Weak in Battle, Dangerous in Resistance: Venezuela’s Military Preparedness and Possible Responses to U.S. Action – War on the Rocks

As of December 2025, the strategic landscape surrounding Venezuela has calcified into a tense standoff, characterized by an external power projecting significant military pressure and an incumbent regime demonstrating a resilient, albeit brittle, capacity for internal control and protracted resistance. The military, conventionally outmatched by the United States, has invested heavily in an asymmetric defense doctrine that prioritizes national fragmentation and the exploitation of hybrid warfare tactics should kinetic action commence. This dynamic—a military weak in battle against a superior conventional force, yet dangerous in resistance through decentralized warfare—presents a complex set of challenges for any hypothetical post-conflict scenario, particularly concerning the critical phase of stabilization.

Post-Conflict Stabilization and the Military’s Reintegration Dilemma

The transition from a kinetic conflict, or even a high-intensity coercive standoff, to a sustainable political environment in Venezuela necessitates an immediate and effective security sector transformation. The primary obstacle lies not in the initial military engagement but in managing the labyrinthine armed ecosystem that currently underpins the regime. The prospect of a power transition, whether catalyzed by external pressure or internal fracture, immediately raises the specter of a security vacuum exploited by the very elements the intervention sought to neutralize.

The Challenge of Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR)

A successful transition hinges on an effective Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program, a process anticipated to be extraordinarily difficult in the Venezuelan context. The core difficulty stems from the sheer multiplicity and fusion of armed actors. This environment is not one defined by a clear demarcation between a traditional national army and a singular opposition or non-state group. Instead, the security structure is a spectrum:

The DDR challenge is thus the management of not just soldiers, but armed political enforcers and deeply entrenched transnational criminal syndicates. A flawed or rushed DDR process risks a cascading failure. Releasing thousands of heavily armed individuals—who are ideologically motivated, economically disenfranchised due to the collapse of state wages (some receiving as little as $100 per month in late 2025), and accustomed to impunity—directly back into civilian life without viable economic alternatives guarantees a surge in cycles of violence and criminality. The primary concern for the end of 2025 is that the very mechanism of resistance for the current regime relies on the proliferation and loyalty of these non-state actors, making their disarmament synonymous with the complete dismantling of the existing power base.

Purging Illicit Networks Embedded within the Security Apparatus

The persistence of corruption and illicit networks presents a challenge that transcends the deposition of the current political leadership. The vast web of corruption, drug trafficking, and illicit resource exploitation has functioned as the regime’s financial backbone, securing the loyalty of key military and political officers through patronage and profit-sharing. Dismantling these deep, transnational criminal networks—which have utilized the military and state infrastructure as operational bases—is a prerequisite for establishing a legitimate state apparatus.

This requires an intelligence-led, sustained campaign of law enforcement and financial tracking that operates on a transnational level, given the involvement of actors like Hezbollah, which relies on these Latin American financial channels. The difficulty arises from the inherent conflict between two immediate post-conflict imperatives: political reconciliation and amnesty for lower-level actors to prevent a wider insurgency, versus the deep penetration and prosecution required to eradicate the organized crime architecture that binds the elite. An overly lenient approach to reconciliation will allow key financial architects to remain embedded, maintaining the logic of illicit loyalty. Conversely, an aggressive purge risks alienating mid-level personnel necessary for immediate order maintenance and could trigger resistance from the criminal elements who still control vital economic arteries, such as smuggling routes and mining operations. The political peril in achieving this balance—accountability versus operational capacity—will define the early phase of any transition.

Establishing a Credible, Non-Partisan Security Force

The ultimate strategic objective following any intervention is the establishment of a new Venezuelan security apparatus capable of commanding the trust of the populace and adhering strictly to democratic norms. This aspiration confronts the reality of vetting and retraining tens of thousands of personnel drawn from the existing structure.

The vetting process is a political minefield. Overly aggressive purges, while perhaps satisfying demands for accountability following years of repression, carry several high risks. Such an approach alienates potential allies within the security services who may be willing to shift allegiance but not accept complete professional erasure. It also risks discarding personnel possessing necessary technical skills (e.g., operating existing air defense systems or maintaining critical infrastructure) for which immediate foreign replacement is unfeasible. Conversely, an overly lenient vetting process allows corrupt, loyalist, or criminal elements to remain embedded, continuing the cycle of impunity and state capture. The success of the post-conflict transition is fundamentally tied to finding a precise calibration that separates the professional soldier or police officer from the political enforcer or criminal profiteer—a task made exponentially harder by the regime’s systematic blurring of these lines. The memory of the deep institutional capture by Chavismo, which has persisted despite international negotiations and electoral defeats since 2024, mandates a reform that goes beyond mere personnel changes to overhaul doctrine, pay structures, and internal oversight mechanisms.

Strategic Lessons for Future U.S. Interventions in Contested Environments

The Venezuelan experience in late 2025, marked by military posturing, economic coercion, and the threat of kinetic action against a regime determined to resist via asymmetric means, offers critical insights for future U.S. strategic planning in environments defined by state failure and deep institutional capture.

The Necessity of Comprehensive Political Solutions Preceding Military Action

The stark dichotomy between the Venezuelan military’s conventional weakness and its dangerous capacity for internal resistance underscores a fundamental strategic axiom: military force alone cannot resolve a deeply politicized, sclerotic state failure. The current escalation, framed by Washington as a counter-narcotics operation, risks creating a power vacuum that the most decentralized, dangerous elements are best equipped to exploit, guaranteeing protracted instability.

The core lesson, as evidenced by the continued resilience of the Maduro structure despite targeted strikes on maritime assets, is that any application of U.S. pressure or force must be inextricably linked to a credible, internationally supported, and clearly defined political framework for governance transition. The U.S. has not recognized Maduro since the disputed 2024 election, instead recognizing opposition figures, yet the military pressure has not collapsed the regime. A successful strategy requires the military action to be perceived as the coercive arm enforcing a pre-established political outcome, rather than the primary mechanism for achieving regime change itself. Without this framework, military action merely substitutes one form of chaos for another, ultimately supplying the incumbent with a unifying external enemy narrative.

The Imperative of Measuring Political Will Against Material Cost

Future operational planning must shift emphasis from calculating an adversary’s *capacity* to win a conventional fight—a calculation Venezuela would lose overwhelmingly—to accurately assessing the *will* of the opposing leadership to absorb massive material losses in exchange for holding power. The Venezuelan case demonstrates that a weak conventional military becomes politically potent if its leaders are willing to trade national integrity for personal survival through asymmetric warfare, sabotage, and the co-option of armed, non-state actors.

The current deployment of assets like the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group signals a high material cost in the projection of U.S. power. However, if the regime’s calculation remains fixed on leveraging political survival through chaos—employing the “prolonged resistance” strategy based on 280 decentralized units—the material cost assessment must heavily weight the political and social price of a long, messy counter-insurgency, including potential humanitarian crises, mass migration surges, and regional diplomatic fallout. The lesson is clear: a leader with little to lose regarding national standing but everything to lose regarding personal security will choose costly resistance over capitulation, regardless of conventional military superiority.

Integrating Economic and Diplomatic Pressure with Military Signaling

The most effective strategy to force a favorable calculation within the Venezuelan high command is a synchronized application of pressure across all domains—a concept superseding the “Maximum Pressure 1.0” of previous years. Economic strangulation, exemplified by punitive secondary sanctions on oil purchasers imposed in early 2025, must be visibly linked to the threat of limited kinetic action. This military signaling, in turn, must be framed by clear, achievable political objectives that offer a negotiated path for survival to mid-to-high-level actors who benefit from the current illicit economy but fear the total destruction of the state apparatus.

This synergy aims to fundamentally shift the calculus within the Venezuelan command structure from “how do we defeat this threat?” to “how do we best negotiate our survival given the inevitability of escalating, integrated pressure?” The integration of intelligence targeting the financial logic of loyalty—the Cartel de los Soles and its associated networks—with visible military readiness maximizes leverage while minimizing the perceived necessity for the armed forces to default to the destructive path of protracted, nationalistic resistance. This integrated approach offers a pathway out of the “weak in battle, dangerous in resistance” trap by weaponizing the internal conflicts within the regime’s support structure.