Airpower + Cyber Power: Is Caracas a New Strategic Model
The January 3rd operation to oust President Maduro confirmed the unprecedented primacy of the U.S. military and its unique ability in conducting operations of this scale and magnitude. Apparently, it seemed like a typical U.S. military operation that began with precision airstrikes against command and control nodes, the enemy`s leadership, and significant infrastructure. It looked like the opening night of operation Iraqi Freedom, when two F-117s bombed, what was believed to be the hideout of the Iraqi dictator. The objective of the airstrike back then was to decapitate the enemy’s leadership and cause strategic paralysis. The air raid missed Saddam Hussein, but it set the stage for the shock and awe campaign that followed and brought the Iraqi regime to its knees within a matter of weeks.
In Caracas, the purpose was not to shut down the government and certainly not to cause strategic paralysis. Maduro was removed, but the regime and its security apparatus remained intact. The military objective was to eliminate air defenses and create corridors for the helicopters to reach Maduro with minimum friendly and collateral losses. No major fighting was reported and no regular military forces or their headquarters were bombed, possibly suggesting an effort to control escalation and reduce losses.
The standout feature of Operation Absolute Resolve was that the job was not done exclusively by air-launched precision- guided munitions. Instead of relying solely on airstrikes, additional means were also employed. Some command-and-control nodes were not bombed but were reportedly degraded by electronic warfare and cyber-attacks. More than 150 aircraft supported the operation, including F-22 and F-35 fifth generation fighters, B-1B bombers, EA-18G electronic warfare aircraft, early warning and ISR aircraft and numerous drones. When the package was launched with the task of dismantling Venezuela’s air-defence systems, the Caracas power grid was already offline. President Trump confirmed that “the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have, it was dark, and it was deadly”. This statement has been widely interpreted as referring to a large scale coordinated cyber-attack to black out the city. This digital attack disrupted command and control nodes, since military communications in Venezuela partially rely on the civilian infrastructure. They also degraded the visual acquisition capabilities of the man-portable air defence systems. As a result, the low flying special operations helicopters infiltrated the airspace above Caracas almost invisible and without major losses.
Two key points are worth noticing from a strategic standpoint about the opening stage of the operation. Usually, cyber effects are employed to create fog and complicate the response of the adversary during initial deployments. Caracas, however, was widely discussed as one of the few known, high profile cases in which cyber capabilities were used in the opening phase of a major military operation to facilitate kinetic effects. Cyber effects, alongside airpower, were used to generate immediate operational results.
The second point is best framed as a question rather than a claim: could the approach “airpower + cyber-power” represent a new strategic model to run an intervention? The term is referred to a strategy where the means employed are precision airstrikes and cyber-attacks and the objective is to deny the adversary access to critical military capabilities like early warning and air defenses, but with minimum physical destruction of the relevant infrastructure. The problem is that most governments do not talk openly about their offensive cyber operations and the U.S. cyber command is no exception. USCYBERCOM was established in 2010, but it was not before 2016 that they publicly acknowledged their first major cyber offensive campaign against the Islamic state. One of the lessons learned from that operation was that cyberattacks can be integrated into the battle plan, just like airstrikes. So, given all this secrecy and the lack of details, there is insufficient data to support such an argument at this stage. But the hints are there, and they are hard to ignore. So, we will have to wait and see whether Caracas is a new strategic model for intervention or a one-off case. Should comparable actions follow- as implied by rhetoric about other possible theaters like Mexico and Colombia or Iran– the pattern if any, will be more visible and more easy to assess.
Angelos Giakoumis is an officer in the Hellenic Air Force.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own.