Venezuela conflict motive theory - drone subs

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The Posture Doesn’t Match the Mission

The administration is presenting the buildup around Venezuela as an expanded counternarcotics campaign.

That explanation doesn’t hold water.

We do not fly F-35s to Puerto Rico for cocaine skiffs. We do not send a carrier strike group to the Caribbean for routine interdiction. We do not move an Amphibious Ready Group with an embarked Marine Expeditionary Unit for drug runners. Traditional counterdrug operations lean on Coast Guard cutters and patrol aircraft that find, track, and vector law enforcement onto small boats.

The force package tells you what planners are worried about. An ARG/MEU is what you deploy when you want Marines available for rapid ashore operations. Fifth-generation fighters are what you deploy when you expect contested airspace or need precision strike options against defended targets. A declared blockade is an act of coercion against a state, not a tool for catching smugglers.

None of this makes sense as a counternarcotics campaign. All of it makes sense as preparation for a larger contingency.

If counternarcotics is a cover story, the next question is why the administration would need one. The most likely answer is that the real concern is harder to talk about publicly. A serious vulnerability close to home, one that requires this kind of posture to address, is not something you advertise.

Saying it openly makes homeland defense look porous. It invites a public reaction that could narrow options and force escalation on a political timetable rather than a strategic one. It also tells adversaries exactly what you’re worried about and how much leverage they have.

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Friedman Sees It Too

George Friedman, founder of Stratfor and Geopolitical Futures, has arrived at a similar conclusion. Friedman placed U.S. actions around Venezuela in the context of the Monroe Doctrine and Cold War competition in the Caribbean. Present-day tensions with Russia, he argued, have driven Moscow to renew its interest in the Western Hemisphere as a counter to U.S. actions in Ukraine.

When Washington applies pressure near Russian borders, Moscow looks for leverage near America’s. Friedman has also emphasized the cartel connection, seeing a modern version of Cold War proxy operations taking shape. Russia working through the Maduro regime and cartel infrastructure to create leverage against Washington.

What Friedman identifies clearly is the target. At least half of all U.S. imports and exports move through Gulf Coast ports. Texas and Louisiana are of fundamental economic importance, and if access were disrupted, Atlantic and Pacific ports would struggle to offset the shortfall. The Gulf is also the seaward gateway to the Mississippi River system, the country’s main inland artery for bulk commodities and industrial inputs.

All Gulf traffic funnels through just two exits, the Straits of Florida and the Yucatán Channel. The Straits span only about 90 miles at their narrowest point.

What Friedman does not address is how an adversary would actually threaten those corridors without putting Russian submarines on station or establishing a visible military footprint in the hemisphere. Autonomous underwater vehicles answer that question.

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Vehicles (UUVs and AUVs) Every once in a while, a new technology emerges that breaks the existing equilibrium. Machine guns collapsed the logic of massed infantry. U-boats shattered the assumption that surface fleets controlled the seas.

Autonomous underwater vehicles belong in that category. Our entire globalized trading system rests on a basic assumption that goods can move freely across the world’s oceans. For decades, U.S. naval dominance secured the shipping lanes on which increasingly stretched supply chains depend.

We offshored critical parts of our industrial base and spread key inputs across the globe, assuming they would always remain accessible.

UUVs threaten to shatter that assumption. They are cheap, nearly impossible to detect, and a handful of them can shut down entire shipping lanes. They can sever undersea cables, isolating countries both digitally and physically. And there is almost nothing we can currently do to neutralize the threat at scale.

The volume of global shipping today is orders of magnitude larger than it was a century ago.

In World War I, the solution to U-boats was naval escorts and convoys. That is not a viable strategy today. The U.S. simply does not have the fleet capacity to protect the traffic that globalization has created.

This is not just a threat to commerce. It directly undermines the ability to project power and sustain military operations. A persistent UUV threat near U.S. approaches would strain the economy and force the military to defend the homeland at exactly the moment those assets are needed elsewhere.


On December 15, 2025, Ukraine opened a new chapter in naval warfare by using an underwater drone to strike a Russian submarine in the defended port of Novorossiysk. It was the first time a UUV had ever been used in a strike. The target was a Kilo-class submarine, valued at roughly $500 million, that had been used to fire cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities. The attack succeeded in a confined port with patrols, barriers, sensors, and controlled approaches. If that can happen in a space purpose-built for defense, clearing an open shipping corridor that stretches for hundreds of miles is an impossibility.

Two days later, Russia revealed just how defenseless it is against this threat. On December 17, 2025, the Russian Navy sank several barges at the entrance to the Novorossiysk port pier to prevent any further Ukrainian drones from entering. Russia has effectively imprisoned its own Black Sea Fleet because it has no other way to defend against cheap autonomous drones.

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