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.

By the report’s accounting, the U.S. military has added two hardened aircraft shelters (HAS) and 41 of what it refers to as “unhardened individual aircraft shelters (IASs),” at airbases within 1,000 miles of the Taiwan Strait since the early 2010s. Expansion of those same facilities has been otherwise limited, with the addition of only one runway, one major taxiway, and 17% more ramp area overall. “Since the early 2010s, the PLA has more than doubled its hardened aircraft shelters (HASs) and unhardened individual aircraft shelters (IASs) at military airfields, giving China more than 3,000 total aircraft shelters — not including civil or commercial airfields,” the new report from Hudson says. “This constitutes enough shelters to house and hide the vast majority of China’s combat aircraft. China has also added 20 runways and more than 40 runway-length taxiways, and increased its ramp area nationwide by almost 75 percent.”

“In fact, by our calculations, the amount of concrete used by China to improve the resilience of its air base network could pave a four-lane inter-state highway from Washington, D.C., to Chicago[, Illinois],” it continues. “As a result, China now has 134 air bases within 1,000 nautical miles of the Taiwan Strait — airfields that boast more than 650 HASs and almost 2,000 non-hardened IASs.”

explaining scale of construction to an American: "imagine a really big highway..."

The report does acknowledge that IASs do not provide anywhere near the same level of protection as true HASs, which are costlier. It also makes clear that shelters, hardened or otherwise, are just one part of a larger base defense equation. However, its authors argue that robust passive defenses are the most cost-effective single measure that can be taken to provide critical added resiliency against attacks and help provide a key foundation for other concepts of operations. Hudson’s report estimates that buying just one fewer B-21 every year for the next five years could free up enough funds to construct 100 HASs. A similar reduction in purchases of F-15EXs or F-35As could yield the resources required to build 20 more HASs annually. ... “IASs may also make it more difficult to determine the number and types of aircraft at a base, potentially masking a pre-conflict surge of aircraft, and make both strike planning and post-strike damage assessment more challenging.” ... As TWZ highlighted in the past, the ability to better shield planes exposed on the flight line from even more limited threats like shrapnel, including that produced by relatively small warheads on kamikaze drones and cluster munitions, is still very valuable. By targeting aircraft sitting out in the open, an adversary could well prevent them from ever entering the fight, even with limited attacks, such as ones involving weaponized commercial drones. .. Furthermore, **while “passive defenses may seem at odds with a predominantly expeditionary U.S. approach to warfare … unless U.S. forces can defend airfields at home and abroad, they will be unable to support US and allied interests in a conflict.” As illustrated below, Hudson’s report assesses that it could take just 10 missiles with warheads capable of scattering cluster munitions across an area with a 450-foot diameter to neutralize all exposed aircraft on the ground and fuel storage at key airbases like Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan, Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, or Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.

The report also highlights the ever-growing threat posed by drones, and how uncrewed systems and missiles could threaten airbases within the continental United States, as well as overseas. For years now, TWZ has been sounding the alarm on these issues, especially when it comes to the dangers of increasingly more capable drones that are steadily proliferating globally, and noting the continued lag on the part of the U.S. military in addressing them. “Recent Air Force requests for information about ‘enclosures to defend F-15Es from drone attacks’ at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base and F-22 jets at Langley Air Force Base suggest the Air Force is starting to consider the threat more seriously,” Hudson’s report notes, directly citing some of TWZ‘s past reporting. “However, it is again pursuing low-cost solutions (such as canvassing existing open-air shelters or applying nets), which counter-measures such as shaped charges can easily overcome, rather [than] building proper HASs.” Still unexplained drone incursions over Langley that continued for several weeks in December 2023, which TWZ was first to report, became a particular watershed moment for the discourse around drone threats, including to domestic U.S. military bases.

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As already noted, the report from Hudson stresses that HASs and other infrastructure improvements are not a ‘silver bullet’ solution. It also includes two other recommended lines of effort centered on a potential conflict with China in the Pacific. The report also calls for increasing the ability of U.S. forces to similarly hold Chinese bases and other critical infrastructure, including facilities deep inside the country, at risk. That, among other things, will require increasing the production and stockpiling of strike munitions, and the development of types that are cheaper and easier to produce at scale. ... How the U.S. Air Force and the rest of the U.S. military might actually proceed, especially when it comes to base infrastructure, remains to be seen. Last month, the Air Force notably released a new base modernization strategy that included a focus area on increased resiliency and that pointedly said that the service’s facilities “can no longer be considered a sanctuary.” However, it did not explicitly mention HASs or similar passive defensive measures, last month. Air Force officials have also pushed back on the value of more extensive physical hardening in the past. “I’m not a big fan of hardening infrastructure,” Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, then head of Pacific Air Forces, the top Air Force command for that region, said at a roundtable at the 2023 Air and Space Forces Association symposium. “The reason is because of the advent of precision-guided weapons … you saw what we did to the Iraqi Air Force and their hardened aircraft shelters. They’re not so hard when you put a 2,000-pound bomb right through the roof.”

Hudson’s report includes an entire section rebutting arguments like Wilsbach’s, including highlighting how physical hardening would force the PLA to expend more and better weapons in attacks on airbases to try to ensure success. ... Lengthy traditional contracting processes and concerns about future U.S. defense budgets, together with competing priorities, present additional issues. The Air Force has been increasingly warning about the affordability of various new advanced aircraft and other modernization efforts, including plans for a new sixth-generation stealth combat jet, Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones, and new stealthy tankers, for months now. ... “To comprehensively harden airfields, the DoD [Department of Defense] will need to shift from treating each construction project individually to conducting a campaign of construction,” Hudson’s report says. “When facing similar challenges in the past, the DoD addressed them, building 373 HASs in Vietnam over a three-year period and roughly 1,000 HASs in Europe in the 1980s. With decisive action, the DoD can address this problem.” In the meantime, while the debate in the United States about the value of HASs and other physical defenses continues, China is vastly outpacing the U.S. military in this regard and other countries are also taking note.

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.