on/off rotation from the Atlantic Fleet that could be tasked to contribute to the theatrics of this with a sail-past. But I would suggest if a carrier group does arrive and actually lingers in the region, which is doubtful, then this will have become more than just another of Trump’s melodramas.
In the unlikely event that some sort of Marine landing is to be attempted, the task force detailed above (which could potentially deploy as many as 2,800 Marines) is really not enough to do more than capture the beaches near Caracas, and attempt to depose Maduro before making a hasty retreat. Venezuela can muster some 220,000 to 300,000 troops of varied levels of training in its defence. And a longer ground war targeting substantial regime change would need a very high commitment of US forces over a protracted period. While this likely sounds like music to Trump’s ears (think: distraction), I’d like to think that cooler heads would prevail to prevent such an ill-conceived excursion.
If the Marines were indeed dispatched to remove Maduro from Caracas, even that limited mission would prove difficult. While Caracas is near the coast, it’s fortified by a 7,200ft high mountain range. Beaching their gear would be very doable, but moving 3,000 Marines and their armour to the capital would expose them to huge risk of ambush and counterattack by a mechanized infantry of comparable size.
So. until I see 30,000 or more Marines massing, and a Nimitz-class carrier group stalking the Venezuelan Coastline, I’m going to call this what it is: more Trump bluster.
Meanwhile, I’m going to re-watch Wag The Dog.
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