The Pentagon is still building up its naval forces in waters close to Venezuela, which has prompted officials in Caracas to decry recent joint exercises between the U.S. and troops from nearby Trinidad and Tobago, Reuters reported Sunday.
The latest public movements include rerouting the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft-carrier strike group and its 5,000 or so troops from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean ostensibly to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors,” as the Pentagon announced Friday. That’s on top of more than a half-dozen American warships already in the region.
“The U.S. hasn’t sent this many ships to the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis,” Nancy Youssef, Gisela Salim-Peyer, and Jonathan Lemire wrote for The Atlantic on Friday.
Notable: “The carrier strike group also provides far more firepower than is necessary for the occasional attack on narco-trafficking targets. But the ships could be ideal for launching a steady stream of air strikes inside Venezuela,” the three reporters wrote.
The U.S. has attacked at least 10 boats off the coast of Latin America since September, killing more than three dozen people. The White House says the people killed were drug traffickers and “terrorists,” but U.S. officials have not offered evidence to support their claims for each attack—which critics say amount to extrajudicial killings circumventing the laws of war.
Expert reax: “The only thing you could use the carrier for is attacking targets ashore, because they are not going to be as effective at targeting small boats at sea,” said retired Navy officer Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute. However, “If you are striking inside Venezuela, the carrier is an efficient way to do it due to the lack of basing in the region,” he said.
Related: “Venezuela’s Maduro says the US is fabricating a war and seeks to revoke citizenship of opponent,” the Associated Press reported Saturday.
A U.S. aircraft carrier lost two aircraft in separate incidents just 30 minutes apart Sunday afternoon in the South China Sea. Fortunately, all five crew members were safely recovered by search-and-rescue personnel from the USS Nimitz (CVN 68).
Involved: A Navy MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter and an F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet. The helicopter went down first at about 2:45 p.m. local during “routine operations” in the region, and the jet also “went down in the waters of the South China Sea while conducting routine operations from Nimitz,” the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet announced on social media.
It’s unclear what caused the apparent accidents, and both episodes are under investigation, officials said Sunday.
Nimitz entered the South China Sea 10 days ago. The carrier strike group has been deployed since late March, when the Nimitz departed its home port in Washington state’s Naval Base Kitsap for operations against the Houthis in Yemen, according to USNI News.
For what it’s worth, “The incidents came while President Donald Trump was on a visit to Asia,” Reuters reports. Trump told reporters Monday the episodes may have resulted from “bad fuel” and not foul play, though he did not elaborate, the Associated Press reports.
Update: The 9th Circuit appeals court reversed last week’s victory for the White House in one of its National Guard cases. The reversal came after the discovery process revealed Justice Department lawyers lied about troop numbers in Oregon, Law and Crime reported Saturday.
The findings hinged on an alleged forced redeployment of 115 Federal Protection Service officers to Portland, Ore. However, “discovery showed deployments of 27 troops, 31 troops, 29 troops, and 20 troops in Portland at any given time between the middle of June and end of October,” Law and Crime writes.
Now what? “The National Guard will not be deployed to Portland, at least until Tuesday, while the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decides whether to rehear the case” on Tuesday, Portland’s KGW8 news reports. Read more, including background about the case, in Willamette Week.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2019, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed himself during a U.S. military raid in northwestern Syria.
Industry
Firms large and small are building prototypes with their own money. It’s not a new development, but it seems to be happening more than ever, as companies chase new acquisition priorities and look to displace established programs. Lockheed Martin says it’s honing a five-year shift in its R&D approach, while far smaller startups are looking to impress. Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports, here.
China is applying DeepSeek, its homegrown AI model, to drones and battlefield robots, Reuters reports off a review of “hundreds of research papers, patents and procurement records” that give “a snapshot of the systematic effort by Beijing to harness AI for military advantage.” Among the new DeepSeek-powered products is the P60, a “military vehicle capable of autonomously conducting combat-support operations at 50 kilometres per hour.” Read on, here.
If that’s your cup of tea, do a deep dive into back editions of The China Intelligence, a column by Peter Singer and BluePath Labs that mines open-source documents for news about China’s military development. Find those, here.
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Around the world
Russia says a nuclear-powered cruise missile has flown for 15 hours, covering 8,700 miles. “Little is known about the Burevestnik, which was code-named Skyfall by NATO, and many Western experts have been skeptical about it, noting that a nuclear engine could be highly unreliable,” the Associated Press reported off a video released Sunday that purports to show Russian leader Vladimir Putin reading a report by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of general staff.
Trendspotting: “Russia continues to issue explicit nuclear threats as part of a multi-pronged effort seeking to deter continued US pressure on Russia and support for Ukraine,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote in their latest battlefield assessment Sunday.
What’s going on: “Russia has been trying to use a combination of carrots and sticks unrelated to the war in Ukraine, such as bilateral arms control talks, to push the United States to give in to concessions about the war,” ISW writes.
Frontline update: Russian and Ukrainian forces are still battling over the strategically located city of Pokrovsk, Reuters reported Monday from Kyiv. “Russia has been trying to occupy Pokrovsk, a key part of Kyiv’s defensive lines, for months, seeing it as a crucial point for its push to fully capture the Donetsk region…Over the past week, Ukrainian open-source mapping project Deep State expanded the grey area to the southwest of Pokrovsk and now shows around one-fifth of the city’s west and south as contested area.”
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