Between their military and police force, which are in many ways functionally interchangeable, the US accounts for over 60% of the world's military budget. This is the effect of bringing to bear a century of total global domination and the power and experience gained from that, particularly in special forces operations. The staging and planning of this attack probably ran into the billions of dollars, not even counting the actual purchase price of the weapons, ships and aircraft involved, or the training costs of personnel, or the cost of putting up the spy satellites they will have used, etc.

It's certainly surprising they could outright capture and extract him, rather than just bomb him or gun him down, but when you look at the total volume of military hardware used to pull it off, it's not that hard to believe.

[–] TreadOnMe@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah, I have been thinking about it and, even if they do pull this whole thing off, the complete take over of Venezuela, is it actually going to be worth it? I mean, this economy runs on such short term gambles, but the oil industry, especially the Venezuelan oil industry, would require years to restablish and actually create profitability. I mean, the five finger discount doesn't really count if you spent 2 billion dollars on stealing it.

[–] KoboldKomrade@hexbear.net 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As parenti said: (paraphrasing) They (private capital) is gladly willing to spend $2b of our money to make $1b in profit.

[–] fort_burp@feddit.nl 7 points 1 week ago

What a powerful photograph. It made me read it in his voice 🥰

[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Your sense of the numbers are way off. $2Bn is a small price to pay for the largest known oil reserves in the world. Very very very small price compared to what the profits will be within a year. Venezuela in 2025 was already at a million barrels per day which is at least 2 billion USD in revenue monthly.