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During a televised briefing on the operations of the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB) to address drug trafficking and US military threats on Monday, Venezuelan Defense Minister General Vladimir Padrino denied Guyana’s accusations of an alleged attack from Venezuelan territory on a Guyanese boat carrying personnel and electoral material.

Minister Padrino said that Guyana’s accusations are a false positive and accused the United States of orchestrating a narrative to create conflict in the region. Additionally, the Venezuelan minister lamented that “vassal governments” in the region are lending themselves to a narrative dictated by Washington, which he described as “sterile and useless.”

He criticized the government of Trinidad and Tobago for offering its territory to the United States “to attack what they call the Cartel de los Soles,” and warned of the danger of “the Guyanese and Trinidadian mafias; as through them, they are trying to create a war front.”

The top military commander also said that “Venezuela has never had such a strong military presence on that de facto line, which connects us to the territory usurped by Guyana, our territory, territory grossly exploited, ignoring the 1966 Geneva Agreement, which is the backbone of the diatribe we have regarding the territory of Guayana Esequiba.”

Guyana’s complaint comes amid rising tensions between Caracas and Washington, especially following the deployment of US military and warships in the Caribbean. Along these lines, the Venezuelan government recently condemned the imminent deployment of other US warships to the Caribbean, including a guided-missile cruiser, the USS Lake Erie, and nuclear submarine USS Newport News, to waters near Venezuela.

Faced with the United States’ threat in the Caribbean Sea, which threatens not only the peace and security of Venezuela but also the proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, the Venezuelan government has requested support from the secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), António Guterres. Meanwhile, it has received support from several regional leaders who have spoken out against US interference.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced the militarization of his country’s border with Venezuela in the Catatumbo region, a move reportedly aimed at combating drug-mafias. He added that he had also requested a militarization of the region’s border by the Venezuelan side, “to minimize the mafia’s forces.”

“I have ordered the Colombian army to increase the number of troops in Catatumbo,” he stated on social media this Thursday, August 28. “We have 25,000 soldiers in the area. It’s not the land that wins over the mafia; it’s the coordination between the two states that achieves it.”

The announcement follows Venezuela’s activation of “Peace Zone Number One” on Monday in the states of Táchira and Zulia, on Venezuela’s side of the Catatumbo region. President Nicolás Maduro ordered the move to fight drug trafficking amid military threats from the US empire.

That evening, President Maduro announced that “we are going with 15,000 men and women, well-armed, well-trained, and well-prepared” to reinforce the entire binational Peace Zone, a territory that stretches from Táchira state to La Guajira. Venezuelan authorities insisted on the importance of a similar deployment on the Colombian side of the border.

During the closing of a military ceremony Thursday, President Maduro thanked his Colombian counterpart for his support in combating drug gangs, following the Colombian president’s troop deployment announcement.

“I thank Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has ordered the reinforcement of 25,000 troops, a new force, throughout the entire Catatumbo region of Colombia,” he said. “Thus, the coordination of Binational Zone Number One advances, for the good of sovereignty, peace, and the future of our border towns. Venezuela and Colombia act united for peace, because we ourselves care for, guard, and preserve our lands.”

The coordination occurs as President Petro has challenged the US empire’s narrative on the drug trafficking motives behind its recent military deployment in the Southern Caribbean. On August 25, the Colombian president stated that the so-called “Cartel of the Suns” is made up by US imperialism and far-right politicians as a “fictitious excuse to overthrow governments that don’t obey them” and to obtain Venezuela’s resources, in line with their history of regime change. Colombian Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez Suárez has reaffirmed that “the Cartel of the Suns does not exist.”

President Petro further clarified on social media that the passage of Colombian cocaine through Venezuela is controlled by a mafia known as the Drug Trafficking Board, whose bosses live comfortably in Europe and West Asia, according to Colombia’s investigations. He noted that he has proposed to the US empire and Venezuela that they jointly destroy the cartel.

Chief among the reasons for U.S. vulnerability is that although protecting the homeland is the Defense Department’s top priority, U.S. forces and resources are spread out around the globe, VanHerck pointed out. There are hundreds of thousands of troops in dozens of countries, with often competing resource requirements of the military’s regional commanders. “Candidly, the policy outstrips the capacity of the joint force right now,” VanHerck proffered. “What I mean by that is our expectations in policy exceed the capacity for the forces that we have, and that forces the tough decisions to be made.” VanHerck warned that “we’ll be adjudicating resources across the globe in the middle of a crisis. And so you have combat commanders today that plan to consume large portions, if not 100% of the joint force in certain force offerings, if you will. And they assume they’re going to get them, when in reality, in crisis, they won’t get them based on a global perspective. And so you end up with an [operational plan] that is now not executable in a time of crisis. And so I’m not satisfied with it at all.” VanHerck and retired Air Force Brig. Houston Cantwell, a senior fellow at the institute, touched on a number of other subjects during the hour-long webinar.

well, at least there's some people in the US military who realize the empire is stretched too thin to take on Russia, China, Iran and whoever else all at the same time...

Arctic Surveillance

Though the U.S. and Canada have spent billions on building radar systems in the far north to provide early warning of impending attacks, huge gaps remain in that coverage. There is also a major challenge to digest the massive amounts of data that is available, as the Chinese spy balloon incident of 2023 clearly showed. Data from sensors that might have picked up the balloon earlier had been filtered out so as not to overwhelm the analysis process. When it comes to protecting the homeland, this inability to sufficiently detect and respond to threats from the north leaves the nation at great risk, said Cantwell, who authored a new white paper on the topic. As a result, America and Canada need to deploy more and better sensors, both on the surface and in space. There also has to be a better way to process the data that is collected. “Simply put, the U.S. has insufficient Arctic domain awareness now,” Cantwell posited. “This leaves us vulnerable through the most likely avenue of attack, through the Arctic.” “Advanced and precise cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, hold vital American interests at risk, and our existing radar systems simply are unable to detect many of the inbound threats,” warned Cantwell. “In many cases, we wouldn’t know of an aerial attack until the missiles impacted the targets.“

Lessons From The Wars In Ukraine And The Middle East

For more than three-and-a-half years, Russia has been pummeling Ukraine with constant missile and drone attacks. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israel has fought Iran and its proxies the Houthi rebels of Yemen and Hezbollah of Lebanon, as well as Hamas. “Candidly, we don’t want to be Kyiv,” Cantwell explained. “We see in the news all the time that Kyiv is being bombarded by these conventional and precise missiles and and their use is only growing. So in the first few years in Ukraine, Ukraine was only absorbing about 5,000 missiles a year. Now you have Russia manufacturing 5,000 of their Shahed drones every month. So the use of these long-range and precise conventional weapons is only going to increase, and we have to prepare the homeland to be aware of when we’re under attack.”

“Some people are getting this right,” Cantwell stated. “Israel demonstrates the importance of domain awareness regularly.” During conflicts with Iran, “domain awareness was front and center” during attacks in April and October 2024. In each case, “the Israelis detected and then intercepted hundreds of missiles and UAVs during unrelenting aerial attacks,” Cantwell explained. “A layered array of sensors was key. Rapid information sharing was also critical that allowed the Israelis to pre-position air interceptors and to ensure adequate radar coverage at expected avenues of attack. But modern radars were foundational to success, because you can’t respond to what you can’t see.”

Making Tough Choices On What To Protect

Though Israel has one of the world’s best layered air defense systems, it is not impenetrable, as attacks from Iran in particular have shown. “I use the example of the Israeli Iron Dome, at my own peril, because that is a very small piece of real estate, and so we have to manage expectations here in the United States,” Cantwell noted. During attacks from Iran, Israel allowed several missiles “to get through because they just don’t have enough interceptors, and they have to pick and choose depending on the strategic value of what they think the targets are. And so a similar conversation, I think, is going to have to go on here across America, of what are the strategic priorities that we need to defend across the nation, and then emphasize those areas.” “But additionally, I want to re-emphasize the point that General VanHerck brought up, which was, we need to become a more resilient country when it comes to looking at being able to take, quote, a punch in the face,” Cantwell added. “You know, one attack shouldn’t put the country down completely. We have to be able to take that punch in the face, be resilient and be able to get back up and defend ourselves.”

On Funding Priorities For Golden Dome

U.S. President Donald Trump said his Golden Dome missile defense system will cost about $175 billion and be operational “in less than three years” with “a success rate close to 100%.” VanHerck was asked about the best investments for this ambitious program. “Today’s missile defense system, along with additional capabilities such as an Aegis Ashore to go after hypersonics and cruise missiles, those are feasible, achievable within the time frame the President would like to see this fielded,” VanHerck said. “The space-based capabilities? There’s technology still to be developed. [It] certainly will be expensive, but I do think it’s realistic, and the space-based capabilities are going to be required to enable other layers of a homeland defense architecture, such as Golden Dome. With that said, it starts with policy. As General Cantwell talked about, what are we going to defend from? Who? How many threats? What capacity of threats? You can’t defend against 4,000 inbound nuclear missiles. So there needs to be some tough decisions on policy, and that’s where we must start.”

Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks...

The E-7 Wedgetail Should Be Saved From The Budget Axe

While Golden Dome is Trump’s main line of effort at protecting America’s skies, there are other systems that need to be folded in as well, said Cantwell. That includes restoring funding for the E-7 Wedgetail airborne early warning & control jet to replace some of the E-3s. The Pentagon wants to kill the E-7 over concerns of mounting costs, production delays and survivability, as well as competing priorities. The Pentagon eventually wants to push most of its airborne moving target indicator sensor capabilities into space. So it has laid out plans to buy more of the Navy’s E-2D Hawkeye airborne early warning and control planes to mitigate capability gaps in the interim. “This program requires ongoing support in the air,” he suggested. “The E-7 Wedgetail will provide essential targeting and command and control relay capabilities. The aircraft flexibility can allow responsiveness to our volume threat or degraded land systems. It plays an essential role and must be placed back in the Air Force budget.”