Senior military officials presented US President Donald Trump with updated options for possible operations in Venezuela, including ground strikes, CBS reports, citing a number of sources familiar with the meetings at the White House, News.bg reports.
Among those presenting the plans are Defense Secretary Pete Hegsett, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Kaine and other senior defense officials, who briefed the president on options for action in the coming days.
According to the sources, no final decision has been made to undertake any of the proposed operations at this time.
The US intelligence community has helped provide relevant information on potential actions. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was not present at the White House discussions, as she was returning from a trip abroad, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in Canada for a meeting of G-7 foreign ministers.
Earlier this week, the aircraft carrier strike group “Gerald Ford“ entered the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, the structure responsible for military operations in the Caribbean and South America. The aircraft carrier was joined by a flotilla of destroyers, warplanes and special operations units already operating in the region.
In the past two months, the US military has carried out strikes on at least 21 ships that it says were transporting drugs from South America to the United States. At least 80 suspected smugglers have been killed in those raids; two survivors were repatriated to Ecuador and Colombia.
At a defense meeting Wednesday in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Hegseth addressed the administration's crackdown on drug trafficking and issued a stark warning. "My advice to foreign terrorist organizations is don't get on the boat," he said. "If you're trafficking drugs to poison the American people, and we know you're part of a terrorist organization, you're a foreign terrorist or a drug trafficker - we're going to find you and we're going to kill you."