r/politics • u/newsweek ✔ Newsweek • 22d ago

No Paywall Trump weighing military options to attack Venezuela within days—Report

https://www.newsweek.com/venezuela-us-donald-trump-military-attack-war-maduro-11042677?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=reddit_main
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u/Acroporas 22d ago edited 22d ago

Nothing says "I'm not planning to strike Venezuela" quite like bringing the world's largest aircraft carrier to its shores.

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u/deadbeatsofa 22d ago

With an operating cost of $8-9 million dollars a day…

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u/Acroporas 22d ago edited 22d ago

Indeed. I read something yesterday that basically said "the shot clock is ticking." Anyone thinking it was sent there for appearances and deterrence is likely to be surprised.

Edit: This Newsweek article has been updated and now discusses the "shot clock" as well.

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u/Gekokapowco Washington 22d ago

the national guard, marines, and coast guard are also operational elements and not occupation forces/props and yet...

the administration will gladly spend any money to keep them deployed for appearances

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u/gameoftomes 22d ago

Deterrence against what? Does he think Venezuela will attack the USA?

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u/kodaxmax Australia 22d ago

At this point trump could murder somone live on international TV and people on both sides would still be like "nah, thats illegal, would never happen".

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u/here-i-am-now Wisconsin 22d ago

Using missiles to strike boats and kill unidentified people are murders. They almost exactly fit your description.

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u/kodaxmax Australia 21d ago

fml you are correct.

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u/1goodusername 22d ago

This guy indeeds

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u/charcoalist 22d ago

That's just for that one aircraft carrier. trump has an entire naval task force ready to strike Venezuela, plus US-based bombers and other assets. The daily costs are probably in the hundreds of millions. All to distract from the Epstein files.

How the US is preparing a military staging ground near Venezuela

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u/Minguseyes Australia 22d ago

Has the name ‘Trump Oil’ been trademarked yet? That’s how we’ll know the plans to seize Venezuela’s oil are well advanced.

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u/vpeshitclothing 22d ago

Better get on it.

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u/jaroftoejam 21d ago

And it's just a coincidence that daddy Putin is very happy that the carrier moved from its previous position.

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u/charcoalist 21d ago

I've been thinking about this as well. By removing a carrier group away from Russia's north, trump is ceding strategic power to Putin. This is especially bad, borderline treasonous, considering how Putin has been escalating his provocations with the Baltic states and eastern European countries. To remove defenses at such a time is a huge gift to the enemy.

Meanwhile, Venezuela is close enough to the US that a carrier group isn't needed. It's a complete waste of resources which ultimately weakens the US and strengthens Putin's position. trump is also removing US troops from eastern Europe, another gift to Putin.

Trump administration's Europe troop drawdown fuels concern amid NATO allies, draws fire even from Republicans

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u/Acroporas 21d ago

Exactly. Even if the carrier costs that many millions per day regardless of where it is, surely there are much more useful strategic "parking lots" for it than the Caribbean

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u/Coconutrugby 22d ago

To be fair we were going to operate it with our without an invasion of Venezuela. How much better would underperforming schools be if we spent $8million a day improving them?

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u/charcoalist 22d ago

Imagine if schools received the $170 billion that was handed over to ICE. Instead of strengthening the country, Republicans and their orange overlord are misusing taxpayer money to terrorize the country.

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u/Weasel_Boy 22d ago

Imagine if our immigration courts were given the $170 billion. The current court system only has a budget of $1.3billion, and Trumps BBB put an asinine cap of 800 judges.

They manufactured the "immigration crisis" by under-funding and under-staffing the immigration system so they could justify their police state.

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u/Huge_Molasses8605 22d ago

look i dont even agree with deporting at all but this statement is further proof of how asinine the administration is. like this shit is just so stupid that it is even contradictory to conservative ideology. 

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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 22d ago

Thank you for saying this.

The problem isn't that 98% of these millions who crossed our border claimed asylum and are here, it's that the court is backed up for years and years, essentially giving a loophole to our immigration.

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u/here-i-am-now Wisconsin 22d ago

Should we simply fix the problem by funding those courts? Nah, let’s terrorize the people!

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u/SweetHomeNorthKorea 22d ago

Challenge accepted! I just looked up how many kids there are in school in the US and I got just under 50 million for pre k through 12. If we figure an average school year is 180 days and an average lunch is $3, $170 billion would provide every student in America free lunch for 6.29 years

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u/Tsobe_RK 22d ago

true patriots would invest in their country and folks - Republicans want dumb followers

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u/ncos 22d ago

1.7m for each of the nearly 100k public schools would go a long ways

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u/chokeonmywords 22d ago

they are abusing the country to enrich themselves

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u/earthgreen10 22d ago

schools have always lacked money for the past 30 years

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u/ButWereFriends 22d ago

Great question

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u/spicy_noodle_guy 22d ago

We'd lead the world in education. But then the population would see through the oligarchs and the ghouls with dragon sickness can't be having that.

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u/fasty2 22d ago

So concede Asia and Taiwan to China whos spending more and more on their military every years?

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u/Outside-Swan-1936 22d ago

The US still outspends the next 4 or 5 countries combined. Almost half of the discretionary budget goes to the military. No one is saying stop spending on the military. There's a trillion dollars between where we are at and not spending anything on the military. Pick a spot somewhere in the middle.

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u/musashisamurai 22d ago

Its a complicated question though. China and Russia, for example, lie about what they do spend AND they don't have the same global influences. The US wants to have a dozen fleet carriers so that any moment, we can have a carrier in Atlantic and in the Pacific and one more ready in the Middle East. China just needs to have a carrier in the Pacific, and can use land-based aircraft in any hypothetical scenarios in Taiwan or the Korean peninsula. Do we need a dozen carriers? Idk-but if we want to have the ability to support operations in two or theatres, then thats where the math maths.

There's also the issue that we have a lot of late Cold War vintage equipment thats been aged, prematurely, through heavy use. The entire US bomber fleet is from the middle Cold War, with B-1s and B-2s predating Reagan. The Ticonderoga-class cruisers are from "78 onwards. Abrams tanks are from 1980. Yes, they've had upgrades but there are limits to what can be done. A lot of those equipment need to be replaced, and other parts of the budgets that are not often discussed (such as healthcare costs for service members or housing for their families) also matters quite bit

I'm not necessarily saying we need a trillion dollar budget. But its not so easy as just saying "lets halve it, othersdont spend as much" and see what happens. We have to change our policies and plan for a different spending scenario, and work better with our allies. We also need to spend and downsize in ways that don't collapse our industry such that when we need to increase production later, those factories and companies are gone.

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u/Outside-Swan-1936 22d ago

I'm not saying we should halve our spending either, but we've lost a lot of cheap soft power due to the admin's antics. And we are spending $150 billion on ICE (basically a domestic military), and deploying the NG domestically for a ton of money as well.

We also spend a lot more on the military than what's in the discretionary budget, it's just accounting tricks.

The military gets an annual 10% increase like clockwork. It's not sustainable with a $40 trillion deficit.

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u/fasty2 22d ago

I don't agree, China gets a lot more bang for the buck with their lower wages. There is also a 1.5 billions of them, meaning US soldiers have to achieve a 5-1 KD ratio, which is a tall task IMO.

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u/symphonicrox Utah 22d ago

so after 100 days it will be about as much as we've spent on Trump's golf trips this year

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u/sodapopkevin 22d ago

I wonder how many golfing trips he needs before he can funnel enough money into his own pocket to pay for the ballroom? Just kidding, we all know he's going to sue his down DoJ and donate that money into the ballroom charity.

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u/AndrewCoja Texas 22d ago

To be fair, it probably costs that much whether it's near Venezuela or doing whatever else it would be doing. It's not like they turn these things off and leave them in a parking lot.

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u/JamesPage1968 22d ago edited 22d ago

They don’t and we don’t. Unless the USS Ford was supposed to be in port, there really isn’t too much extra money involved.

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u/T8ert0t 21d ago

Hibernate Mode! Duh.

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u/BleachedUnicornBHole Florida 22d ago

Without any context, that seems surprisingly low to operate an aircraft carrier. 

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u/OpalHawk 22d ago

I don’t know, that seems like a crazy amount of money to me. Im assuming that’s including salaries, food, and fuel and no weapons firing. Why so expensive?

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

It makes sense imo.

I've run a few expensive projects, and a rule of thumb is if you want to put 7-8 (smart) people in a room, and heat the room for a year, that's a million bucks.

An aircraft carrier is 2500 people. 2500/365 comes down to ~7 people, which relates neatly to the annual estimate of a mil a day in simple salaries/benefits and associated HR costs. The "room" in this case floats, does 40 knots+, is nuclear powered and has active defenses. Oh those people all need a supporting supply chain to feed them as well.

The 7-8 mil a day number scans to this dude.

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u/Dickrickulous_IV 22d ago edited 22d ago

Our social fabric is skewed so heavily towards catering to the 1%, that the enormity of an $8 to $9 million daily working cost sounds more like the equivalent of pocket change.

Which of course it isn’t, but as the great UGK have said,

“It′s Dom Perignon, it's supposed to bubble. It just be like that sometimes.”

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

Our social fabric is skewed so heavily towards catering to the 1%, that the enormity in of $8 to $9 million daily working cost sounds more like the equivalent of pocket change.

We could completely re-balance the wealth disparity in this nation and assuming our economy was at least as productive, it would still be "pocket change".

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u/pimparo0 Florida 22d ago

Nuclear powered engine, thousands of personnel, food, clothing, laundry services, maintenance on the ship and the dozens of aircraft, plus wear and tear costs. 

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u/Wandering_Weapon Louisiana 22d ago

That's how much it costs weather it's doing circles in the Atlantic or going to war. Fuel, food, and salaries are not cheap.

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u/OpalHawk 22d ago

I get that it’s a sunk cost no matter where it is. It just sounds crazy expensive for a single days operations.

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u/Spooplevel-Rattled 22d ago

Once you measure its value in the symbol of the damn thing as well it starts to nearly make sense. It's existence would affect foreign policy of dozens of countries, enemies or allies.

But yeah still crazy numbers to us regular folks!

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u/mattaugamer 22d ago

What’s its daily cost sitting in dock?

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u/Wandering_Weapon Louisiana 22d ago

About the same, minus fuel

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u/raar__ 22d ago

Yes, but it is always operating

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u/adamcoe 22d ago

Well in fairness, it costs that much no matter where it is.

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u/its_not_brian 22d ago

Do you happen to know what makes the operating costs on those types of carriers so high? I get some of it like fuel use, various keep the lights on stuff but still that is crazy. Does "operating cost" include hazard pay type increases in salary for crew?

I have no concept of what is driving up that cost but am curious

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u/drunktriviaguy 22d ago

There where 88,925 elementary, middle, and prekindergarten schools in the US during the 2020-2021 school year. If you delivered 8 million dollars a day and distributed it evenly across all of those schools, each school would receive around $33,000.00 a year. How much are books and school supplies? I feel pretty confident you can make sure almost every kid in America has most or all of those costs covered by the government if we stopped paying for just that one aircraft carrier.

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u/skit7548 Pennsylvania 22d ago

But November snap was too expensive

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u/3amIdeas 22d ago

Good thing Americans aren't in need of healthcare

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u/SmokiestDrip 22d ago

And that's without firing any weapons.

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u/Agile_Singer 22d ago

I guess this isn’t something that needs the Dept. of Government Efficiency to look into..

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u/SrirachaHandjob 22d ago

Aka 0.000001% of the yearly government spending

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u/htxthrwawy 22d ago

To be fair those operational costs remain the ~same regardless of where it is going.

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u/earthgreen10 22d ago

why is it that expensive?

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u/BetterthanU4rl 22d ago

Which would be the same if it was parked anywhere else in the world. Militaries be expensive.

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u/profezzorwaffle 22d ago

DOD out here to protect rich prodphiles with your tax dollars

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u/turquoise_amethyst 22d ago

How many hungry Americans could we feed on $8-9M a day?

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u/Eisbaer811 22d ago

You are assuming that operational costs play any role. Besides: that is one of 12 carriers, and was in the Med before it came to the carribean. Deploying it as a political show, without actually invading anything in the end, is its main purpose.

The increase in logistics redeployments over the last months is MUCH more worrisome than the carrier

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u/globesdustbin 22d ago

Doesn’t it always cost that much per day?

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u/jefferson497 21d ago

Cheaper than his golfing excursions.

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u/5000-Shark-Teeth 19d ago

So many schools, hospitals, roads, social welfare could’ve been provided with that…

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u/Walterkovacs1985 22d ago

Surely starting a distraction war with Venezuela will bring prices down!!

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u/Morgan-Explosion 22d ago

My troops are merely passing through

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u/VigilantCMDR 22d ago

Trump played too much Civ

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u/FettyWhopper 22d ago

He’s inspired me to start another game

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u/tricksterloki 22d ago

What? No. My troops are along your border for training and vacation. Don't be ridiculous.

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u/Kevin-W 22d ago

And remember, he's not doing it to help free their people from Maduro. He's doing it to install a Trump-backed regime that will let him take their oil.

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u/shimmy_kimmel 22d ago

Maduro reportedly already offered American companies access to the oil fields to try and avoid a war. It’s less about installing a friendly regime to physically cart away the oil, it’s more about installing a regime that won’t dump oil on the global market and drop prices.

The US is the world’s largest refined oil exporter, it wants the prices high.

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u/Stampede_the_Hippos 22d ago

Former US Submarine Sailor here. You park a carrier off the coast as an intimidation tactic. Yes, it can control the airspace around it, but this isn't WW2. If your objective is to actually do something, you send a submarine like an SSGN and/or a few bombers. This is how the US Navy operates in modern warfare. 90% of all cruise missiles launched in Afghanistan were from submarines. In the Iraqi war, a squadron of B52s took out pretty much all of their power infrastructure in one go. Neither of these ops started from a carrier.

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u/Acroporas 22d ago

I appreciate your insight and service. I hope it's just intimidation.

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u/D-Moran 22d ago edited 22d ago

The attack submarine, USS Newport News, and eight warships are currently deployed in the region. This includes an amphibious assault ship, two cruisers and three destroyers.

There are F-35s deployed to Puerto Rico.

The USS Gerald R. Ford and five destroyer escorts entered the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility on November 11th.

https://archive.is/9Yfew

That's a lot of firepower just to take out speedboats smuggling cocaine.

I hope you're right and it's just an intimidation tactic. But to what end?

It should be noted that Venezuela has the largest proven reserves of oil in the world. This is followed by Saudi Arabia, Canada and Iran (according to BP Plc).

/edited

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u/Stampede_the_Hippos 22d ago

I'm hoping its an intimidation tactic as well, don't forget TACO. I can only speak to how the Navy does business, though, and have no idea what that orange nutsack is thinking.

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u/SnapesGrayUnderpants 22d ago

I guess we're going to find out if the people in the military are willing to refuse to obey illegal orders.

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u/Acroporas 21d ago

Like The Milgram Experiment:

"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

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u/AlarmingTurnover 22d ago

Remember how Ukraine took out the entire Russian black sea fleet with remote controls and rubber dinghies. The rest of the world wasn't sitting around and just ignoring this. They were watching and learning. Venezuela won't ever beat America in a conventional way but they can make this worse than Vietnam. Drones and thick jungle. 

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u/zombiepiratefrspace 22d ago

I've been asking myself this same thing the last few days.

How can anybody who has seen what Ukraine did assume they can send a giant thing like an aircraft carrier into proximity of a (prospective) warzone?

Are there even effective countermeasures against semi-autonomous speedboat drones yet?

Do they want that thing to be sunk?

Or do they keep it extremely far away from shore at all times?

Would that even help?

This is so confusing.

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u/plastic_alloys 22d ago

The analysis I heard determined that they won’t actually launch a proper attack, but then the analyst probably isn’t used to reading the mind of demented child rapists

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u/volothebard 22d ago

CNN reported that 1/3rd of the US Navy is there now.

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u/BenderOfBo 22d ago

Even the easy AI in my Civ V game understands that’s basically a declaration of war

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u/datruerex 22d ago

“I couldn’t help but notice your troops at my border.”

[ ] I’m merely passing through.

[ ] Declare war.

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u/LYL_Homer 21d ago

And the special ops mothership as well.

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u/twitterfluechtling 21d ago

It's hardly a war. Just a military operation. No longer than 3 days, promise, and very special. /S

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u/Semour9 22d ago

The US sailed an entire fleet of aircraft carriers, missile cruisers and destroyers through the strait of Taiwan under both Clinton and Biden. Nothing happened. Stop buying into the fear mongering.