US sends its ‘most lethal’ warship to Caribbean as tensions with Venezuela rise | ITV News

The US has announced that it is sending their Navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier to waters off South America, as it ramps up an operation to target alleged drug smuggling boats coming from Venezuela.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R Ford, billed by the US Navy as “the most capable, adaptable, and lethal combat platform in the world”, to be sent to the Caribbean on Friday.

The move comes the day after the US flew a pair of supersonic, heavy bombers up to the coast of Venezuela, and a little over a week after another group of American bombers made a similar journey as part of a training exercise to simulate an attack.

The US military has built up an unusually large force in the Caribbean Sea, raising speculation that President Donald Trump could try to topple Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who faces charges of narcoterrorism in the US.

Adding to the speculation, the US military has been carrying out lethal strikes on vessels in waters off Venezuela since early September, which President Trump says are smuggling drugs.

The latest was an overnight strike against a boat allegedly smuggling narcotics in the Caribbean, killing six and bringing the total number of targeted boats to 10, and the number of people killed to 43, according to the US defence secretary.

The Pentagon said in a statement Friday that the USS Gerald R Ford would be deployed to the region, including the Caribbean Sea, to “bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere”.

The vessel is the US Navy’s largest aircraft carrier. It is currently deployed in the Mediterranean alongside three destroyers, and the group are expected to take around one week to make the journey.

President Donald Trump talks with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth after a roundtable on criminal cartels on Thursday. Credit: AP

There are already eight US Navy ships in the central and South American region, along with a nuclear-powered submarine, adding up to about 6,000 sailors and marines, according to officials.

Trump has escalated his rhetoric on the potential of land strikes inside Venezuela in recent days, with CNN reporting the president is considering plans to target cocaine facilities and drug trafficking routes inside the country.

On Wednesday, Trump said the US was “prepared” to hit Venezuela on the land.

“We will hit them very hard when they come in by land,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, “we’re totally prepared to do that. And we’ll probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we’re doing when we come to the land.”

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has drawn a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the US declared after the September 11 attacks in 2001, and the Trump administration’s crackdown.

“Our message to these foreign terrorist organisations is we will treat you like we have treated al-Qaeda,” Hegseth told reporters on Thursday at the White House.

“We will find you, we will map your networks, we will hunt you down, and we will kill you,” he added.

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