Caracas Chronicles

Months before U.S. forces deployed to the Caribbean to confront narco-terror networks operating from a criminalized Venezuelan state, Pentagon planners must have been working through the unglamorous arithmetic of action.

At the outset, conversations in the Pentagon, the interagency and the legal shop were granular, ugly and brutally honest: whose life is at stake; what is the objective; what does success look like; and who pays the political bill afterwards?

At some point, the discussion would circle back to what had started it all—the presidential order. It had been distilled down to three brief, blunt, and unambiguous sentences: Neutralize the networks. Hit their assets. Make them feel the cost. They also want a recommendation on targeting regime officials, the ‘crown jewels’ of Venezuela.

That directive—translated through layers of command and lawyering—became the lens for everything that followed. Each phrase was dissected in briefing slides and late-night memos, parsed into questions of authority, evidence, and risk.

During one of those brain-numbing sessions, someone would almost wistfully ask: why can’t we just send a drone in on Maduro and end it for everyone? For those in the room, the image was tempting — a single, clean operation that severs the head of the regime and, just like that, the rest collapses.

Targeting a single personality is the classic decapitation fantasy. Targeting a dozen members of an inner circle is a campaign.

In practice, planners know that “decapitation” is a technical option, not a strategy. The first question is always the hardest: kill or capture? The two are functionally different. A lethal standoff strike — drone, cruise missile, or precision bomb — requires the least tactical footprint: pinpoint intelligence, a launcher, and a narrow window of opportunity.

The Soleimani strike of January 2020 had shown how a state can eliminate a high-value target from afar—and how quickly political costs erupt when “imminence” becomes a matter of interpretation. . Under international law, a state may use force preemptively only if an attack is truly imminent; the Trump administration’s lawyers stretched that definition, igniting fierce debate. Everyone in that room remembered it: the satellite images, the backlash, the fragile legal justifications. They understood that the line between success and disaster could be as thin as the President’s next sentence.

Then should come the infrastructure analysis—radar sites, command bunkers, oil terminals—all glowed under fluorescent light. Each dot on the screen meant lives, calculations, and consequences.

Capture is another order of magnitude. The Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 was the product of years of patient human intelligence, clandestine surveillance and a bespoke special operations forces insertion-extraction plan — and it carried enormous operational risk and diplomatic consequences.

The questions that matter

A raid into Venezuelan territory to seize a senior official would demand clandestine entry, comprehensive search and rescue plans, and medical evacuation readiness, secure detention and transfer plans, and the ability to suppress or neutralize local counterforces at very short notice. That requires basing, air cover, logistics and legal authorities that are seldom mentionable in public debate. 

Second question: how many? Targeting a single personality is the classic decapitation fantasy. Targeting a dozen members of an inner circle is not fantasy, it is a campaign. The difference is strategic: one strike can inflame and consolidate; a dozen coordinated removals risk fragmentation, revenge violence, and a chaotic scramble for spoils.

History teaches us there is rarely a linear relationship between removing leaders and producing a ready-made, pro-U.S. successor. Panama 1989 (Operation Just Cause) demonstrates the scale of force and aftercare required when removal turns into regime change or occupation. 

The third question is about legal and political cover. The U.S. would almost certainly frame any strike on regime figures as self-defense or a counter-narco/counter-terror measure, especially if links between officials and transnational drug flows or attacks on U.S. persons can be credibly established.

The best historical outcomes (where they exist) combined lethal action with exhaustive political work: incentives for defections, clear plans for governance, and a credible international financial and humanitarian package.

That was the argument for Soleimani; the plausibility of “imminent threat” and chain of attribution matters enormously and will be fought in capitals and courts. Absent clear imminence or a U.N. mandate, the international community will see such strikes as exceptional and many states will treat them as uses of force against a sovereign government, no matter how corrupt and repressive the government. 

Fourth question: why Venezuela, and not Colombia or Mexico? If the operational message is “we will hit narco-infrastructure,” both Colombia and Mexico are arguably higher-value targets. They host larger trafficking ecosystems, and in Mexico’s case powerful cartels traffic fentanyl that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Venezuela is a political target as much as a narco-node. It is the rare case of a criminalized state whose institutions overlap with trafficking networks.

Striking inside Venezuela therefore carries a symbolic message to everyone in the region and beyond. But symbolism is double-edged, because it risks international isolation and strengthens the regime’s nationalist narrative. Washington would have to weigh tactical gains in disruption against the strategic costs of appearing to pick a political quarrel with a sitting government. 

Fifth question: What would execution look like? For a lethal strike the minimum requirements are near-certain geolocation, time-sensitive targeting, stand-off strike assets with appropriate intelligence, and a mitigation plan for collateral harm. For capture, you multiply those needs by logistics, personnel, diplomatic cover and contingency options for failure.

Both options require mastery of “patterns of life” intelligence, partner access or overflight rights, and a hardened political narrative that anticipates condemnation. The alternative to acting alone is to assemble coalition support; yet multilateral cover is slow, leaky and politically costly in its own way.

Without a post-strike package, a tactical success risks becoming a strategic failure.

Finally we have the strategic aftermath. Decapitation without a political plan can be self-defeating. Removing officials may harden the core, fragment criminal networks into violent competitors, and invite reprisals against civilians and dissidents.

The best historical outcomes (where they exist) combined lethal action with exhaustive political work: incentives for defections, clear plans for governance, and a credible international financial and humanitarian package. Those are not glamorous tasks, but they are what convert strikes into outcomes.

A U.S. planner’s honest memo would therefore start not with the perfect shot but with the sentence every journalist skips: “What is our end state, and can kinetic violence get us there without a politics-first plan?” If the answer is “no,” the realist course is surgical pressure on narco-infrastructure, allied intelligence sharing, and patient inducements for elite fracture. Something messy, slow, politically less satisfying, but far more likely to avoid strategic catastrophe.

If Washington chooses otherwise—to hunt, kill or snatch the crown jewels—it should be clear-eyed about what it will take: intelligence work, special operations forces on call, basing and diplomatic seams, a legal narrative that will be contested, and a post-strike package, likely to run into the billions, to stabilize what comes next. Without that, a tactical success risks becoming a strategic failure.

What the U.S. is doing

A pragmatic planner imagines a rising two-track policy: step up attacks on narco-infrastructure while keeping the threat of strikes or captures of senior regime figures alive as a coercive lever. In other words, the strikes get harsher on the logistics (boats, labs, airstrips, maritime nodes) while the “crown jewels” option is left on the table as psychological and political pressure to induce elite fracture. That is not fantasy: it is coercion by attrition coupled with a bargaining chip. 

Kinetic pressure on narco-networks degrades capability and sends two signals: to the traffickers that supply routes are no longer safe, and to regime-aligned elites that their personal exposure has risen. The calculation for many in Maduro’s circle becomes transactional: endure the pain and risk, or either defect or offer interlocutors to stop the bleeding.

This is the precise outcome Washington would hope for: The handing over of key figures or intelligence without the need for a direct assault on the presidential palace. The problem is that criminalized regimes and cartels are resilient. Pressure often fragments, producing violence and opportunistic actors rather than neat transitions. 

Kinetic pressure on narco-infrastructure—while keeping the crown-jewels option in reserve—is a logical, low-to-moderate risk path for Washington that aims to incentivize elite defections or handovers without direct regime overthrow. But it relies on a risky bet: that enough pressure, credibly threatened and selectively applied, will cause internal collapse or transactional compliance rather than chaos. Planners know the odds are uncertain; politicians prefer clarity. The U.S. is now trying to lock the two together, meaning more strikes at sea and on logistics, more legal framing, and the continual whisper that no official is beyond reach. Whether that whisper becomes the decisive lever or the match that lights a wider fire will be answered, if at all, in the months to come.