The Trump Administration is continuing to expand its military build-up in Latin America, ordering new assets into the region that include supersonic bombers and the US Navy’s largest aircraft carrier.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell on 24 October said that Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has ordered the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford to move into the US Southern Command area of responsibility, which includes all of South and Central America and the Caribbean Sea.
The Ford is Washington’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, being first in a new class of flattop warships. The vessel will be accompanied by a full carrier strike group escort and carry its full carrier air wing.
Carrier Air Wing 8, assigned to the Ford, includes four squadrons of Boeing F/A-18E/F strike fighters and a single electronic-attack squadron of Boeing EA-18Gs.
“The enhanced US force presence… will 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,” Parnell says. “These forces will enhance and augment existing capabilities to disrupt narcotics trafficking and degrade and dismantle [transnational criminal organisations.”
The carrier air wing will join a contingent of US Marine Corps Boeing AV-8B Harrier II jump jets already the region, embarked aboard amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima.
The move comes one day after Boeing B-1B supersonic bombers from the US Air Force flew within a few nautical miles of the Venezuelan coast, broadcasting on ADS-B and visible on flight tracking sites.
The latest show of force comes one week after a ”bomber attack demonstration” that involved US Boeing B-52 bombers and Lockheed Martin F-35B stealth fighters passing through the southern Caribbean.
Washington has also repeatedly launched lethal air strikes against small boats in the area, which the Trump Administration has claimed are drug smugglers. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon has provided evidence to support those claims.
